Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars

Edward Newman, Karl DeRouen, Jr., Edward Newman, Karl DeRouen, Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136255779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comprehensive new Handbook explores the significance and nature of armed intrastate conflict and civil war in the modern world.

Civil wars and intrastate conflict represent the principal form of organised violence since the end of World War II, and certainly in the contemporary era. These conflicts have a huge impact and drive major political change within the societies in which they occur, as well as on an international scale. The global importance of recent intrastate and regional conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Nepal, Cote d'Ivoire, Syria and Libya – amongst others – has served to refocus academic and policy interest upon civil war.

Drawing together contributions from key thinkers in the field who discuss the sources, causes, duration, nature and recurrence of civil wars, as well as their political meaning and international impact, the Handbook is organised into five key parts:

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• Part I: Understanding and Explaining Civil Wars: Theoretical and Methodological Debates

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• Part II: The Causes of Civil Wars

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• Part III: The Nature and Impact of Civil Wars

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• Part IV: International Dimensions

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• Part V: Termination and Resolution of Civil Wars

Covering a wide range of topics including micro-level issues as well as broader debates, Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars will set a benchmark for future research in the field.

This volume will be of much interest to students of civil wars and intrastate conflict, ethnic conflict, political violence, peace and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general.

1

Introduction

Edward Newman and Karl DeRouen, Jr.

Armed intrastate conflict and civil wars are the primary form of organized violence in the contemporary world, in an era where inter-state war, although far from extinct, is an increasingly unlikely prospect for most countries. Academic interest in understanding and explaining civil wars – and in particular, what causes them – has grown enormously since the end of the Cold War, and this has evolved into a substantial field of research and study. In policy circles, too, civil wars are pressing challenges with implications for international stability and intervention. This collection brings together a range of debates and research findings which define the study of civil wars and intrastate armed conflict, covering methodological approaches, the sources and causes of civil war, the nature and impact of violence, and factors relating to the duration, termination, recurrence and international dimensions of civil war. It also gives attention to broad patterns in types and numbers of civil wars in historical perspective.

This collection is designed to cover a wide range of academic traditions. It includes contributions from different methodological orientations – empirical, critical, quantitative, qualitative, anthropological, sociological – in an attempt to illustrate common ground as well as differences in approaches and research findings. The chapters have been written to present the main findings and debates, and the cutting edge, across the range of topics covered. They also consider possible future directions in each research area.

The field of civil war studies has evolved very significantly in recent decades in terms of methodological techniques and rigor, the growth in the number and popularity of journals dedicated to the field, and the growth of university research and teaching programs focusing upon intrastate armed conflict. However, this does not mean that the study of civil war reflects consensus in terms of the approaches that should be used to understand the dynamics of collective violence in the modern world. In fact, it is quite legitimate to question whether a unified field of civil war studies exists – or, indeed, if it should do so. There are very significant differences amongst scholars in terms of methodology and approach, and to a significant extent scholars are defined – and divided – as much by their methodology as by the substantive aspect of armed conflict they focus upon. There are wide differences of opinion across the broad field of scholars who work on civil war regarding the basis of legitimate and scientific knowledge in this area, on whether cross-national studies can generate reliable findings, and on whether objective, value-free analysis of armed conflict is possible. All too often – and perhaps increasingly so, with the rise in interest in econometric approaches – scholars interested in civil war from different methodological traditions are isolated from each other. Moreover, aside from these broader epistemic debates, even within the more narrowly defined empirical approaches to civil war studies there are major disagreements regarding the most fundamental questions relating to contemporary civil wars, such as the trends in numbers of armed conflicts, whether civil wars are changing in nature, whether and how international actors can have a role in preventing, containing and ending civil wars, and the significance of factors such as ethnicity, climate change, unemployment, inequality and grievances in the onset and nature of violent conflict. This volume presents the evolution of thinking and the latest research findings in all such debates, and in doing so identifies areas of consensus and controversy.

Basic patterns of civil war

In simplest terms civil war is a violent conflict between a government and an organized rebel group, although some scholars also include armed conflicts primarily between non-state actors within their study. The definition of a civil war, and the analytical means of differentiating a civil war from other forms of large-scale violence, has been controversial. A number of definitional thresholds and criteria have emerged in an attempt to delineate the subject. These relate to the magnitude and scope of the violence, the spatial context, and the nature and identity of the protagonists, amongst other things, to distinguish civil wars from other forms of large-scale violence such as riots, one-sided massacres, genocide, or criminal violence. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) uses 25 battle-related deaths per year as the threshold to be classified as armed conflict, and – in common with other datasets such as the Correlates of War (COW) – a threshold of 1,000 battle-related deaths for a civil war. While this is now widely endorsed, debate remains regarding the rigor of this definition; the difficulties of gathering reliable data on mortality, and differentiating between battle deaths and other forms of violent fatalities, for example, have introduced some uncertainty into this definition. Moreover, as some of the chapters in this volume illustrate, differences between two of the main quantitative conflict datasets – the UCDP and the COW – in terms of the measurement of armed conflict result in significant differences in interpreting patterns of conflict. This has led to conflicting findings not only about absolute numbers of civil wars, but also regarding trends in the numbers of such conflicts.

Sambanis (2004) explores the definition debate in a systematic analysis of various civil war datasets and robustness checks, and it is worth considering this as a part of this background discussion. He categorizes a conflict as a civil war when:

1. the conflict is in an independent state with a population of at least 500,000;
2. the parties are organized around political agendas;
3. the government takes part in the fighting;
4. the main insurgency is local – rebels can also operate outside the country but must have a physical presence in the country;
5. with some exceptions, in the start year there are at least 500 to 1,000 deaths;
6. the war maintains minimal levels of ongoing violence;
7. the weaker party must maintain an “effective resistance” as represented by at least 100 deaths inflicted;
8. peace treaties yielding at least a six-month peace spell indicate termination;
9. a military victory by the rebels associated with a new regime represents a termination; and
10. a government victory followed by six months of peace also represents a termination.

Sambanis also addresses the question of whether anti-colonial and imperial wars should be classified as civil wars. He concludes that these conflicts should be considered separate phenomena and not included in civil war datasets. Fearon, on the other hand, treats these conflicts as civil wars as they entail domestic rebels fighting a government (see Fearon and Laitin 2003). As Sambanis demonstrates – and as illustrated in a number of chapters in this volume, notably those by Wallensteen and Sarkees – there are important differences between some of the key civil war datasets (COW, UCDP/Oslo Peace Research Institute (PRIO); Doyle and Sambanis 2000; Fearon and Laitin 2003). These differences are especially made manifest when it comes to onset and termination dates.

Despite healthy disagreements in the literature the basic definition of a civil war – reflected in the Sambanis contribution, above, although sometimes with minor variations – has wide consensus, at least within empirical research, and a number of trends can be identified on this basis. According to the UCDP/PRIO data, from 1946 to 2011 a total of 102 countries experienced civil wars. Africa witnessed the most with 40 countries experiencing civil wars between 1946 and 2011. During this period 20 countries in the Americas experienced civil war, 18 in Asia, 13 in Europe, and 11 in the Middle East (Themnér and Wallensteen 2012). There were 367 episodes (episodes in this case being separated by at least one year without at least 25 battle-related deaths) of civil wars from 1946 to 2009 (Kreutz 2010). The number of active civil wars generally increased from the end of the Cold War to around 1992 (Themnér and Wallensteen 2012). Since then the number has been in decline, although whether this is likely to be sustained is debatable. In terms of onset of first episode by region from 1946 to 2011, Africa leads the way with 75, followed by Asia with 67, the Western Hemisphere with 33, the Middle East with 29, and Europe with 25 (Themnér and Wallensteen 2012). As Walter (2011) has observed, armed conflicts are increasingly concentrated in poor countries.

The data also indicate patterns related to the human impact of civil wars. There were 3 million deaths from civil wars with no international intervention between 1946 and 2008. There were 1.5 million deaths in wars where intervention occurred. However, in relative terms, intervention tends to increase conflict intensity. Extra-systemic civil wars fought by a country away from its core resulted in more than 700,000 deaths (Harbom and Wallensteen 2009; Lacina and Gleditsch 2005). In terms of region, there were approximately 350,000 civil war-related deaths in both Europe and the Middle East from the years 1946 to 2008. There were 467,000 deaths in the Western Hemisphere, 1.2 million in Africa, and 3.1 million in Asia for the same period (Harbom and Wallensteen 2009; Lacina and Gleditsch 2005).

In addition to deaths, civil wars lead to large-scale human displacement. Often these refugees are then settled into camps known for violence and disease, and in some cases, long-term residency (Loescher et al. 2008). According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR 2012), at the outset of 2012 there were approximately 15.2 million refugees and 28.8 million internally displaced persons. Of course, not all of these displacements are caused by war but a very significant majority are the result of armed violence of some form.

In terms of historical patterns of civil wars and intrastate armed conflict more broadly, the most conspicuous trend in recent decades is an apparent decline in absolute numbers, magnitude, and impact of armed conflicts, including civil wars. While there is wide – but not total – agreement regarding this, the explanations for this downward trend are contested. A number of historical factors may be relevant to this trend, including the decline of wars of national liberation and post-independence conflicts, the decline of Cold War ideologies as a driving force for upheaval, the reduction of intervention and support by external parties compared to the proxy armed conflicts of the Cold War years, increasingly effective peacekeeping and peacebuilding interventions, the increasing number of consolidated democracies, the increased number of consolidated states, and possibly – although this is the most debatable theory – strengthening norms against the use of violence. Nevertheless, twenty-first century civil wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nepal, Libya, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Syria, and Sri Lanka – amongst others – illustrate that intrastate armed conflict merits the utmost attention of scholars and policy analysts.

Outline of the volume

Theoretical and methodological debates

The scope of this volume is too broad to provide a comprehensive description of all the chapters in this introduction; instead, this section will touch upon some of the main themes and debates that arise. Part I covers theoretical and methodological debates. In common with many areas of scholarship, and particularly the social and political sciences, the study of civil wars has embraced debates about the methodology, ontology, and epistemology of the field: the foundational starting point and assumptions of what the key features of civil war are, what we should be studying, and how to generate reliable, legitimate knowledge. Since the 1990s civil war studies has been driven by empirical, especially quantitative, approaches, which reflect a growing concern with methodological rigor and testable hypotheses. According to the positivist empirical approach scholars can generate rigorous explanatory theory, through observation and testing, on a range of questions related to the causes and nature of civil war. The quantitative and econometric approaches are at the heart of this academic renaissance and some of the key debates in civil war studies have reflected this approach.

The empirical research discussed in this volume uses both statistical and case study methods, although some chapters reflect a more discursive approach. North American – in particular US – scholars are known to approach the study of civil war from the behavioral perspective. A growing number of Scandinavian and UK-based scholars are increasingly also using statistical approaches. The results of this work have made a huge impact on debates relating to the causes and nature of intrastate armed conflict, and in particular on the significance of factors such as ethnicity, poverty, inequality, regime type, institutional factors, demographic factors, environmental degradation and natural resources – indeed, many of the topics covered by chapters in this volume. However, as many of the chapters in this volume also illustrate, the findings of these approaches often contradict each other, or are contradicted by subsequent research. The codification and measurement of data, the use of proxies and the interpretation of patterns is clearly still not an exact science.

In parallel – and sometimes as a challenge – to the rise to prominence of empirical and especially quantitative methodologies, other approaches have made an important contribution. Critical and anthropological approaches are skeptical of the cross-national approach of mainstream civil wars analysis, stressing the importance of local context. Critical approaches, in particular, challenge the assumption of objectivity and neutrality in the positivist approaches, and argue that interpretations and judgments made by analysts are inevitably subjective and often political. Sociological approaches have pointed to the importance of looking beyond the narrow range of discrete variables in understanding the onset and nature of civil war. Instead, they point to the importance of considering the broader narrative of these conflicts in order to understand their significance for themes such as statebuilding, nation building and transformations in the relationship between society and the state.

The predominant empirical approaches to analyzing the causes and nature of intrastate armed conflict are based upon national units of analysis and cross-national comparisons, and a range of other aggregated concepts such as national GDP, ethnicity, and state and non-state actors. The value of this approach is that data can be analyzed in manageable units, and it can draw upon a highly developed range of datasets. It also enables comparison between readily recognizable political units – countries – and the use of comparable variables to help us understand a range of questions related to the onset and nature of intrastate armed conflict. However, a focus on aggregated national data and other aggregated factors can often obscure critically important local patterns and dynamics. In contrast, exploring the micro-dynamics of civil war illustrates localized patterns of violence and other phenomena, and disaggregates processes that are usually studied at the national level. This can generate more detailed knowledge about armed conflict and it often presents results which are overlooked by national, macro-level analysis. Micro-level approaches point the way to a more nuanced, disaggregated empirical approach to understanding armed conflict, as many of the chapters in this volume suggest.

The section on theoretical and methodological debates illustrates some of the epistemological tensions which exist across different approaches to understanding civil war. Nevertheless, it is interesting that, taken together, these chapters indicate that different methods may not be as incompatible as is often assumed, and that mixed-methods approaches are likely to play an important role in future research in this area.

The causes of civil wars

Part II, on the causes of civil war, includes chapters on ethnicity and identity conflict, absolute and relative deprivation, natural resources and the war economy, demographic factors, regime type and political transition, religion, statebuilding, globalization and social transition, and environmental factors. These chapters focus on some of the key debates which have dominated civil war studies in recent decades and they also point to a number of key challenges for the field. As a demonstration of some of the methodological issues raised in the Part I of the volume, they also illustrate the challenges of attempting to evaluate the relative significance of specific variables in conjunction with other relevant factors, the possibility that empirical research may not always embrace all the relevant variables, and the issue of reverse causality.

The chapters do, however, also illustrate that there is growing consensus on a number of findings. For example, intrastate armed conflict is more likely to occur in poor, developing countries with weak state structures. In situations of weak states the presence of lootable natural resources and oil increase the likelihood of experiencing armed conflict. Dependency upon the export of primary commodities is also a vulnerability factor, especially in conjunction with drastic fluctuations in international market prices which can result in economic shocks and social dislocation. State weakness is relevant to this – and to most of the theories regarding armed conflict proneness – because such states are less able to cushion the impact of economic shocks. While ethnic heterogeneity is not in isolation associated with a higher risk of armed conflict, ethnic or group domination of politics and economic opportunities does increase the risk. Similarly, while absolute poverty – which affects a very significant proportion of the world, much of which does not experience armed conflict – may not in isolation be a reliable indication of conflict risk, inequalities across distinct identity groups and relative deprivation grievances are sources of armed conflict. So-called ethno-religious conflicts can therefore have political or economic causes. Civil war can result from frustration if one group perceives an unfair advantage by another group in the political or economic realms. Inequities such as this sometimes have their origins in the colonial legacy. Situations of partial or weak democracy (anocracy) and political transition, particularly a movement t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Understanding and explaining civil wars Theoretical and methodological debates
• Part II: The causes of civil wars
• Part III: The nature and impact of civil wars
• Part IV: International dimensions
• Part V: Termination and resolution of civil wars
• Index