Dynamics and Logics of Civil War

Abstract

This article reviews the literature on civil war. We focus on the most recent period of scholarly activity, beginning in the early 2000s when the publication of prominent quantitative studies triggered a surge in the empirical research of civil war as a well-defined conceptual category. We identify three explanatory logics that have dominated much of this literature and that view civil wars as a consequence of greed, grievances, and opportunities, respectively. We evaluate the arguments and findings of these theoretical approaches with respect to each of the main phases of war: outbreak, wartime dynamics, conflict termination, and postwar recovery. The article concludes by identifying key challenges confronting future civil war research. In particular, we emphasize the continuing need to advance theories that bridge the main explanatory logics as well as the different phases of conflict. Researchers should also pay more attention to defining the appropriate spatiotemporal scope of their studies.

Ethnic Conflict Regulation Through Territorial Autonomy – A Configurational Analysis of Success and Failure

“…Ethnic peace is not the result of an 'invisible hand', but of an emerging regime of accommodative institutions (Cederman & Vogt, 2017;Gurr, 2000).…”

Does Peace Trickle Down? Micro-Level Evidence from Africa

“…While prior work has largely focused on inequalities on the group level Cederman and Vogt 2017), shifting the focus on links between elite and micro-levels opens up new questions: is elite accommodation of political power sufficient to reduce ethnonationalist grievances (Wucherpfennig et al 2012)? Or does this accommodation have to be accompanied by a peace dividend for the broader ethnic group?…”

“…To understand how peace agreements-and, more specifically, ethnic representation through rebel groups in a power-sharing arrangement-shape individual levels of wellbeing after conflict, we draw on concepts from the literature on horizontal inequalities: ethnicity and politically relevant ethnic groups, group grievances that arise from these inequalities, and rebel organizations that mobilize ethnic grievances through an armed insurgency (Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug 2013;Cederman and Vogt 2017).…”

“…Yet this elite-focus has generated a blind spot regarding the micro-level effects of post-war institutions. This has led Cederman and Vogt (2017) to reemphasize Blattman and Miguel's observation that " [t]he social and institutional legacies of conflict are arguably the most important but least understood of all war impacts" (Blattman and Miguel 2010, 42). Our paper addresses this gap.…”

Sociocultural mechanisms of conflict: Combining topic and stochastic actor-oriented models in an analysis of Afghanistan, 1979–2001

“…We pay special attention to the formation of comradeship, or a nity, among combatants because of its potential to promote conflict resolution. Greater feelings of commonality decrease tolerance of collateral casualties (Schori-Eyal et al 2019), while unity among combatants helps shorten civil wars and insurgencies (Cunningham 2006;Cederman and Vogt 2017;Gade et al 2019a) and diminish the likelihood of conflict recurrence (Blattman and Miguel 2010). Moreover, by focusing on the sociocultural dynamics that generate relations of a nity rather than on interpreting cultural content, our study helps advance the formal analysis of culture by specifying potentially general mechanisms (Martin 2002;Edelmann and Mohr 2018).…”