Civil Wars, Scientific Study of

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Idean Salehyan ◽  
Clayton L. Thyne
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Conflict Duration ◽  
Breeding Grounds ◽  
The Government ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
External Actors

Civil war is an armed conflict between the state and another organized domestic party over a contested political incompatibility, which results in a number of casualties exceeding a certain threshold for both parties. Attempts to operationalize these criteria have produced many data sets, which conceptualize civil war as distinct from one-sided violence, organized crime, and communal fighting. Civil wars are devastating for states experiencing them, their neighbors, and the entire global community. Combatant and civilian deaths, rape, massive refugee flight, negative impacts on economy and infrastructure, spread of infectious diseases, global spread of illegal narcotics, and the promotion of terrorism are all consequences of civil wars. Theories explaining why civil wars occur focus on objectives of the rebels, ability of rebels to successfully challenge the government, influence of external actors on interactions between the government and the opposition, external financing of potential rebel groups, and impact of a state’s neighbors on the likelihood of civil conflict or how neighboring conflicts and refugee communities serve as breeding grounds for cross-border rebel movements. Conflicts persist until neither side believes that it can achieve unilateral victory and continued fighting is costly. Governments are more likely to win early when they have large armies, but time to government victory increases when they are faced with secessionist rebels and when external parties are involved. Meanwhile, external mediation diminishes informational and credible commitment problems during bargaining and reduces conflict duration. Promising directions for future research on civil war include geographic disaggregation, survey research, and computational/agent-based modeling.

scholarly journals Interstate rivals’ intervention in third-party civil wars: The comparative case of Saudi Arabia and Iran in Yemen (2004-2018)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Júlia Palik
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Third Party ◽  
External Support ◽  
Civil Conflicts ◽  
Rebel Governance ◽  
Conflict Duration ◽  
The Government

How does interstate rivals’ intervention in a third-party civil war impact conflict duration and outcome in that country? More specifically, (1) how do interstate rivals engage in third party civil conflicts and (2) how do conflict parties attract, utilize, and sustain the external support they receive from their supporters? I answer these questions by comparing Saudi Arabia and Iran’s intervention in two distinct conflicts in Yemen. This dissertation applies a qualitative case study method and selects two within-case methods: structured-focused comparison and process tracing. In the structured-focused comparison, I compare the support Saudi Arabia and Iran has provided to the Government of Yemen (GoY) and the Houthis respectively, differentiating between military and non-military types of support. I compare these during the Saada wars (2004-2010) and in the current internationalized civil war (2014-2018). To ensure the validity of my causal inferences I triangulate data from three sources: the development of a novel mediation and ceasefire dataset1 (1), semi-structured in-depth elite-interviews2 (2), and document reviews (3). This dissertation develops a mechanism-focused analytical framework that integrates both rivalry and civil war dynamics to explain civil war duration and outcome. I build on five distinct literatures (strategic rivalry, civil war studies, third-party intervention in civil wars, mediation, and rebel governance) and complement them with the literature on Middle East Area Studies. In the analytical framework first, I look at the inter-state dimension and propose that rivals’ initial decision to intervene and their subsequent decisions to remain engaged in third-party civil wars are two distinct processes. Rivals seek to inflict costs on their counterparts, but at the same time they seek to avoid direct confrontation. Their cognitive rigidities lock them in their own conflicts and give rise to the mechanism of conflict integration in third-party conflicts. Besides interveners, I also take into account domestic dynamics and examine civil war conflict parties’ capacity to impact rivals by keeping them engaged in their conflict through the mechanism of rivalry instrumentalization. The external and internal perspectives are reinforcing each other and create networked interdependencies. With this two-dimensional logic, I move beyond the conventional framework of proxy wars.

Political life after civil wars: Introducing the Civil War Successor Party dataset

2020 ◽  
pp. 002234332092090
Author(s):  
Sarah Zukerman Daly
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Quality Of Democracy ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Electoral Performance

Around the world, following civil wars, rebel and government belligerents contest and win the founding postwar elections. Despite the prevalence of these elections and their importance in setting post-conflict environments on specific political trajectories, their outcomes have been understudied. Existing scholarship centers on the timing and institutions of the postwar elections, but not on their party and voter participants. This article introduces a dataset which traces the postwar political trajectories of civil war belligerents, identifies their successor parties, charts their electoral performance, and documents their decision to remilitarize or demilitarize. The Civil War Successor Party (CWSP) dataset covers all belligerents that have transitioned from civil conflict in the period 1970–2015. The article describes the contours of the dataset, reveals patterns of political life after wars, and outlines the potential uses of the dataset for future research. In particular, it suggests how the data may be leveraged by scholars and practitioners to understand dynamics of political behavior, patterns of governance and public goods provision, quality of democracy, and recurrence of low- and high-intensity war in the aftermath of mass violence.

Oil export, external prewar support for the government, and civil conflict onset

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 513-526
Author(s):  
Jungmoo Woo
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Complete Information ◽  
Primary Energy ◽  
External Support ◽  
Oil Export ◽  
The Government ◽  
Oil Revenues ◽  
External Actors ◽  
Civil War Onset

The literature on civil war onset focuses on the effect of oil on domestic actors but relatively little suggests its effect on external actors who can intervene in an oil-producing state, although most revenues of oil-producing states are generated by their oil export to other states. This article advances a theory of oil export, external prewar support for the government, and civil war onset. In the international oil market, although oil is a primary energy source in most states, there are few oil exporters. This implies that costs of breaking an oil trade tie are greater for an oil-importing state vis-à-vis an oil-exporting state and, thus, oil-importing states are likely to have concerns about oil-exporting states’ political instability that can cause civil conflict onset and break their oil trade ties. I hypothesize that a state’s oil export increases the likelihood of external prewar support for its government. However, because oil-exporting states are likely to conceal the information about their oil export to prevent public grievances against the distribution of oil revenues and their governments’ incompetence in oil export, rebels are less likely to have complete information about oil export. The secrecy of oil export hinders finding a mutually acceptable bargaining range between the government and rebels, and increases the likelihood of civil conflict onset in oil-exporting states without external support for the government. I measure each state’s oil export using network analysis, and test these hypotheses using logit models. Empirical results support the hypotheses.

Who Wins, Who Loses, Who Negotiates Peace in Civil Wars: Does Regime Type Matter?

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 482-498
Author(s):  
Anup Phayal ◽  
T David Mason ◽  
Mehmet Gurses
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
The State ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
Negotiated Settlement ◽  
Peace Research ◽  
Conflict Duration ◽  
Regime Types ◽  
The Government ◽  
Competing Risk Models

Abstract Previous research has shown that the outcome of a civil war is related to conflict duration: military victory by either the government or the rebels occurs early if it occurs at all, and the longer a civil war lasts, the more likely it is to end in a negotiated settlement. The models of civil war duration and outcome that have produced these findings are built on characteristics of the civil war and less on attributes of the state itself, other than where the state lies on the Polity autocracy-democracy scale. We propose that how civil wars end varies not only between democracies and authoritarian regimes but among the different authoritarian regime types identified by Geddes, Wright, and Franz. The distinguishing attributes of these regime types—democracy, one-party, personalist, military, monarchical—should lead to different likelihood in defeating a rebel movement, being defeated by a rebel movement, and negotiating a peace agreement with a rebel movement. Results from a series of competing-risk models using the Uppsala–Peace Research Institute Oslo Armed Conflict Dataset demonstrate support for our claim that how civil wars end is partly a function of the characteristics of the regime.

scholarly journals Civil War from a Transnational Perspective

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
International System ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Post Cold War

Civil war is the dominant form of armed conflict in the contemporary international system, and most severe lethal armed conflicts in the post-Cold War era have been civil/intrastate rather than interstate. Still, it would be misleading to see these conflicts as purely domestic, as many contemporary civil wars such as Syria display clear transnational characteristics, including inspirations from events in other countries, links to actors in other countries, as well as international interventions. Moreover, civil wars often have important implications for other states, including security concerns and economic impacts. There is a need to focus on the growth and core findings in the literature on transnational dimensions of civil war, in particular on how factors outside a particular state can influence the risk of conflict within states as well as some of the central consequences of domestic conflict for other states or relations between states. This line of research has helped expand our understanding of both civil conflict and interstate war, and that a comparative focus on varieties conflict and attention to the possible transnational dimensions of civil war deserve a prominent role in future research.

What Do We Know About Civil War Duration? A Bargaining Perspective

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Negotiated Settlement ◽  
Negotiated Settlements ◽  
Majority Population ◽  
Economically Marginalized ◽  
The Government ◽  
External Actors ◽  
Military Victory

Civil wars vary greatly in duration—some end within months; others last for decades. What explains this variation? Civil wars drag on when no combatant can win a military victory and the various actors involved are unable, or unwilling, to reach a compromise agreement that resolves the war. Military victory does happen in civil war, but it is rare, so understanding why civil wars last as long as they do requires examining the barriers to negotiated settlement. Wars last longer when the parties involved perceive the war as less costly relative to peace and when the combatants are overly optimistic about how they will do in the war. Even when key decision-makers see the war as costly and are realistic about their chances of prevailing, negotiated settlements prove elusive if the parties cannot accept a division of the issues at stake or if the government or rebels are unable to trust the commitments the other side makes in a negotiation. Additionally, bargaining is more complicated when there are more combatants that must accept the terms of any agreement, and conflicts with more combatants last much longer than those with fewer. Many factors affect the bargaining environment, and these barriers to bargaining can explain why civil wars are on average quite long. International actions can alleviate some of the barriers and help combatants reach comprehensive settlements, as happened in the conflicts in Mozambique, El Salvador, Guatemala. In particular, peacekeeping and mediation strategies are effective at resolving wars sooner. International action in general is more effective, however, when the parties involved are interested in peace but need some help overcoming commitment or informational problems. These actions are much less successful when that interest is lacking. The current civil war in Syria has many of the factors identified as prolonging wars. It is an extremely fractionalized conflict, and many external actors are involved. Syria has a large majority population that has been historically excluded from political power and economically marginalized, and a minority government that has been dominant. These factors make reaching a comprehensive settlement very challenging and mean the war is likely to be very long-lasting.

The Rebels’ Credibility Dilemma

2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakana L. Thomas ◽  
William Reed ◽  
Scott Wolford
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Rebel Groups ◽  
Strategic Incentives ◽  
Rebel Group ◽  
The Government ◽  
Conflict In Africa

AbstractThis article examines why rebel groups make large demands of governments that are inconsistent with their fighting capacity, especially when such demands are almost always rejected. We show that making large demands, even if ultimately rejected by the government, makes sense for rebels who face a credibility dilemma. Such a dilemma is most likely to arise when militarily weak rebel groups face governments of uncertain strength and can commit to fight credibly only when they believe the government is also weak. This results in a counterintuitive set of strategic incentives for weak rebels, who choose their demands to ensure that they are rejected even when the government is weak. Thus, to make their threat to fight credible, weak rebels make large demands that, when rejected, result in inefficient fighting. Since most civil wars are characterized by weak rebels bargaining with much stronger governments, it is important to understand how this particular feature of civil war shapes intrawar negotiations between the rebels and the government. We develop a model of bargaining between a government and rebel group and evaluate its implications using historical data on civil conflict in Africa from 1989 to 2010. The results suggest that the tendency for the government to be significantly stronger than rebels induces rebel groups to make unrealistically large demands.

Stick Then Carrot: When Do Governments Give Amnesty during Civil War?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesley-Ann Daniels
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Policy Choice ◽  
Strategic Choices ◽  
Rebel Groups ◽  
The Government

Abstract Governments grant amnesties to rebel groups during civil wars and this is a puzzle. Why would the government offer an amnesty, which can be interpreted as a signal of weakness? In certain circumstances, offering amnesty is a rational policy choice. Governments should give amnesties when they are winning: the risk of misinterpreted signals is lessened, costs are low, rebel groups are weakened, and so amnesty can be used instrumentally to encourage defection or division among foot soldiers or as an incentive to leaders. Therefore, the government capitalizes on its military advantage and offers amnesty in a “stick then carrot” tactic. Using a database of amnesties during conflicts from 1990 to 2011, the article shows that governments are more likely to give amnesties following high rebel deaths. The use of amnesty during conflict is nuanced and context is important when understanding strategic choices.

scholarly journals The global impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns on urban air pollution

Elem Sci Anth ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgios I. Gkatzelis ◽  
Jessica B. Gilman ◽  
Steven S. Brown ◽  
Henk Eskes ◽  
A. Rita Gomes ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Atmospheric Chemistry ◽  
Urban Air Pollution ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Specific Method ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Atmospheric Pollutant ◽  
Government Interventions ◽  
Pollutant Concentrations ◽  
Global Impacts ◽  
The Government

The coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) pandemic led to government interventions to limit the spread of the disease which are unprecedented in recent history; for example, stay at home orders led to sudden decreases in atmospheric emissions from the transportation sector. In this review article, the current understanding of the influence of emission reductions on atmospheric pollutant concentrations and air quality is summarized for nitrogen dioxide (NO2), particulate matter (PM2.5), ozone (O3), ammonia, sulfur dioxide, black carbon, volatile organic compounds, and carbon monoxide (CO). In the first 7 months following the onset of the pandemic, more than 200 papers were accepted by peer-reviewed journals utilizing observations from ground-based and satellite instruments. Only about one-third of this literature incorporates a specific method for meteorological correction or normalization for comparing data from the lockdown period with prior reference observations despite the importance of doing so on the interpretation of results. We use the government stringency index (SI) as an indicator for the severity of lockdown measures and show how key air pollutants change as the SI increases. The observed decrease of NO2 with increasing SI is in general agreement with emission inventories that account for the lockdown. Other compounds such as O3, PM2.5, and CO are also broadly covered. Due to the importance of atmospheric chemistry on O3 and PM2.5 concentrations, their responses may not be linear with respect to primary pollutants. At most sites, we found O3 increased, whereas PM2.5 decreased slightly, with increasing SI. Changes of other compounds are found to be understudied. We highlight future research needs for utilizing the emerging data sets as a preview of a future state of the atmosphere in a world with targeted permanent reductions of emissions. Finally, we emphasize the need to account for the effects of meteorology, emission trends, and atmospheric chemistry when determining the lockdown effects on pollutant concentrations.

scholarly journals Coup-Proofing and Civil War

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Koga Sudduth
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
The Other ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Rebel Groups ◽  
The Future ◽  
Face Threats ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
The Military

Political leaders face threats to their power from within and outside the regime. Leaders can be removed via a coup d’état undertaken by militaries that are part of the state apparatus. At the same time, leaders can lose power when they confront excluded opposition groups in civil wars. The difficulty for leaders, though, is that efforts to address one threat might leave them vulnerable to the other threat due to the role of the military as an institution of violence capable of exercising coercive power. On one hand, leaders need to protect their regimes from rebels by maintaining strong militaries. Yet, militaries that are strong enough to prevail against rebel forces are also strong enough to execute a coup successfully. On the other hand, leaders who cope with coup threats by weakening their militaries’ capabilities to organize a coup also diminish the very capabilities that they need to defeat their rebel challengers. This unfortunate trade-off between protection by the military and protection from the military has been the long-standing theme in studies of civil-military relations and coup-proofing. Though most research on this subject has focused primarily on rulers’ maneuvers to balance the threats posed by the military and the threats coming from foreign adversaries, more recent scholarship has begun to explore how leaders’ efforts to cope with coup threats will influence the regime’s abilities to address the domestic threats coming from rebel groups, and vice versa. This new wave of research focuses on two related vectors. First, scholars address whether leaders who pursue coup-proofing strategies that weaken their militaries’ capabilities also increase the regime’s vulnerability to rebel threats and the future probability of civil war. Second, scholars examine how the magnitude of threats posed by rebel groups will determine leaders’ strategies toward the militaries, and how these strategies affect both the militaries’ influence over government policy and the future probability of coup onsets. These lines of research contribute to the conflict literature by examining the causal mechanisms through which civil conflict influences coup propensity and vice versa. The literatures on civil war and coups have developed independently without much consideration of each other, and systematic analyses of the linkage between them have only just began.

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