An influential conventional wisdom holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic and religious antagonisms. We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 1950s and 1960s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system. We also find that after controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence in this period. We argue for understanding civil war in this period in terms of insurgency or rural guerrilla warfare, a particular form of military practice that can be harnessed to diverse political agendas. The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war are not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgency. These include poverty—which marks financially and bureaucratically weak states and also favors rebel recruitment—political instability, rough terrain, and large populations.We wish to thank the many people who provided comments on earlier versions of this paper in a series of seminar presentations. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (Grants SES-9876477 and SES-9876530); support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences with funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; valuable research assistance from Ebru Erdem, Nikolay Marinov, Quinn Mecham, David Patel, and TQ Shang; sharing of data by Paul Collier.

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Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War

How does a state's natural resource wealth influence its economic development? For the past fifty years, versions of this question have been explored by both economists and political scientists. New research suggests that resource wealth tends to harm economic growth, yet there is little agreement on why this occurs. This article reviews a wide range of recent attempts in both economics and political science to explain the “resource curse.” It suggests that much has been learned about the economic problems of resource exporters but less is known about their political problems. The disparity between strong findings on economic matters and weak findings on political ones partly reflects the failure of political scientists to carefully test their own theories.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0043887100008200

The Political Economy of the Resource Curse

Comparative history is not new. As long as people have investigated social life, there has been recurrent fascination with juxtaposing historical patterns from two or more times or places. Part of the appeal comes from the general usefulness of looking at historical trajectories in order to study social change. Indeed, practitioners of comparative history from Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber to Marc Bloch, Reinhard Bendix, and Barrington Moore, Jr. have typically been concerned with understanding societal dynamics and epochal transformations of cultures and social structures. Attention to historical sequences is indispensable to such understanding. Obviously, though, not all investigations of social change use explicit juxtapositions of distinct histories. We may wonder, therefore: What motivates the use of comparisons as opposed to focussing on single historical trajectories? What purposes are pursued—and how—through the specific modalities of comparative history?

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The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry

List of illustrations and tables Preface and acknowledgments List of abbreviations 1. The puzzle of insurgent collective action 2. Ethnographic research in the shadow of civil war 3. Redrawing the boundaries of class and citizenship 4. From political mobilization to armed insurgency 5. The political foundations of dual sovereignty 6. The re-emergence of civil society 7. Campesino accounts of insurgent participation 8. Explaining insurgent collective action Epilogue: legacies of an agrarian insurgency Appendix: A model of high-risk collective action by subordinate social actors Chronology of El Salvador's civil war List of references.

Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador

When scholars extend their models and hypotheses to encompass additional cases, they commonly need to adapt their analytic categories to fit the new contexts. Giovanni Sartori's work on conceptual "traveling" and conceptual "stretching" provides helpful guidance in addressing this fundamental task of comparative analysis. Yet Sartori's framework draws upon what may be called classical categorization, which views the relation among categories in terms of a taxonomic hierarchy, with each category having clear boundaries and defining properties shared by all members. We examine the challenge to this framework presented by two types of nonclassical categories: family resemblances and radial categories. With such categories, the overly strict application of a classical framework can lead to abandoning to category prematurely or to modifying it inappropriately. We discuss solutions to these problems, using examples of how scholars have adapted their categories in comparative research on democracy and authoritarianism.

Conceptual 'Stretching' Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis

Review: What Makes Peasants Revolutionary? Reviewed Work(s): Peasants, Politics, and Revolution: Pressures toward Political and Social Change in the Third World by Joel S. Migdal Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World

What Makes Peasants Revolutionary?@@@Peasants, Politics, and Revolution: Pressures toward Political and Social Change in the Third World@@@Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World@@@"Hegemony and the Peasantry,"@@@Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century

Jeffery M. Paige

Papers

Review: What Makes Peasants Revolutionary? Reviewed Work(s): Peasants, Politics, and Revolution: Pressures toward Political and Social Change in the Third World by Joel S. Migdal Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World

What Makes Peasants Revolutionary?@@@Peasants, Politics, and Revolution: Pressures toward Political and Social Change in the Third World@@@Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World@@@"Hegemony and the Peasantry,"@@@Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century