We investigate whether civil wars have economic causes. The model is based on utility theory, rebels will conduct a civil war if the perceived benefits outweigh the costs of rebellion. Using probit and tobit models the propositions are tested empirically. Four variables, initial income, ethnolinguistic fractionalisation, the amount of natural resources and initial population size are significant and strong determinants of the duration and the probability of civil wars. One important finding is that the relationship between civil wars and ethnic diversity is non-monotonic; highly fractionalised societies have no greater risk of experiencing a civil war than homogenous ones.

A key distinction among theories of civil war is between those that are built upon motivation and those that are built upon feasibility. We analyze a comprehensive global sample of civil wars for the period 1965-2004 and subject the results to a range of robustness tests. The data constitute a substantial advance on previous work. We find that variables that are close proxies for feasibility have powerful consequences for the risk of a civil war. Our results substantiate the 'feasibility hypothesis ' that where civil war is feasible it will occur without reference to motivation. 2 1.

Applications of modern methods for analyzing data with missing values, based primarily on multiple imputation, have in the last half-decade become common in American politics and political behavior. Scholars in this subset of political science have thus increasingly avoided the biases and inefficiencies caused by ad hoc methods like listwise deletion and best guess imputation. However, researchers in much of comparative politics and international relations, and others with similar data, have been unable to do the same because the best available imputation methods work poorly with the time-series cross section data structures common in these fields. Weattempttorectify this situation with three related developments. First, we build a multiple imputation model that allows smooth time trends, shifts across cross-sectional units, and correlations over time and space, resulting in far more accurate imputations. Second, we enable analysts to incorporate knowledge from area studies experts via priors on individual missing cell values, rather than on difficult-to-interpret model parameters. Third, because these tasks could not be accomplished within existing imputation algorithms, in that they cannot handle as many variables as needed even in the simpler cross-sectional data for which they were designed, we also develop a new algorithm that substantially expands the range of computationally feasible data types and sizes for which multiple imputation can be used. These developments also make it possible to implement the methods introduced here in freely available open source software that is considerably more reliable than existing algorithms. We develop an approach to analyzing data with

We develop and test an economic theory of insurgency motivated by the informal literature and military doctrine. We model a three-way contest between violent rebels, a government seeking to minimize violence by mixing service provision and coercion, and civilians deciding whether to share information about insurgents. We test the model using panel data from Iraq on violence against Coalition and Iraqi forces, reconstruction spending, and community characteristics (sectarian status, socio-economic grievances, and natural resource endowments). Our results support the theory‘s predictions: counterinsurgents direct services disproportionately to predictably violent locations, and improved service provision has reduced insurgent violence since January 2007. 1We acknowledge the comments of seminar participants at the Western Economic Association, the NBER

This paper studies the incidence of civil war over time. We put forward a canonical model of civil war, which relates the incidence of conflict to circumstances, institutions and features of the underlying economy and polity. We use this model to derive testable predictions and to interpret the cross-sectional and times-series variations variations in civil conflict. Our most novel emprical finding is that higher world market prices of exported, as well as imported, commodities are strong and significant predictors of higher within-country incidence of civil war.

There is a striking difference in the world as Americans see it in 2005 from the one they saw in 1989. Then, the threat came from the East. Now it comes from the South. Terrorists, civil war, refugees and asylum seekers, genocide and other atrocities, humanitarian emergencies, all located in the global South, have replaced communist revolution and Soviet military power in American minds. There are many reasons for this change in perceptions. The obvious one is that the East has disappeared. The massive expenditures on armaments, militaries, nuclear deterrence, strategic aid and proxy wars in the third-world and to anti-communist counterinsurgencies are a matter of history. The US declared victory as the sole remaining superpower, and the Second World dissolved into a few lucky enough to make

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This paper is intended to complement the existing literature on civil wars. First, it presents a simple theoretical model of conflict which defines a two-sector economy. In a contested sector two agents struggle to appropriate the maximum possible fraction of a contestable output. In an uncontested sector, they hold secure property rights over the production of some goods. Agents split their resource endowment between ‘butter’, ‘guns ’ and ‘ice-cream’. Following the theoretical insights the empirical analysis focuses on the relationship between civil wars and different sectors of the economy. In particular, a panel probit specification shows that the incidence of a civil war decreases in the size of manufacturing sector.

The key idea of this paper is that the relative price of primary commodities in terms of manufactured goods affects the likelihood of actual conflicts. The empirical application focused on a panel of Sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1995-2006. Results are not fully conclusive. However, there is robust evidence that a proxy of world price of manufactured goods is negatively associated with the likelihood of a civil war. The conclusion would be that an increase in world prices of manufactured goods would make civil wars less likely.

Does foreign military assistance strengthen or further weaken fragile states facing internal confict? We address this question by estimating how U.S. military aid affects violence and electoral participation in Colombia. We exploit the allocation of U.S. military aid to Colombian military bases, and compare how aid affects municipalities with and without bases. Using detailed political violence data, we find that U.S. military aid leads to differential increases in attacks by paramilitaries (who collude with the military), but has no effect on guerilla attacks. Aid increases also result in more paramilitary (but not guerrilla) homicides during election years. Moreover, when military aid rises, voter turnout falls more in base municipalities, especially those that are politically contested. Our results are robust to an instrument based on worldwide increases in U.S. military aid (excluding Latin America). The findings suggest that foreign military assistance may strengthen armed non-state actors, undermining domestic political institutions.