nach oben

The Review of International Organizations

Erschienen in:

17.06.2021

From grievances to civil war: The impact of geopolitics

verfasst von: Faisal Z. Ahmed

Erschienen in: The Review of International Organizations | Ausgabe 3/2022

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

I revisit claims that the Cold War had no meaningful effect on civil war after 1990 by probing its empirical veracity. I argue and employ a Bartik-style difference-in-differences identification strategy to show that countries with greater political grievances during the Cold War were more likely to experience civil war after the Cold War. I provide evidence suggesting that changes in the credibility of external support to both governments and rebels affected this uptick in conflict onset in aggrieved countries. These findings suggest the confluence of geopolitics and preexisting grievances played a causal role in civil war after the Cold War.

Vorheriger Artikel Power, ideas, and World Bank conditionality

Nächster Artikel Labor clauses in trade agreements: Hidden protectionism?

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Nur mit Berechtigung zugänglich

The analysis in this paper is distinct from Kalyvas and Balcells (2010). Whereas they study how the international system can affect the composition of warfare and strategies in civil war (“technologies of rebellion”), this paper emphasizes how pre-existing political conditions (i.e., grievances) can elevate the onset of civil war when the structure of the international system changes.

As a point of reference to the cited studies, Figs. 1a, b, c plot the incidence (occurrence) of civil conflict, which combines the continuation of existing warfare and the onset of new conflicts. The arguments advanced in this paper pertain most directly to the outbreak (onset) of new conflicts. Accordingly, the statistical analysis in the rest of the paper focuses on conflict onsets.

The patterns identified in Fig. 1b hold with alternate measures of grievances from different data sources.

The next section discusses a number of plausible channels for the patterns in Fig. 1a, b, such as external support and state capacity/development.

The paper’s appendices are all available on the Review of International Organizations' webpage.

As Gaddis (1997, 284) concludes: “The end of the Cold War made it blindingly clear that military strength does not always determine the course of great events: the Soviet Union collapsed, after all, with its arms and armed forces fully intact. Deficiencies in other kinds of power – economic, ideological, cultural, moral – caused the USSR to lose its superpower status.”.

Petersen (2002) traces how anarchic and uncertain conditions in the international system has played a role in twentieth century ethnic conflicts in Baltic states.

For instance, “support” from foreign actors can include the “exporting” of ideology (e.g., revolutionary Marxism), economic and military assistance, diplomatic “cover” in international organizations, and/or outright interventions (e.g., military deployments).

A third, and less likely cause, is “issue indivisibility.”.

External support can fall into two categories: (1) future, direct intervention (e.g., “boots on the ground”) and (2) current and future efforts to prop up the current government or rebel group (e.g., through financial assistance, arms shipments, etc.).

I elaborate on this case in Sect. 4.

While Yugoslavia was a not formally part of the Soviet bloc, it still adhered to socialism and benefited from Soviet foreign economic policies. For example, Ahmed et al. argue that Soviet trade subsidies helped communist/socialist countries orchestrate trade among themselves and enabled their governments to maintain political stability. In the 1980s, as these transfers waned governments in these countries became more vulnerable to violent change.

In the empirics, I control for these factors with year fixed effects (e.g., to account for annual variation in world commodity prices and interest rates), per capita GDP, and fuel exports.

The use of a continuous treatment has been employed in a number of studies, such as those related to the effect of foreign aid on growth and political violence. See, Nunn and Qian (2014), Ahmed (2016), and Dreher and Langlotz (2020).

This follows from the inclusion of country fixed effects in the baseline specification (Eq. 1), which implies conflict dynamics are evaluated within the same country over time.

As Sambanis and Schulhofer-Wohl (2019) note, in the appropriate cases, data on battle death thresholds (e.g., in the Armed Conflict Database) can be useful in studying conflict escalation.

This is estimated effect is similar to a one standard deviation movement in G_i (= 0.40).

The time-vary country characteristics are largely consistent with prior studies: countries with higher economic growth, per capita wealth, fuel exports, and smaller populations, are less likely to experience conflict.

The results that include Soviet successor states should be interpreted more cautiously since data on conflict onset is not observed during the Cold War for these additional countries (since they were not sovereign prior to 1990).

These measures are not necessarily synonymous. For example, the pairwise correlation between the political rights measure of grievances (from Freedom House) and with the “exclusion from power” measure from Wimmer et al. (2009) is 0.35.

The marginal effects corresponding to the period 1972–1984 and 1996–2009 are available upon request.

For example, data from UCDP External Support Dataset shows that Between 1975–2011, almost 80 percent of U.S. interventions in civil conflicts supported the government.

Information on alliance status is drawn from the Correlates of War dataset.

In this section, I limit the analysis to countries that experienced any political grievance during the Cold War (G_i > 0). This is apropos since Cold War grievances are a pre-condition for conflict onset (as shown in Tables 1 and 2). In contrast, estimating a triple interaction term, P_t x G_i x ALLY_i for the full sample (i.e., that includes non-aggrieved countries, G_i=0) can be difficult to interpret and needlessly complicates the analysis.

In contrast, more countries allied with the United States during the Cold War.

In columns 2 and 4, each measure of external support is equal to 1 if the foreign power provide any military assistance to the government or rebel group (depending on the specific variable) during the Cold War and zero otherwise. Thus, each measure of external support varies by country but not over time; and its main effect is subsumed by its corresponding country fixed effect.

The differential effect of another measure of state capacity (foreign aid x P_t) with more a international dimension has no effect on civil war onset.

In the Syrian case, Russia has aided the incumbent Assad regime, while the United States (and its allies) has provided assistance to the rebels.

Ahmed, F. Z. (2016). Does foreign aid harm political rights?: Evidence from U.S. aid. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 11(2), 183–217.CrossRef

Ahmed, F. Z. (2020). The Perils of International Capital. Cambridge University Press.

Ahmed, FZ., Schwab D., and Werker, E. (2021). The Political Transfer Problem: How Cross-Border Financial Windfalls Affect Democracy and Civil War. Journal of Comparative Economics, 49(2), 313–339.

Anderson, N. (2019). Competitive Intervention, Protracted Conflict, and the Global Prevalence of Civil War. International Studies Quarterly, 63, 692–706.CrossRef

Armatta, J. (2010). Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Duke University Press.CrossRef

Besley, T., & Persson, T. (2011). The Logic of Political Violence. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(3), 1411–1445.CrossRef

Borusyak, K., Peter, H., & Xavier, J. (2018) Quasi-Experimental Shift-Share Research Designs. NBER w24997.

Bun, M. J. G., & Harrison, T. D. (2019). OLS and IV estimation of regression models including endogenous interaction terms. Econometrics Review, 10(7), 814–827.CrossRef

Carment, D., & James, P. (1996). Two Level Games and Third Party Intervention: Evidence from Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans and South Asia. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 29(3), 521–554.CrossRef

Cederman, L.-E., Weidmann, N. B., & Gleditsch, K. S. (2011). Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnonationalist War: A Global Comparison. American Political Science Review, 105(3), 478–495.CrossRef

Cetinyan, R. (2002). Ethnic Bargaining in the Shadow of Third-Party Intervention. International Organization, 56(3), 645–677.CrossRef

Christian, P., & Barrett, C. B. (2017) Revisiting the Effect of Food Aid on Conflict: A Methodological Caution. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 8171.

Ciment, J. (1997). Angola and Mozambique: Postcolonial wars in Southern Africa. Facts on File.

Cingranelli, D. L., & Richards, D. L. (2008) The Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project Coding Manual Version 2008.3.13. http://ciri.binghamton.edu/documentation/ciri_coding_guide.pdf

Coggins, B. (2011). Friends in High Places: International Politics and the Emergence of States from Secessionism. International Organization, 65(3), 433–467.CrossRef

Collier, P., & Hoeffler, A. (1998). On Economic Causes of Civil War. Oxford Economic Papers, 50(4), 563–573.CrossRef

Cunningham, D. E., Gleditsch, K. S., & Salehydan, I. (2011). Explaining external support for insurgent groups. International Organization, 65(4), 709–744.CrossRef

Cunningham, D. E. (2010). Blocking Resolution: How External States Can Prolong Civil Wars. Journal of Peace Research, 47(2), 115–127.CrossRef

Cunningham, D. E. (2016). Preventing Civil War: How the potential for international intervention can deter conflict onset. World Politics, 68(2), 307–340.CrossRef

Davenport, C. (2007). State Repression and Political Order. Annual Review of Political Science, 10, 1–23.CrossRef

Dreher, A., & Langlotz, S. (2020). Aid and Growth: New Evidence Using an Excludable Instrument. Canadian Journal of Economics, 53(3), 1162–1198.CrossRef

Earle, J. S., & Gehlbach, S. (2015). The productivity consequences of political turnover: Firm-level evidence from Ukraine’s orange revolution. American Journal of Political Science, 59(3), 708–723.

Fearon, J. (1995). Rationalist Explanations for War. International Organization, 49(3), 379–414.CrossRef

Fearon, J., & Laitin, D. (2003). Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War. American Political Science Review, 97(1), 75–86.CrossRef

Freedom House. (2010) Freedom in the World Comparative and Historical Data, Available: http://www.freedomhouse.org/report-types/freedom-world

Gaddis, J. L. (1997). We Know Now: Rethinking Cold War History. Clarendon.

Goldsmith-Pinkham, P., Sorkin, I., & Swift, H. (2020) Bartik Instruments: What, When, Why, and How. American Economic Review, 110(8), 2586–2624.

Goldstein, R. J. (1978). Political Repression in Modern America: from 1870 to the Present. Schenkman.

Gurr, T. (1970). Why men rebel. Princeton University Press.

Hale, W., & Kienle, E. (1997) Introduction. In After the Cold War: Security and Democracy in Africa and Asia, eds. W. Hale and E. Kienle. London: I.B. Tauris, 1–12.

Herbst, J. (2004). African Militaries and Rebellion: The Political Economy of Threat and Combat Effectiveness. Journal of Peace Research, 41(3), 357–369.CrossRef

Heger, L., & Salehyan, I. (2007). Ruthless Rulers: Coalition Size and the Severity of Civil Conflict. International Studies Quarterly, 51(2), 385–403.CrossRef

Hironaka, A. (2005). Neverending Wars: The International Community, Weak States, and the Perpetuation of Civil War. Harvard University Press.CrossRef

Jovic, D. (2009). Yugoslavia: A state that withered away. Purdue University Press.

Kalyvas, S. (2009) Civil Wars. In The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, eds Carles Boix and Susan Stokes, 416–434.

Kalyvas, S., & Balcells, L. (2010). International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict. American Political Science Review, 104(3), 415–429.CrossRef

Kanet, R. E. (2006). The Superpower Quest for Empire: The Cold War and Soviet Support for Wars of National Liberation. Cold War History, 6(3), 331–352.CrossRef

Kuperman, A. J. (2008). The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lesson from the Balkans. International Studies Quarterly, 52, 49–80.CrossRef

Lacina, B. (2006). Explaining the Severity of Civil Wars. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50(2), 276–289.CrossRef

Lake, D. (2009). Hierarchy in International Relations. Cornell University Press.

Marshall, M. G., & Jaggers, K. (2010) Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions. University of Maryland.

Mearsheimer, J. J. (1990). Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War. International Security, 15(1), 5–56.CrossRef

Monteiro, N. P. (2011). Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity Is Not Peaceful. International Security, 36(3), 9–40.CrossRef

Nunn, N., & Qian, N. (2014). US Food Aid and Civil Conflict. American Economic Review, 104(6), 1630–1666.CrossRef

Petersen, R. D. (2002). Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe. Cambridge University Press.CrossRef

Regan, P. M., & Norton, D. (2005). Greed, Grievance, and Mobilization in Civil Wars. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 49, 319–336.CrossRef

Ross, M. (2006). A Closer Look at Oil, Diamonds, and Civil War. Annual Review of Political Science, 9, 265–300.CrossRef

Sambanis, N. (2004). What is Civil War? Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of An Operational Definition. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 48(6), 814–858.CrossRef

Sambanis, N., & Schulhofer-Wohl, J. (2019). Sovereignty Rupture as a Central Concept in Quantitative Measures of Civil War. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 63(6), 1542–1578.CrossRef

Schulhofer-Wohl, J. (2020). Quagmire in Civil War. Cambridge University Press.CrossRef

Thyne, C. L. (2009). How International Relations Affect Civil Conflict: Cheap Signals. Lexington Books.

Wimmer, A., Cederman, L. E., & Min, B. (2009). Ethnic politics and armed conflict: A configurational analysis of a new global dataset. American Sociological Review, 74(2), 316–337.CrossRef

World Bank. (2010) World Development Indicators, 2010. Washington D.C.

Titel: From grievances to civil war: The impact of geopolitics
verfasst von: Faisal Z. Ahmed
Publikationsdatum: 17.06.2021
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: The Review of International Organizations / Ausgabe 3/2022
Print ISSN: 1559-7431
Elektronische ISSN: 1559-744X
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-021-09426-0

Springer Professional

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu Ihrer Lizenz zu erhalten.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Weitere Artikel der Ausgabe 3/2022

Power, ideas, and World Bank conditionality

Clubs of autocrats: Regional organizations and authoritarian survival

The World Bank COVID-19 response: Politics as usual?

Analyzing international organizations: How the concepts we use affect the answers we get

Investment with insecure property rights: Capital outflow openness under dictatorship

Behind the screen: Understanding national support for a foreign investment screening mechanism in the European Union

Premium Partner