Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War

TL;DR: This article showed 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.

Abstract: 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.

Summary

Civil war since 1945

• (2) The conflict killed or has killed at least 1000 over its course, with a yearly average of at least 100.
• In practical terms, to include the anticolonial wars in the analysis requires that the authors form estimates of possible explanatory factors for whole empires, such as GDP per capita, ethnic fractionalization, and democracy scores.
• One might conjecture that more and more civil wars are breaking out over time, thus producing the secular increase.
• Put differently, states in the international system have been subject to a more-or-less constant risk of violent civil conflict over the period, but the conflicts they suffer have been difficult to end.

Ethnicity, discrimination and grievances

• During the Cold War, political scientists and sociologists often sought to trace rebellion to economic inequality (Russett 1964; Muller 1985); to rapid economic growth said to destabilize traditional rural social systems (Huntington 1968; Paige 1975; Scott 1976); or to frustrations arising from the failure to gain expected benefits of economic modernization (Gurr 1971).
• Using a broad brush, the authors can distinguish between perennialist and modernist (or constructivist) positions on the nature and sources of ethnic nationalism.
• Such arguments yield H 3 : Countries with an ethnic majority and a significant ethnic minority are at greater risk for civil war.
• State policies that discriminate in favor of a particular group's language or religion should be associated with greater minority grievances.
• The authors consider both the Polity IV and the Przeworski et al. ( 2001) democracy measures, along with the Freedom House indicator of the observance of civil liberties, which seems particularly apt.

Insurgency

• If many post-1945 civil wars have been "ethnic" or "nationalist" as these terms are usually understood, then even more have been fought as insurgencies.
• Simply put, insurgents are better able to survive and prosper if the government and military they oppose is relatively weak -badly financed, organizationally inept, corrupt, politically divided, and poorly informed about goings on at the local level.
• This analysis suggests that H 9 : Proxies for the relative weakness or strength of the insurgents -that is, their odds of being killed or captured for a given level of counterinsurgent effort by the governmentshould be associated with the likelihood that a country develops a civil war.
• Oil producers tend to have weaker state apparatuses than one would expect given their level of income because the rulers have less need of a socially intrusive and elaborate bureaucratic system to raise revenues -a political "Dutch disease" (Chaudhry 1989; Karl 1997; Wantchekon 2000).
• For H 9 the authors use Penn World Tables and World Bank data on per capita income, estimating missing values using data on per capita energy consumption.

Empirical Analysis

• The authors central hypotheses concern the relationship between ethnic and religious diversity or structure, on the one hand, and the susceptibility of a country to civil war on the other.
• Several multivariate analyses of the country-year data are presented below, but the main story emerging from them can be made clear by the contour plot in Figure 2 .

Are More Diverse Countries Prone to Civil War?

• The plot shows how probabilities of civil war onset vary at different percentiles for country income (on the x-axis, measured in 1985 dollars) and ethnic homogeneity (on the y-axis, measured by the population share of the largest ethnic group).
• By contrast, countries at the 80th percentile on ethnic homogeneity and at the 20th percentile on income had close to a .18 chance of war in the next five years.
• Among the poorest countries where the authors observe the highest rates of civil war, the data indicates a tendency for more homogenous countries to be more civil war prone.
• The empirical pattern is thus inconsistent with H 1 , the common expectation that ethnic diversity is a major and direct cause of civil violence.

Multivariate Results

• The authors coded a variable onset as '1' for all country years in which a civil war started and '0' for all others.
• But contrary to H 4 and consistent with H 11 , civil war on-sets are no less frequent in democracies after controlling for income, as shown by the positive and statistically insignificant coefficient for Democracy, the Polity 4 measure.
• 31 This nonresult persists when the authors restrict the sample to those countries with at least a 5% religious or ethnic minority.
• A country that is about half "mountainous" (90th percentile) and otherwise at the median has an estimated 12.4% chance of civil war over the course of a decade.

Other variables and robustness checks

• Figure 2 and the multivariate analyses above omitted the 13 anticolonial wars in five colonial empires (Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, and the Netherlands).
• Equation 4 reports a logit analysis parallel to their specification in equation 1, omitting only the democracy variable and religious fractionalization (which is hard to estimate for the empires due to common religions between colonies and metropoles).
• The authors find little evidence of such a parabolic relationship in their data.
• Oil exports may be relevant not so much because they finance rebel groups but, as the authors argued, because they mark relative state weakness at a given level of income.
• The bivariate correlation between their estimate of the total number of civil wars in each country and the equivalent for the other data sets ranges from .72 with Collier and Hoeffler to .88 with Sambanis and Doyle.

Conclusion

• The prevalence of internal war in the 1990s is mainly the result of an accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 1950s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system.
• Viewing "ethnic wars" as a species of insurgency may help explain this paradoxical result.
• Instead, the civil wars of the period have structural roots, in the combination of a simple, robust military technology and decolonization, which created an international system numerically dominated by fragile states with limited administrative control of their peripheries.
• Sometimes recommended as a general international policy for resolving ethnic civil wars (e.g., Kaufmann 1996), ethnic partitions should be viewed as having large international implications and costs.
• The authors find little evidence that civil wars occur where there are unusually large cultural divisions or grievances.

Figures

Table 1: Logit analysis of determinants of civil war onset, 1945-99

Figure 2: Prob. of civil war onset/5 year period

Figure 1

Full text

ETHNICITY, INSURGENCY, AND CIVIL WAR
∗
James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin
Department of Political Science
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6044
Forthcoming in American Political Science Review
August 27, 2002
ABSTRACT
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 nationalism.
We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumu-
lation of protracted conflicts since the 50s and 60s 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, including but not limited to eth-
nic nationalism. 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.
∗
James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin are Professors of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford,
CA, 94305-6044. We wish to thank the many people who provided comments on an 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; and
Paul Collier for sharing some of his data.

Between 1945 and 1999, about 3.33 million battle deaths occurred in the 25 interstate
wars that killed at least 1000 and had at least 100 dead on each side. These wars involved
just 25 states that suffered casualties of at least 1000, and had a median duration of not
quite 3 months. By contrast, in the same period there were roughly 122 civil wars that killed
at least 1000. A conservative estimate of the total dead as a direct result of these conflicts is
16.2 million, five times the interstate toll. These civil wars occurred in 73 states – more than
a third of the United Nations system – and had a median duration of roughly six years.
1
It
is not implausible that the civil conflicts in this period produced refugee flows an order of
magnitude greater than their death toll and an order of magnitude greater than the refugee
flows associated with interstate wars since 1945. Cases such as Afghanistan, Somalia, and
Lebanon testify to the economic devastation that civil wars can produce. By these crude
measures, civil war has been a far greater scourge than interstate war in this period, though
it has been studied far less.
Twenty-four civil wars were ongoing in 1999. What explains the current prevalence of
violent civil conflict around the world? Is it due to the end of the Cold War and associated
changes in the international system, or is it the result of longer-term trends? Why have
some countries had civil wars while others have not, and why did the wars break out when
they did? We address these questions in this article, using data for the period 1945 to 1999
on the 161 countries that had a population of at least a half million in 1990.
Our data cast significant doubt on three influential conventional wisdoms concerning
political conflict before and after the Cold War. First, contrary to common opinion, the
prevalence of civil war in the 1990s was not due to the end of the Cold War and associated
changes in the international system. The current level of about one-in-six countries had
already been reached prior to the break up of the Soviet Union, and resulted from a steady,
1
The interstate war data derives from Singer and Small (1994), updated to include the Kargil and Eritrean
wars. The bases for the civil war estimates are discussed below.
2

gradual accumulation of civil conflicts that began immediately after World War II.
Second, it appears not to be true that a greater degree of ethnic or religious diversity –
or indeed any particular cultural demography – by itself makes a country more prone to civil
war. This finding runs contrary to a common view among journalists, policy makers, and
academics, that holds ethnically divided states to be especially conflict-prone due to ethnic
tensions and antagonisms.
Third, we find little evidence in favor of the dominant view that one can predict where
a civil war will break out by looking for where ethnic or other broad political grievances
are strongest. Were this so, one would exp ect political democracies and states that observe
civil liberties to b e less civil war-prone than dictatorships. One would further anticipate
that state discrimination against minority religions or languages would predict higher risks
of civil war. We show that when comparing states at similar levels of per capita income,
these expectations are not borne out.
The main factors determining both the secular trend and cross-sectional variation in
civil violence in this period are not ethnic or religious differences or broadly held grievances,
but rather conditions that favor insurgency. Insurgency is a technology of military conflict
characterized by small, lightly armed bands practicing guerrilla warfare from rural base areas.
As a form of warfare insurgency can be harnessed to diverse political agendas, motivations,
and grievances. The concept is most closely associated with communist insurgency, but the
methods have equally served Islamic fundamentalists, ethnic nationalists, or “rebels” who
focus mainly on traffic in coca or diamonds.
We hypothesize that financially, organizationally, and politically weak central govern-
ments render insurgency more feasible and attractive due to weak local policing or inept
and corrupt counterinsurgency practices. These often include a propensity for brutal and
indiscriminate retaliation that helps drive noncombatant locals into rebel forces. Police and
counterinsurgent weakness, we argue, is proxied by low per capita income. Shocks to coun-
3

terinsurgent capabilities can arise from political instability at the center or the sudden loss
of a foreign patron. On the rebel side, insurgency is favored by rough terrain, rebels with
local knowledge of the population superior to the government’s, and large population size.
All three aid rebels in hiding from superior government forces. Foreign base camps, financial
support, and training also favor insurgency.
Our data show that measures of cultural diversity and grievances fail to postdict civil
war onset, while measures of conditions that favor insurgency do fairly well. We do not
dispute that ethnic antagonism, nationalist sentiment, and group grievance often motivate
rebels and their supporters. But such broad factors are too common to distinguish the cases
where civil war breaks out. And since in the right conditions insurgency can be successfully
practiced by small numbers of rebels, civil war may require only a small number with intense
grievances to get going.
Using data on about 45 civil wars since 1960, Collier and Hoeffler (2000, 2001) find
similarly that measures of “objective grievance” fare worse as predictors than economic
variables, which they initially interpreted as measures of rebel “greed” (i.e., economic moti-
vation).
2
More recently, they argue that rebellion is better explained by “opportunity” than
by grievance (cf. Eisinger 1973, Tilly 1978), and that the main determinant of opportunity
is the availability of finance and recruits for rebels. They proxy these with measures of pri-
mary commodity exports and rates of secondary school enrollment for males. By contrast,
while we agree that financing is one determinant of the viability of insurgency, we argue
that economic variables such as per capita income matter primarily because they proxy for
state administrative, military, and police capabilities. We find no clear impact for primary
commodity exports, and none for secondary schooling rates distinct from that of income.
2
There are 79 wars in their sample, but they lose about 34 due to missing values on explanatory variables,
which are mainly economic. Standard economic data tends to be missing for countries that are p oor and
civil war-torn. This highly nonrandom list-wise deletion may account for some of the differences between
our results, and similarly for some other studies.
4

Our theoretical interpretation is more Hobbesian than economic. Where states are relatively
weak and capricious, both fears and opportunities encourage the rise of local would-be rulers
who supply a rough justice while arrogating the power to “tax” for themselves and, often, a
larger cause.
Civil war since 1945
Building on similar efforts by other civil war researchers,
3
we constructed a list of violent
civil conflicts that we presently believe to meet the following primary criteria: (1) They
involved fighting between agents of (or claimants to) a state and organized, non-state groups
who sought either to take control of a government, take power in a region, or use violence to
change government policies. (2) The conflict killed or has killed at least 1000 over its course,
with a yearly average of at least 100. (3) At least 100 were killed on both sides (including
civilians attacked by rebels). The last condition is intended to rule out massacres where
there is no organized or effective opposition.
4
These criteria are similar to those stated by the Correlates of War (COW) project,
Doyle and Sambanis (2001), and several others. We developed our own list (working from
these and other sources) mainly because we wanted data for the whole 1945-99 period and
3
In particular, the Correlates of War project (Singer and Small 1994), the Institute for International and
Strategic Studies (IISS 2000), Licklider (1995), Sivard (1996), Doyle and Sambanis (2000), the State Failure
Project (Esty et al. 1998), Gleditsch et al. (2001) and Valentino (2002).
4
We used the following secondary criteria to deal with several other coding issues: (4) The start year is
the first year in which 100 were killed or in which a violent event occurred that was followed by a sequence
of actions that came to satisfy the primary criteria. (5) If a main party to the conflict is defeated or drops
out, we code a new war start if the fighting continues (e.g., Somalia gets a new civil war after Siad Barre
is defeated in 1991). (6) War ends are coded by observation of either a victory, wholesale demobilization,
truce or peace agreement followed at least two years of peace. (7) Involvement by foreign tro ops does not
disqualify a case as a civil war for us, provided the other criteria are satisfied. (8) We code multiple wars in
a country when distinct rebel groups with distinct objectives are fighting a coherent central state on distinct
fronts with little or no explicit coordination. (9) If a state seeks to incorporate and govern territory that
was not a recognized state (e.g., Indonesia v. East Timor 1975, India v. Hyderabad 1947), we consider it
a “civil war” only if the fighting continues after the state begins to govern the territory (thus, East Timor,
yes, Hyderabad, no).
5

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in this paper?

The authors show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 50s and 60s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system. The authors wish to thank the many people who provided comments on an 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 ; and Paul Collier for sharing some of his data. By these crude measures, civil war has been a far greater scourge than interstate war in this period, though it has been studied far less. The authors address these questions in this article, using data for the period 1945 to 1999 on the 161 countries that had a population of at least a half million in 1990. The bases for the civil war estimates are discussed below. The authors 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. The authors 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, including but not limited to ethnic nationalism.