How different are the correlates of onset and continuation of civil wars?

Abstract

It is very common to analyse the factors associated with the onset and continuation of civil wars entirely separately, as if there were likely to be no similarity between them. This is an overstatement of the theoretical position, which has established only that they may be different (i.e. less than perfectly correlated). The hypothesis that the explanatory variables are the same is not theoretically excludable and is empirically testable, both for individual variables and for combinations of them. Starting from this approach yields a rather different picture of the factors associated with the continuation of civil wars, because the relatively small sample size means that confidence intervals on individual coefficients are wide in this case. It is shown here that country size, mountainous terrain and (in most datasets) ethnic diversity seem significant for the continuation of civil wars, starting from the null hypothesis that variables affect onset and continuation probabilities identically, rather than entirely independently. One variable that affects onset and continuation significantly differently is anocracy, which we find to matter only for onset. Civil war is more likely if it occurred two years previously, as well as one year previously, which indicates that wars are more likely to restart after only one year of peace, and also more likely to stop in their first year. The combined model strengthens the result that ethnic diversity matters (it is consistently significant across datasets, whereas it is not when onset is analysed separately), although in the UCD/PRIO dataset it is significant only for onset. By contrast, if continuation is analysed independently, virtually nothing is significant except a pre-1991 dummy and a dummy for civil war two years previously.

Ethnic diversity and conflict

“…For cases where the share exceeds 81%, the correlation between F and P is 0.61, but for cases where the share is less than 81%, the correlation is only 0.09. Table 1 shows the results of estimating a probit model for the incidence of conflict, based on the specification of Bleaney and Dimico (2011). Models 1 and 2 are identical except that Model 2 includes ethnic polarization in place of ethnic fractionalization.…”

“…This hypothesis would explain why ethnic fractionalization and polarization perform about equally well in predicting the presence of conflict in a country (i.e., in the model of Bleaney and Dimico, 2011): fractionalization picks up conflict associated with local (but not national) polarization, whilst both measures are low in ethnically homogeneous countries.…”

The spillover of war in time and space: exploring some open issues

“…From an economic development perspective, understanding how conflicts end is as important as understanding how they start, and the literature on civil war duration is large (Collier, Hoeffler, and Söderbom 2004;DeRouen and Sobek 2004;Fearon 2004;Montalvo and Reynal-Querol 2010;Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan 2009;Bleaney and Dimico 2011;Wucherpfennig et al 2012;Aydin and Regan 2012;Bagozzi 2014;Uzonyi and Wells 2015). None of these papers, however, explicitly examines spillover effects.…”

Every Story Has a Beginning, Middle, and an End (But Not Always in That Order): Predicting Duration Dynamics in a Unified Framework

“…These variables are taken from Fearon and Laitin [2003] and Bleaney and Dimico [2011]. We impute the missing values of the structural variables using the semiparametric imputation technique proposed by Hoff [2007].…”