Weak states, human rights violations, and the outbreak of civil war (original) (raw)

Human Rights Violations, Weak States, and Civil War

Human Rights Review

This study examines the role of human rights violations as a harbinger of civil wars to come, as well as the links between repression, state weakness, and conflict. Human rights violations are both part of the escalating process that may end in civil war and can contribute to an escalation of conflict to civil war, particularly in weak states. The role of government repression and state weakness in leading to civil war is tested empirically. The results show that both closely correlate with civil war onset, especially if they are observed in combination. A two-stage model shows that, while low-level conflict leads to human rights violations, they increase the risk of an escalation to civil war in turn. Human rights violations are identified as an important aspect of understanding civil war onset as the result of an escalation over time and a clear early warning sign of wars to come.

Greed and grievance in civil war

We investigate the causes of civil war, using a new data set of wars during 1960–99. Rebellion may be explained by atypically severe grievances, such as high inequality, a lack of political rights, or ethnic and religious divisions in society. Alternatively, it might be explained by atypical opportunities for building a rebel organization. While it is difficult to find proxies for grievances and opportunities, we find that political and social variables that are most obviously related to grievances have little explanatory power. By contrast, economic variables, which could proxy some grievances but are perhaps more obviously related to the viability of rebellion, provide considerably more explanatory power.

The Incidence of Civil War Outbreak: Balancing Greed and Grievances

This paper assesses the relative explanatory power of the greed and grievance theses in accounting for the incidence of civil war outbreak. It will primarily explore the recent attribution of the greed theorem as the most salient causal factor and question its policy appeal. Through a case study of approaches to conflict incidence in the African continent, it will attempt to highlight the interpretative biases that have led to the overt endorsement of the greed approach and demonstrate how nuanced interpretations can balance the causal validity of grievances.

Political opportunity structures, democracy, and civil war

Journal of Peace Research, 2010

Theories of mobilization suggest that groups are more likely to resort to violence in the presence of political opportunity structures that afford greater prospects for extracting concessions from the government or better opportunities to topple ruling governments. However, existing efforts to consider the possible influences of political opportunity structures on incentives for violence and civil war empirically have almost invariably relied upon measures of democracy to proxy for the hypothesized mechanisms, most notably the argument that the opposing effects of political accommodation and repression will give rise to an inverted U-shaped relationship between democracy and the risk of civil war. The authors detail a number of problems with measures of democracy as proxies for political opportunity structures and develop alternative measures based on the likely risks that political leaders will lose power in irregular challenges and their implications for the incentives for resort to violence. The authors evaluate empirically how the security with which leaders hold office influences the prospects of violent civil conflict. The findings indicate that recent irregular leader entry and transitions indeed increase the risk of conflict onset, while democratic institutions are found to decrease the risk of civil war, after controlling for the new measures of state weakness. interests include civil war, in particular the role of state capacity and transnational relations, peacekeeping operations, and event data analysis.

Greed, Grievance, and Mobilization: The Onset of Protest, Rebellion, and Civil War

2003

Greed, grievances, and mobilization are generally offered as explanations for rebellion and civil war. We extend arguments about the precursors to non-violent protest, violent rebellion, and civil war. These arguments motivate a series of hypotheses that are tested against data from the Minorities at Risk Project. The results of our analysis suggest, first, that the factors that predict anti-state activity at one level of violence do not always hold at other levels; second, the response by the state has a large impact on the subsequent behavior of the rebels; and third, that the popular notion of diamonds fueling civil unrest is not generally supported. We draw inferences from our results to future theoretical and policy development.

Unequal We Fight: Between- and Within-Group Inequality and Ethnic Civil War

Political Science Research and Methods, 2015

When and why ethnic groups rebel remains a central puzzle in the civil war literature. In this paper, we examine how different types of inequalities affect both an ethnic group’s willingness and opportunity to fight. We argue that political and economic inter-group inequalities motivate ethnic groups to initiate a fight against the state, and that intra-group economic inequality lowers their elite’s costs of providing the necessary material and/or purposive incentives to overcome collective action problems inherent to rebel recruitment. We therefore predict that internally unequal ethnic groups excluded from power and/or significantly richer or poorer relative to the country’s average are most likely to engage in a civil war. To assess our claim empirically, we develop a new global measure of economic inequality by combining high-resolution satellite images of light emissions, spatial population data, and geocoded ethnic settlement areas. After validating our measure at the country-...

BEYOND GREED OR GRIEVANCE THEORY – WHAT EXPLAINS CIVIL WAR

Peace and Security Review, 2016

The near absence of interstate conflicts and a parallel increase in the incidence of intra-state conflicts/civil wars reflects that ''orange is the new black'' in the context of 21 st century history of warfare. Amidst such fundamental changes, Paul Collier and his team offer the greed or grievance theory – a pioneering quantitative research to explain the Byzantine complexities of the risks and processes of civil war onset. The most digested model of the theory examines global data on civil war against three empirical proxies for greed and four for grievance claiming that the material motivation (i.e. greed) holds more explanatory power than ideational motivation (i.e. grievance) in the context of civil war onset. This paper critically examines their claim, comparing and contrasting it with other relevant theories of civil war. It argues that the primacy of economic motivation in civil war does not necessarily imply that the notion of greed and grievance to be juxtaposed; instead, both greed and grievance remain inherently indivisible in civil war. The interplay of greed and grievance in civil war is dynamic and reflects a symbiotic relationship. They are often the shades of same problem and can mutate into one another such as into political greed and economic grievance. The paper substantiates its arguments by highlighting the increasing trend of internationalized civil conflicts where various external actors, exploiting the regional conflict complex and the opportunity structures, can contribute to trigger and or prolong civil wars. Finally, the paper highlights the issues of power and wealth distribution in society and argues that inequality plays a central role in conflict as postulated in the horizontal inequalities (HIs) theory. It contends that the inclusiveness offered in the HIs model to account for group inequalities in economic, political, cultural and social dimensions incorporating both greed and grievance makes this model better poised to explain the incidence of civil war onset.