Disaggregating Civil Wars
European
Science Foundation by an FNRS Grant (116795)
Lars-Erik Cederman and Simon Hug
May 12, 2008
Abstract
The sheer number of internal conflicts over the past years in regions,
such as the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Great Lakes of Africa, has
led to a surge of interest in civil war. In recent years, political
economists and quantitative researchers, partly funded by the World
Bank, have told us a great deal about the conditions that make countries
more likely to experience civil war. However, this does not mean that
their results cannot, and should not, be questioned. We challenge some
of the key assumptions and findings of the literature, in particular the
putative irrelevance of ethnicity as a cause of conflict, the strong
emphasis on opportunity structures at the expense of motivations, and
the downplaying of transnational mechanisms.
Our project aims to re-examine these claims by uncovering relevant
causal mechanisms. We do so by answering the questions about ``Who?" and
``Why?." A convincing explanation of conflict outcomes has to offer a
disaggregated account involving real actors with real motives in their
proper social and spatiotemporal context. Disaggregating conflict
processes to uncover the key actor constellations driving conflict
allows us to address our key research problems. First, it forces us to
consider the ethnic identity of the actors involved in the
centre-periphery relationship. Second, it demands a more precise
understanding of the motivations and grievances of these actors. Third,
we need to look beyond the boundaries of the nation-state to capture the
transnational character of the actors.
Work in progress
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