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Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War
I came across this paper today, and its empirical results argue that ethnicity or religion are not the primary determinants of causing insurgency and civil war. What is also interesting is that they dispute that the end of the Cold War created a rash of intrastate conflicts without the bipolar structure it emanated.
Quote:
ABSTRACT
An influential conventional wisdom holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic nationalism. We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 50s and 60s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system. We also find that after controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence in this period. We argue for understanding civil war in this period in terms of insurgency or rural guerrilla warfare, a particular form of military practice that can be harnessed to diverse political agendas, including but not limited to ethnic nationalism. The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war are not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgency. These include poverty, which marks financially and bureaucratically weak states and also favors rebel recruitment, political instability, rough terrain, and large populations.
ĪJames D. Fearon and David D. Laitin are Professors of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305-6044.
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"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3
Last edited by Shek : 02-28-2007 at 22:28 PM.
Reason: Added abstract
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