International Network for Economics and Conflict

This paper seeks to identify the linkages between civil war and poverty that lead to the violent cycles that break out in various parts of the world.

In this paper, the authors construct a dynamic theory of civil conflict hinging on inter-ethnic trust and trade.

This paper uses several sets of governance measures to assess the impact of governance on civil war onset. Overall, the results tend to support the view that low income countries have been at greater risk of violent conflict due to poor governance and weak institutions, more than due to direct labor market effects.

Why is armed civil conflict more common in resource-dependent countries than in others? Several studies have attempted to unravel mechanisms on why natural resources are linked to armed conflict, but no coherent picture has yet emerged. This article seeks to address this puzzle by concentrating on the issue of how rebel access to natural resources affects conflict.

During civil war governments typically resort to inflation to raise revenue. This paper models and quantifies this phenomenon and then applies it to the choices and constraints faced in the post-conflict period.

The main premise of this paper is that the well-being of individuals and families in conflict and post-conflict situations is a key condition for sustainable peace and long-term development. Factors such as infant health, maternal care, food and nutrition, and basic sanitation are among the top priorities of the affected people. Development programming for post-conflict countries should be firmly rooted in an accurate and timely evidence base to justify the priorities selected.

This paper reviews the literature on the development consequences of internal armed conflict and state fragility and analyzes the relationship using data from World Development Indicators, UCDP/PRIO Armed Conict Data, and World Bank state fragility assessments. Our main focus is on a set of development indicators that capture seven of the Millenium Development Goals, but we also look briefly into the effect of conflict and fragility on growth, human rights abuses, and democratization. We analyze these relationships using a variety of methods - averages by conflict and fragility status; cross-sectional regression analyses of change in each indicator over the time frame for which we have data; fixed-effects regression analyses of the impact on each indicator for each five-year period 1965-2009; as well as occasional panel time series models and matching techniques.

Three disturbing patterns exist regarding civil wars and their recurrence. First, civil wars have a surprisingly high recidivism rate. Second, recurring civil wars have become the dominant form of armed conflict in the world today. And third, civil wars are increasingly concentrated in a few regions of the world.

The most influential recent work on the determinants of civil wars found the factors associated with the grievance motivation to be largely irrelevant. This paper subjects the results of this empirical work to further scrutiny by embedding the study of civil war in a more general analysis of varieties of violent contestation of political power within the borders of the state.

This paper re-examines the proposition that countries with a higher percentage of national income from primary commodity exports have been more prone to civil war.