Week 03: Civil Wars

# Week 03: Civil Wars
## Causes of Civil Wars
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### Danilo Freire
### 24 September 2019

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# Last week we saw that...

* They are hard to define:
	- Partisan bias (favour victims)
	- Political bias (war is not politics)
	- Urban bias (costly information, big narratives)
	- Selection bias (overaggregation, lack of context)
]
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# Last week we saw that...

* Even barbaric acts can be rational

* Quantitative measures are somewhat arbitrary

* PRIO/UCDP and ACLED
	- 25/1000 annual battle-related deaths
	- "contested incompatibility over territory or government and one of the parties is the state"
]
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# Last week we saw that...

- Cold War: class-based conflicts, peasant rebellions
	- 1991-2003: ethnic conflicts 
	- 2003-present: radical Islamism, but religion might not be the main cause
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# Causes of civil war

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# Collier and Hoeffler (2004)

* Grievances are more or less constant, so why do civil wars break only at a specific point in time?]
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* *Window of opportunity*: people rebel _when they can_

* Greed: atypical circumstances that can generate large returns

* Yet C&H agree they cannot differentiate between *opportunity* and *viability* to express grievances
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# Proxies for opportunity

* Relationship is non-linear

* Countries with very low and very high ratios do not have civil wars

* **Question**: why?
]
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* Countries with few natural resources have nothing to loot
* Oil-rich countries can hold the country together by force
* Countries in the middle are the best ones to loot
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# Proxies for opportunity

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* **Money from diasporas**]
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* E.g.: Tamil Tigers funded by American-resident Tamils

* Immigrants provide money (and skills?) rebel groups wouldn't have otherwise

* Proxied by % of immigrants living in the US
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# Proxies for opportunity

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* **Funding from hostile governments**]
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* Examples: 
	- Algerian civil war (rebels supported by USSR/ France by the US)
	- Soviet-Afghan war (Sunni Mujahideen supported by US/PAK/CN, etc; Shia Mujahideen supported by Iran)
	- Syrian civil war (a mess!)
]
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# Proxies for opportunity

* 2) Weapons are cheap: previous wars

* 3) Government is weak: montainous terrain

* 4) Social cohesion: ethnic diversity
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# Proxies for grievance

* Political repression: non-democracies

* Political exclusion: ethnic dominance (majority group comprises 45-90% pop)

* Economic inequality: Gini index, ratio top-to-bottom income 
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# Opportunity model

# Opportunity model

# Grievance model

# Grievance model

# Combined model

<img src="ch05.png" width="1100px" height="400px" />
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# Combined model

<img src="ch06.png" width="1100px" height="400px" />
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# Combined model

<img src="ch07.png" width="1100px" height="400px" />
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# Interpretation

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* Factors that influence the opportunity for rebellion:
	- Money from commodities
	- Diaspora
	- Low GDP
	- Dispersed population

* *No evidence for grievance-based theories*

* Only ethnic dominance has a positive effect

* **Question**: what do you think? Is their explanation convincing?
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# Comments

* GDP, democracy, primary exports change very slowly over time... what triggers conflict onset?

* Urban bias: no mention of rural dynamics
	
* Passive role of the state in the conflict

* Crude proxies for greed and grievances
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# Fearon and Laitin (2003)

* Remarkable data collection effort

* Four main points:

- The end of the Cold War *did not* cause civil wars
	- Controlling for income, ethnicity and religion don't matter
	- Little support for grievance-based theories
	- Factors that explain *insurgency* are the most relevant

* Different from C&H, F&L argue that low GDP proxies for *state capacity* 
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# Data

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* Conflicts that kill at least 1,000 people, at least 100 per year, rebels or government forces

* Include colonial wars

* F&L are cautious about their data on empires

* They analyse the data both including and excluding colonial wars
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# Conflicts over time

# Ethnicity and conflict

* Deep-rooted ethnic grievances are not enough to explain civil war onset

* Sceptical of "modernisation theory": limits to upward mobility cause people to revolt

* Question the idea that discrimination (ethnic or economic favouritism to other groups) leads to conflict
]
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# Insurgencies

* Guerrilla groups are weak compared to the government

* Factors that facilitate rebel group survival are very important
	- Montainous terrain (hideouts)
	- Local knowledge
	- Rural base
	- Weak state governance
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# Main results

# Pred. probabilities: income and ethnicity

# Discussion

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* The high number of civil wars in the 1990s is the result of accumulation of previous conflicts, not the end of the Cold War

* Ethnicities and grievances do not explain why internal wars occur 
	
* Factors that favour *insurgency* do: state weakness, low GDP, instability, and large population

* Practical implications:
	- Promoting democracy abroad doesn't work
	- Cultural dialogue doesn't work either
	- Little foreign states can do: GDP, state capacity take time
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# Comments on C&H and F&L

* Rebels are essentially criminals: profits from looting

* **Question**: natural/lootable resources can fuel grievances too, can't they?
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* Resource-rich countries might have higher inequality, forced migrations, trade shocks, etc

* Diasporas can also provide welfare to local communities and therefore *reduce* the likelihood of conflict
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# Comments on C&H and F&L

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* F&L: unclear which aspect of state capacity decreases civil war risk: Inclusive institutions, shared power, armed forces, economic redistribution?

* Impossible to adjudicate between their theory (state capacity, proxied by GDP per capita) and C&H's (lootable resources, proxied by.... GDP per capita!)

* As with C&H, national-level data obscures important within-country dynamics
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# Questions?

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# Wimmer et al (2009)

* Qualify previous literature

* Offer better data on ethnic groups

* Establish new mechanisms that link group grievances to conflicts

* Focus on political dynamics of ethnic exclusion and competition
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# Institutionalist, configurational theory

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* **Institutionalist**: political structures create incentives for players to act strategically

* **Configurational**: the same institution provides different incentives according to the distribution of power

* Ethnicity matters _because the nation state uses it for legitimacy_

* Politicians have incentives to favour their co-ethnics

* Ethnic favouritism is more likely in poor, young states (which need more legitimacy)
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# Institutionalist, configurational theory

# Three types of ethnic conflict

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* **Secession**: changing the territorial boundaries of a polity and can be pursued by both excluded and included groups

* **Rebellion**: excluded segments of a population fight to shift the boundaries of inclusion

* **Infighting**: elite disputes for the spoils of government

* Predictions:
	- ethnic exclusion breeds conflict
	- more power-sharing increase conflict (coalitions)
	- large states and those under indirect rule rebel more 
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# Results

# Results

# Results

# Conclusion

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* "The likelihood of armed confrontation increases as the center of power becomes more ethnically segmented and as greater proportions of a states population are excluded from power because of their ethnic background"

* "These conflicts are even more likely in incoherent states where the population is not accustomed to direct rule by the political center"

* "Ethnicity is not an aim in itself, but the organizational means through which individuals struggle to gain access to state power"
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# Comments on Wimmer et al

* However, still treats ethnicity as a fixed category

* Ethnicity and conflict can be endogenous

* Urban bias, maybe?
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# Questions?

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# Kalyvas and Balcells (2010)

* More specifically, what is the role of the international system in civil wars?

* "Technologies of rebellion": ways that civil conflicts are fought

* Disaggregating the types of conflict

* The end of the Cold War caused a decline in irregular wars
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# Technologies of rebellion

* **Conventional warfare**: army and rebels have similar power

* **Symmetric non-conventional (SNC) warfare**: states unable/unwilling to fight ("primitive" wars)
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# The puzzle of the Cold War

* End of the Cold War brought changes to the int'l system:
	- End of multiethnic states
	- Emergence of new states
	- Cheap weapons from the former USSR
	- Weakening of client states
	- No legitimising principle to the state (link with Wimmer et al.)

* Contest F&L's results that the Cold War has no effect
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# Technologies of rebellion

# Summary statistics

# Main results

# Main results

# Discussion

* However, the model doesn't seem very convincing

* Almost nothing is significant; bad control variables

* No testing of any mechanism:
	- Material support
	- Ideological cohesion
	- Access to weapons

* SNC is a poorly-defined category
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# Ward et al (2010)

* How useful are they to predict *what might happen in the future*?

* In-sample vs out-of-sample testing

* Predictive accuracy: Possible means for testing the validity of a theory
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# Problems of statistical significance

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* False positives and false negatives
	- Every probability above 0.5 is considered positive in the model
	- There is *nothing* special about that number

* **Question**:
	- You are the leader of your country and you see that country X has 50% chance of going to war next year. If you are right, a civil war can be averted. *But if you are wrong*, you will invade another country, your citizens will die, and conflict might spread. What probability would make *you* go to war?
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# Statistical vs predictive power

# Discussion

* How can we use these models to predict new conflicts?

* Factors that explain previous civil wars may not explain future ones

* Prediction can help us build more robust (although not necessarily more efficient) models for civil war prevention
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# Questions?

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# Brief summary

* Windows of opportunity are more important than old grievances

* Ethnic rivalries can lead to civil war outbreak, but under certain conditions

* The Cold War has changed the way civil wars are fought

* Many of the variables we know explain *past* wars, but can they explain future ones?
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# Similar analysis

# To conclude

.center[Source: [Griffith, S. B. - Introduction to Mao Zedong's *On Guerrilla Warfare* (1961)](https://books.google.com/books?id=jKoqAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA7&dq=griffith%20%22its%20basic%20element%20is%22&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false)]
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# See you next week!