Incidence, Onset and Duration of Civil Wars PDF Download

Author: Michael F. Bleaney
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
We investigate the determinants of onset, duration and incidence of civil wars, and their sensitivity to different coding rules. Whatever the coding rule used, incidence of civil war is largely determined by poverty, country size, mountainous terrain and ethnic diversity. Poverty reduces the opportunity cost of rebellion, and mountainous terrain makes rebellions harder to defeat, while ethnic diversity creates potential conflict, since some linguistic groups may feel under-represented. Continuation and onset of civil war are non-overlapping subsets of incidence, depending on whether civil war occurred in the previous year. We exploit this aspect to test whether the determinants of continuation and onset are statistically significantly different. For four out of five coding rules, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of common determinants of civil war onset and continuation. This is the main contribution of the paper. Ethnic diversity is particularly high in Africa, where many civil wars occur, but we show that the significance of ethnic diversity is not just an unidentified Africa effect. Our estimated model works as well for Africa as for other areas. There is evidence that ethnic polarization matters as well as fractionalization. We show that polarization understates the propensity for conflict in societies with high ethnic diversity, where the polarization measure tends to be low, but otherwise outperforms fractionalization as a predictor of conflict. Mountainous terrain is generally not significant when ethnic polarization is included.

Author: Thomas David Mason
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538169177
Category : Civil war
Languages : en
Pages : 423

View

Book Description
Civil wars remain the most frequent and deadly form of organized armed conflict in the world. What Do We Know about Civil Wars? enlists leading scholars to guide students through cutting-edge research on civil war onset, duration, and outcomes, as well as the recurrence and consequences of civil wars to better understand global security.

Author: Ralph Myers
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640719425
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 41

View

Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Sociology - War and Peace, Military, grade: 73%, Dublin City University, course: International Relations, language: English, abstract: This paper poses the research question: what causes civil war? Since the end of World War II, both incidence and duration of civil wars have been on the rise, with disastrous outcomes for humanity. It is crucial that academics study this phenomenon and try to create theories which are able to explain and predict civil war onset for different countries. Two main competing theories have become prominent in the modern day literature surrounding the outbreak of civil war. On the one hand there are “greed” theorists employing econometric models to account for rebel opportunism. These theories centre around the notion that ethno-linguistically or religiously diverse countries experience civil war as a result of the incentive to rebel compared to the state’s ability to counter rebellion. Greed theories focus largely on the ability of rebel groups to recruit and finance themselves, in addition to a number of other variables, which make civil war more or less conducive. On the other side are advocates of the “grievance” theory who argue civil wars start as a result of grievances, built up as a result of political and material discrimination. Depending on the level of grievance in combination with the ability of ethnocultural groups to mobilise and the state’s response to initial protest, civil war occurs. This paper focuses on two case studies, with opposing dependent variables. The first is Uganda which has experienced multiple internal conflicts of varying intensity since gaining independence. The other is Kenya which has been spared the outbreak of a full-blown civil war, although it has experienced a number violent ethnic clashes. The case studies are relatively similar so as to control for third variables, yet chosen in such a fashion as to avoid bias or case fixing. For both countries the greed model is firstly applied followed by a more in-depth look at whether the rationale behind the given independent variables corresponds with political-economic realities. The second part of each case study looks at the applicability of grievance based theories and which set of explanations holds more power with regards to civil war onset. The analysis of both models in the context of the two chosen case studies should determine which theory holds the most explanatory power in relation to civil war onset.

Author: Ibrahim Elbadawi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
January 2001 As important as knowing how wars start and end is knowing how much war we are likely to observe in any given period. In strategies for preventing civil war, political liberalization should be a higher priority than economic development, but the best possible results would combine political reform, economic diversification, and poverty reduction. Quantitative studies of civil war have focused either on war's onset or its termination, producing important insights into these end points of the process. Elbadawi and Sambanis complement these studies by studying how much war we are likely to observe in any given period. To answer this question, they combine recent advances in the theory of civil war initiation and duration and develop the concept of war incidence, denoting the probability of observing an event of civil war in any given period. They test theories of war initiation and duration against this new concept using a five-year panel data set for 161 countries. Their analysis of the incidence of war corroborates most of the results of earlier studies, enriching those results by highlighting the significance of sociopolitical variables as determinants of the risk of civil war. Their findings: * Steps toward advancing political liberalization or economic development reduce the risk of civil war, whatever the degree of ethnolinguistic fractionalization in a society. * This effect is amplified in polarized societies. The probability of civil war is lower in very homogeneous societies and (less so) in more diverse societies. * In polarized societies the risk of civil war can be reduced by political rather than economic liberalization. At high levels of political freedom, ethnic diversity--even polarization--has a minimal impact on the risk of civil war. * Economic diversification that would reduce a country's reliance on primary exports would also reduce the risk of civil wars, especially in polarized societies. * In strategies for preventing civil war, political liberalization should be a higher priority than economic development, but the best possible results would combine political reform, economic diversification, and poverty reduction. This paper--a product of Public Economics, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to study the economics of violence. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project "The Economics of Political and Criminal Violence" (RPO 682-99). The authors may be contacted at [email protected] or [email protected].

Author: Paul Collier
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Civil war
Languages : en
Pages : 34

View

Book Description
The duration of large-scale violent civil conflict increases substantially if the society is composed of a few large ethnic groups, if there is extensive forest cover, and if the conflict has commenced since 1980. None of these factors affect the initiation of conflict. And neither the duration nor the initiation of conflict is affected by initial inequality or political repression.

Author: World Bank
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 0821386417
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

View

Book Description
Civil war conflict is a core development issue. The existence of civil war can dramatically slow a country's development process, especially in low-income countries which are more vulnerable to civil war conflict. Conversely, development can impede civil war. When development succeeds, countries become safer when development fails, they experience a greater risk of being caught in a conflict trap. Ultimately, civil war is a failure of development. 'Breaking the Conflict Trap' identifies the dire consequences that civil war has on the development process and offers three main findings. First, civil war has adverse ripple effects that are often not taken into account by those who determine whether wars start or end. Second, some countries are more likely than others to experience civil war conflict and thus, the risks of civil war differ considerably according to a country's characteristics including its economic stability. Finally, Breaking the Conflict Trap explores viable international measures that can be taken to reduce the global incidence of civil war and proposes a practical agenda for action. This book should serve as a wake up call to anyone in the international community who still thinks that development and conflict are distinct issues.

Author: Jung-Yeop Woo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527500470
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 165

View

Book Description
This book identifies the conditions under which foreign countries intervene in civil wars, contending that we should consider four dimensions of civil war intervention. The first dimension is the civil war itself. The characteristics of the civil war itself are important determinants of a third party’s decision making regarding intervention. The second dimension is the characteristics of intervening states, and includes their capabilities and domestic political environments. The third is the relationship between the host country and the intervening country. These states’ formal alliances and the differences in military capability between the target country and the potential intervener have an impact on the decision making process. The fourth dimension is the relationship between the interveners. This framework of four dimensions proves critical in understanding foreign intervention in civil wars. Based on this framework, the model for the intervention mechanism can reflect reality better. By including the relationships between the interveners here, the book shows that it is important to distinguish between intervention on the side of the government and intervention on behalf of the opposition. Without distinguishing between these, it is impossible to consider the concepts of counter-intervention and bandwagoning intervention.

Author: Matthew Lane
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
It is often noted that civil wars have superseded interstate wars as the primary form of conflict in the international system. What is rarely discussed, however, is that states often find themselves embroiled in parallel conflicts, or multiple civil wars that overlap in time and space. Through four empirical essays, this dissertation project explores the causes and implications of such parallel conflicts through the strategic spatiality of civil war. The first essay questions whether the underlying causes of initial and parallel civil wars systematically differ. I show that, in contrast with the extant literature, these separate types of conflict onsets have dissimilar structural causes, and that by lumping them together we risk conflating the structural foundations of initial and subsequent conflicts. Furthermore, I show that by separating the onset of initial and parallel civil wars, we can leverage important conflict characteristics, such as the severity and geography of ongoing conflicts, to significantly improve predictions of parallel conflict onsets, considerations which are largely absent from the major theories of civil war. Building on these broad insights, the second essay explores the puzzle of why some ethnic groups choose to take up arms against the state. Applying existing theories of conflict contagion between states to the contagion of conflict between ethnic groups within the state, I argue that ongoing conflicts in ethnic groups' geographic proximity provide important resources and information necessary to fight the state, which lowers barriers to entry into conflict. Similarly, the third essay considers why some politically excluded ethnic groups rebel against the state, arguing that the relationship between ethnopolitical exclusion and civil war is shaped by excluded groups' broader political and strategic neighborhoods. I first show that neighborhoods of inconsistent ethnopolitical exclusion, by highlighting excluded groups' disadvantages and exacerbating feelings of resentment, lead groups to take up arms. Paralleling the previous essay, I argue that geographic proximity and relative prevalence of ongoing conflicts in excluded groups' immediate neighborhoods provide logistical and motivational benefits. Shifting from the study of civil war onset, the last empirical essay examines how the duration of civil war is affected by the spatial distribution of multiple conflicts within the state. Through a theory of scarce resource division and the loss of strength gradient, I argue that, as the distance between parallel conflicts increases, states' war-fighting capacities are stretched across multiple fronts, limiting their ability to definitively suppress rebel forces. These spatial effects, in conjunction with the characteristics of overlapping conflicts, shape the duration of hostilities for by altering the bargaining framework between governments and rebels, leading to interdependent conflict durations. Taken together, these essays consistently support the notion that accounting not only for the existence of multiple conflicts, but also the spatial distribution of those conflicts throughout the state, yields important insights for the ongoing study of civil war.

Author: Alberto Alesina
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethnic groups
Languages : en
Pages : 64

View

Book Description
We present a model that links heterogeneity of preferences across ethnic groups in a city to the amount and type of public good the city supplies. We test the implications of the model with three related datasets: US cities, US metropolitan areas, and US urban counties. Results show that productive public goods -- education, roads, libraries, sewers and trash pickup -- in US cities (metro areas/urban counties) are inversely related to the city's (metro area's/county's) ethnic fragmentation, even after controlling for other socioeconomic and demographic determinants. Ethnic fragmentation is negatively related to the share of local spending on welfare. The results are mainly driven by observations in which majority whites are reacting to varying sizes of minority groups. We conclude that ethnic conflict is an important determinant of local public finances.

Author: Jose G. Montalvo
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Civil war
Languages : en
Pages : 31

View

Book Description
The authors analyze the relationship between ethnic polarization and the duration of civil wars. Several recent papers have argued that the uncertainty about the relative power of the contenders in a war will tend to increase its duration. In these models, uncertainty is directly related to the relative size of the contenders. The authors argue that the duration of civil wars increases the more polarized a society is. Uncertainty is not necessarily linked to the structure of the population but it could be traced back to the measurement of the size of the different groups in the society. Given a specific level of measurement error or uncertainty, more polarization implies lengthier wars. The empirical results show that ethnically polarized countries have to endure longer civil wars than ethnically less polarized societies.