Greed, Grievance, and Mobilization in Civil Wars

Abstract

Greed, grievances, and mobilization are generally offered as explanations for rebellion and civilwar. The authors extend arguments about the precursors to nonviolent protest, violent rebellion, and civil war. These arguments motivate a series of hypotheses that are tested against data from the Minorities at Risk project. The results of the analysis suggest, first, that the factors that predict antistate activity at one level of violence do not always hold at other levels; second, the response by the state has a large impact on the subsequent behavior of the rebels; and third, the popular notion of diamonds fueling civil unrest is generally not supported. The authors draw inferences from their results to future theoretical and policy development.

Unpacking ethnicity: Exploring the underlying mechanisms linking ethnic fractionalization and civil conflict.

“…The results in Model 1, where civil conflict is the dependent variable, show that there is indeed a highly significant relationship between the updated ethnic fractionalization variable -ETHFRACIPOLATED -and the risk of civil conflict onset. This is perfectly in line with much of the empirical literature (Ellingsen 2000;Hegre and Sambanis 2006;Regan and Norton 2005). An empirical relationship between ethnicity and civil conflict onset is thereby established, which creates the foundation to investigate further ethnicity as an indicator of civil conflict onset.…”

“…Contrary to this, Sambanis (2001) found that ethnic fractionalization is significantly and positively correlated with the likelihood of civil war onset, a result supported by Regan and Norton (2005). Hegre and Sambanis (2006) found a link between ethnicity and low intensity conflicts, though there was no such connection when full-scale civil wars were used as the dependent variable.…”

“…Scholars who instead use a threshold of 25 battle-related deaths -or similar measures capturing low intensity-conflicts as well -all find a significant relationship between ethnicity and conflict initiation (Ellingsen 2000;Hegre and Sambanis 2006;Regan and Norton 2005). 1985-2010 1985-2010 1985-2010 1985-2010 Notes:Lagged one year; ¤Log transformed; a Anocracy as reference category; b probability of F-value; *significant at 10%, **significant at 5%, ***significant at 1%; the units are clustered by country using Huber-White robust standard errors (White 1980).…”

Peace building after Civil War: A Critical Survey of the Literature and Avenues for Future Research

“…9 Ethnic polarisation index states that countries with a bipolar distribution of ethnic groups (1/2, 0, ... 0, 1/2) have the highest level of conflict. 10 Also see Gurr and Moore 1997;Gurr 2000 While some studies find robust evidence that (minority) ethnic discrimination increases the likelihood of civil war (Regan and Norton, 2005), others come to the opposite conclusion (Fearon, 2003;Cederman, Wimmer and Min, 2010;Hug, 2011). Moreover, the Minorities at Risk dataset's focus on only ethnic minorities' limit its scope and applicability.…”

The Effect of Misclassifications in Probit Models: Monte Carlo Simulations and Applications

“…16 The first study by Regan and Norton (2005) proposes an empirical model to assess how various factors influence the outbreak of protest, rebellions, and civil wars. To test this empirical model, they employ the MAR data (Gurr 1993), aggregated, however, to the level of country-years.…”