Estimating the impact of economic conditions on the likelihood of civil conflict is difficult because of endogeneity and omitted variable bias. We use rainfall variation as an instrumental variable for economic growth in 41 African countries during 1981–99. Growth is strongly negatively related to civil conflict: a negative growth shock of five percentage points increases the likelihood of conflict by one-half the following year. We attempt to rule out other channels through which rainfall may affect conflict. Surprisingly, the impact of growth shocks on conflict is not significantly different in richer, more democratic, or more ethnically diverse countries. I.

This working paper presents an agent-based computational model of civil violence. We present two variants of the Civil Violence Model. In the first, a central authority seeks to suppress decentralized rebellion. In the second, a central authority seeks to suppress communal violence between two warring ethnic groups. The authors thank Ross Hammond for research assistance. For comments, they thank Robert Axtell,

This paper draws on data developed and is closely related to work in progress with David Laitin, whom I thank for many helpful comments and discussions

This paper analyzes the effect of ethnic division on civil war and the role of political systems in preventing these conflicts. First we show the importance of religious polarization and animist diversity in explaining the incidence of ethnic civil war. We find that religious differences are a social cleavage more important than linguistic differences when we analyze the development of a civil war. Second we find that being a consociational democracies significantly reduces the incidence of ethnic civil war.

A booming quantitative literature on large-scale political violence has identified important economic and political determinants of civil war. That literature has treated civil war as an aggregate category and has not considered if identity (ethnic/religious) wars have different causes than non-identity wars. In this paper, I argue that this is an important distinction and that identity wars are predominantly due to political grievance rather than lack of economic opportunity. Ethnic heterogeneity is also associated differently with identity than non-identity wars. Some systemic variables are also important determinants of civil war and these have been neglected in the existing literature. An important new result is that living in a bad neighborhood, with undemocratic neighbors or neighbors at war, significantly increases a country’s risk of experiencing ethnic civil war.

Most nations have experienced an internal armed conflict since 1960. Yet while civil war is central to many nations ’ development, it has stood at the periphery of economics research and teaching. The past decade has witnessed a long overdue explosion of research into war’s causes and consequences. We summarize progress, identify weaknesses, and chart a path forward. Why war? Existing theory is provocative but incomplete, omitting advances in behavioral economics and making little progress in key areas, like why armed groups form and cohere, or how more than two armed sides compete. Empirical work finds that low per capita incomes and slow economic growth are both robustly linked to civil war. Yet there is little consensus on the most effective policies to avert conflicts or promote postwar recovery. Cross-country analysis of war will benefit from more attention to causal identification and stronger links to theory. We argue that micro-level analysis and case studies are also crucial to decipher war’s causes, conduct, and consequences. We bring a growth theoretic approach to the study of conflict consequences to highlight areas for research, most of all the study of war’s impact on institutions. We

This article seeks to explain why some countries experience recurring civil war while others do not. It argues that renewed war has less to do with the attributes of a previous war, as many people have argued, and more to do with the incentives individual citizens have to join rebel groups at any given point in time. Civil wars will have little chance to get off the ground unless individual farmers, shopkeepers, and workers choose to enlist in the rebel armies that are necessary to pursue a war, and enlistment is likely to be attractive when two conditions hold: the status quo for the average citizen is perceived to be worse than the possibility of death in combat, and there is no non-violent outlet for political change. An analysis of all civil wars ending between 1945 and 1996 suggests that improvements in basic living conditions and in the average person's access to political participation have a significant negative effect on the likelihood of renewed war. Countries that are able to increase the economic well-being of their citizenry, and create a more open political system are less likely to experience multiple civil wars regardless of what happened in a previous conflict. Civil wars create what has been called a conflict trap.

Quantitative studies of civil war have focused either on war initiation (onset) or war termination and have produced important insights into these processes. In this paper, we complement these studies by noting that equally important to finding out how wars start and how they end is to identify how much war we are likely to observe in any given period? To answer this question, we combine recent advances in the theory of civil war initiation and duration and develop the concept of war incidence, which denotes the probability of observing an event of civil war in any given period. We test the theories of war initiation and duration against this new concept using a five-year panel data-set of 161 countries. Our analysis of war incidence corroborates most of the results of earlier studies on war initiation and duration and enriches those results by highlighting the significance of socio-political variables as determinants of the risk of civil war.

The human suffering caused by civil war extends well beyond the direct casualties and beyond the span of the war. We examine these longer-term effects in a cross-national (1999) analysis of World Health Organization new fine-grained data on death and disability broken down by age, gender, and type of disease or condition. We test concrete hypotheses about the impact of civil wars, and find substantial long-term effects, even after controlling for several other factors. We estimate that the additional burden of death and disability incurred in 1999, from the indirect and lingering effects of civil wars in the years 1991-97, was approximately equal to that incurred directly and immediately from all wars in 1999. This impact works its way through specific diseases and conditions, and disproportionately affects women and children. We thank the Weatherhead Initiative on Military Conflict as a Public Health Problem, the Ford Foundation, and the World Health Organization, NIA (P01 17625-01) for financial support. 1

In this paper, I provide a review of the scope and limits for government and international action to prevent the outbreak of civil war. I begin with a brief review of the literature on violent conflict indicators and identify the most significant predictors of civil war outbreak. I explicitly focus on models and empirical approaches used by World Bank-related research on conflict. By applying commonly used indicators of civil violence to a recently compiled database of civil war, I provide simple predictions of the risk of civil war onset in more than 150 countries. I then review the literature on strategies that can be used by governments and/or international organizations (the United Nations and the World Bank in particular) to prevent the outbreak of civil war. I focus on four strategies: redistribution to reduce prevailing inequities; political decentralization; secession or partition; and multidimensional peacebuilding. I review lessons learned on the usefulness of these strategies in preventing war and also consider risks associated with each of these strategies: moral hazard problems; normchanging problems; and resource constraint problems. The paper is intended to provide a synthesis of available knowledge on the topic of organized political violence, focusing on the World Bank's work in the area of conflict analysis and conflict prevention and linking that work with the literature on secession, decentralization, and international intervention in civil wars. 1.