How does civil war begin? The role of escalatory processes

Abstract

Correlational and bargaining failure approaches to the eruption of civil war have neglected the role of escalatory processes, whose analysis has to date been largely limited to sociology. Escalating violence involves mechanisms that are self-reinforcing and have a propensity to transform the political landscape by reshaping group boundaries and political identities, and prompting the formation of new actors. This article shows that such mechanisms should be considered as analytically distinct from structural causes and bargaining failures. Escalatory processes—that is, the combinations of these mechanisms—are often crucial to the eruption of full-scale civil war. But their causal significance in civil war onset varies with regard to two criteria: the speed of violent escalation and the extent to which it transforms the actor landscape. These two criteria form the basis for a typology of escalations into civil war that distinguishes civil wars erupting in revolutionary situations from deliberate escalation by organized belligerents and from gradual escalation through rebel group formation and counterinsurgency. I illustrate each ideal type with a case study that serves as a plausibility probe. Accounting for escalatory processes allows to distinguish between contrasting roads to civil war, each of which privileges its own explanatory variables.

Targeting Libya’s rentier economy: The politics of energy, water, and infrastructural decay

“…The direct and indirect targeting of civilian infrastructures by local and regional parties have been an important feature of protracted conflicts throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) (see e.g., Daoudy, 2020; Gleick, 2019; Schillinger et al, 2020; Sowers & Weinthal, 2021; Sowers et al, 2017; Talhami & Zeitoun, 2016; Weinthal & Sowers, 2019). In the case of Libya, however, we find that parties to the Libyan conflict have largely not sought to destroy but rather control and disrupt the vestiges of Libya’s rentier state institutions, in what Lacher has termed “rentierism without central authority” (Lacher, 2023; also see Lacher, 2020).…”

“…A limitation of our dataset is that it does not capture how the Wagner troops have asserted control over oil fields, ostensibly for their economic gain, via their support for Haftar’s LNA forces (Uniacke, 2022). The entry of Russian troops has further ossified the split between east and west, as their presence “acts as a deterrent for anyone in western Libya who might challenge Haftar” (Authors’ zoom interview with Wolfram Lacher, July 2023).…”

“…While in principle oil funds could support social services, the Libyan House of Representatives (HoR) based in Tobruk did not pass a formal budget in 2022, leaving an informal agreement in place through which the western-based Libyan government receives 1/12 of the prior year’s budget to spend (World Bank, 2023). Additional irregular transfers allow the Tripoli government to continue to pay for essential services and public salaries (see Lacher, 2023).…”

Anchored in History: Understanding the Persistence of Eco-Violence in Nigeria’s Middle Belt through Collective Memory

“…The 1970s and 1980s droughts precipitated an upsurge in the disputes between nomadic herders and farmers, which have raged for decades (Bassett 1988), with leaders on both sides periodically reaching an accord and soothing the situation (Tonah 2002;Cold-Ravnkilde and Ba 2022). Conflicts between these groups have reached record heights in the last decade, becoming increasingly violent and destructive (Akingbe 2022;Cline 2021;Lacher 2022;Olumba 2022b). This situation has been linked to the rising availability of military-grade weaponry, the elites' vested interests, the proliferation of ungoverned spaces, and inept governance (Ajala 2020;Nartey and Ladegaard 2021;Olaniyan et al 2022).…”