Conflict Profiteers

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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Conflict profiteers, often called "conflict entrepreneurs," are people or organizations that benefit from continued conflict and therefore have an interest in keeping it going. They may gain money, power, status, followers, votes, media attention, protection, or a sense of importance by stoking conflict. Unlike ordinary advocates, who may sincerely fight for a cause they believe in, conflict profiteers actively make conflicts worse because escalation serves their interests. They stoke anger, spread rumors, exaggerate threats, demonize opponents, and make people more afraid of one another than they would otherwise be.

The term is often used in war and peacebuilding contexts. A Carnegie Endowment event on combating conflict entrepreneurs described them as both economic and political actors who foment and fuel violence as a path to economic and political power. This is one reason peace agreements are so hard to implement. For many ordinary people, peace promises relief from fear and suffering. For conflict profiteers, peace threatens the very system that gives them income, followers, weapons, influence, or impunity. They may therefore try to sabotage negotiations, intimidate moderates, assassinate opponents, or provoke retaliatory violence that pulls everyone back into the conflict.

Resource wars provide some of the clearest examples. In Sierra Leone, diamonds helped sustain the civil war by giving armed actors a source of wealth that depended on violence, coercion, and territorial control. A GSDRC summary of The Spoils of War concludes that diamonds were instrumental in creating, sustaining, and heightening the war and frustrating the search for peace. Similar dynamics can occur wherever armed groups, corrupt officials, smugglers, or criminal networks profit from drugs, minerals, oil, timber, weapons, protection rackets, kidnapping, or control of humanitarian aid. In such cases, conflict is not just a breakdown of order. It becomes an economic system.

Conflict profiteering is not limited to money. Some actors profit from hatred by gaining political or social power. Rwanda's Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines is an extreme example of media being used to intensify fear and hatred. An article on inciting genocide with words describes how media propaganda during the 1994 genocide helped incite attacks against Tutsis.

In less extreme settings, political figures, media personalities, influencers, and advocacy organizations may also discover that outrage attracts attention. A 2026 study on "entrepreneurs of conflict" among U.S. legislators found that politicians who specialize in personal insults receive significant media attention, even though they gain no measurable advantage in elections, fundraising, or lawmaking. The reward is not always effective governance; it may simply be visibility, celebrity, and loyal followers.

This is why conflict profiteers are so damaging to constructive conflict work. They turn disagreement into identity warfare, encourage people to see opponents as dangerous enemies, and punish moderates who try to lower the temperature. They make compromise look like betrayal and reconciliation look like weakness. They may also create a self-reinforcing cycle: the more frightened and angry people become, the more they turn to leaders or media sources that promise protection, revenge, or certainty. Those leaders and media sources then have still more incentive to keep the fear going.

Responding to conflict profiteers requires more than asking everyone to be civil. It requires changing the incentives that make conflict profitable. This can include cutting off illicit funding, enforcing anti-corruption laws, protecting independent journalism, reducing the spread of hate speech and disinformation, supporting leaders who de-escalate responsibly, and building institutions that reward problem solving rather than performative outrage.

At the same time, it is important not to label every passionate advocate as a conflict profiteer. The key question is whether the actor is trying to solve the underlying problem, or whether the actor benefits from making the problem worse. Constructive conflict work depends on exposing and countering those who gain from keeping people afraid, divided, and unwilling to listen.

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This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.