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.

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We study the e¤ect of civil con ‡ict on social capital, focusing on the experience of Uganda during the last decade. Using individual and county-level data, we document causal e¤ects on trust and ethnic identity of an exogenous outburst of ethnic con ‡icts in 2002-04. We exploit two waves of survey data from Afrobarometer 2000 and 2008, including information on socioeconomic characteristics at the individual level, and geo-referenced measures of …ghting events from ACLED. Our identi…cation strategy exploits variations in the intensity of …ghting both in the spatial and cross-ethnic dimensions. We …nd that more intense …ghting decreases generalized trust and increases ethnic identity. The e¤ects are quantitatively large and robust to a number of control variables, alternative measures of violence, and di¤erent statistical techniques involving ethnic and county …xed e¤ects and instrumental variables. We also document that the post-war e¤ects of ethnic violence depend on the ethnic fractionalization. Fighting has a negative e¤ect on the economic situation in highly fractionalized counties, but has no e¤ect in less fractionalized counties. Our …ndings are consistent with the existence of a self-reinforcing process between con ‡icts and ethnic cleavages.JEL Classi…cation: D74, O12, Z1.

Currently the strategy for promoting internal peace favoured by the international community is to promote democracy, the rationale being that democratic accountability lowers incentives for rebellion. We argue that democracy also constrains the technical possibilities of government repression, and that this makes rebellion easier. Although the net effect of democracy is therefore ambiguous, we suggest that the higher is income the more likely is it to be favourable. Empirically, we find that whereas in rich countries democracy makes countries safer, below an income threshold democracy increases proneness to political violence. We show that these results hold for a wide variety of forms of political violence.