An Introduction to Civil Wars

Karl DeRouen, Jr.

• Publisher: CQ Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781452244327
• eBook ISBN: 9781483322704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

There are currently more than 30 active civil wars worldwide. An Introduction to Civil Wars provides a comprehensive overview of the civil wars that have taken place globally since World War II. The text opens with a discussion of the human and economic costs of civil war, and then systematically examines all aspects of civil wars: civil war patterns, types, and causes; the effect of natural resources; conflict duration, outcomes, and termination; peace agreements; counterinsurgency; terrorism; international intervention; and post-conflict issues. Author Karl DeRouen, Jr. draws on the latest empirical research and major theoretical debates and connects them to extended case studies of current conflict. Pedagogical features -- tables, figures, maps, photos, a comprehensive bibliography, lists of suggested readings, and an Appendix listing all civil wars since 1946 -- make the book an especially useful research tool for undergraduates and graduate students in political science and public policy.

CHAPTER1

Introduction

Civil war is a global phenomenon with profound social and political consequences. From 1946 to 2011, a total of 102 countries—about half of the entire world’s states—experienced civil wars. During that 60-year period, Africa witnessed the most with 40 of its more than 50 countries experiencing civil wars. In the Americas, 20 countries experienced civil war, Asia saw 18, Europe 13, and the Middle East 11 (Gleditsch et al. 2002; Themnér and Wallensteen 2012).

Civil wars are not only widespread; they also occur more frequently than wars between states. In 2000, a report from the UN Secretary General concluded that while interstate wars had been declining for some time, since the 1990s, most wars have been mainly internal. Indeed, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan identified freedom from armed conflict as a UN priority, pointing to the fact that intrastate wars are brutally violent, claim millions of lives, and prey on ethnic and religious differences (United Nations [UN] 2000:43).

Loss of human life is certainly the most significant cost of civil war. The UN report showed that from 1990 to 2000, civil wars claimed more than 5 million lives worldwide, including countless civilians and children. According to one leading research organization, the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), there were approximately 350,000 civil war battle-related deaths in Europe and the Middle East between 1946 and 2008, and during the same period, African civil wars produced more than 1.2 million battle-related casualties. The most alarming statistic comes from Asia, which lost more than 3.1 million battle-related lives in brutal civil wars especially in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India, and China (Harbom and Wallensteen 2009; Lacina and Gleditsch 2005).

Adding to the loss of life are other tragic factors that affect victims of civil wars. As noted in the UN report,

Women are becoming especially vulnerable to violence and sexual exploitation. Children are being taken away from parents, ending up as forced laborers and forced to become child soldiers.

Civilian populations are used as covers for the operations of rebel movements. In other cases, civilians face brutalities and become targets of genocides. (United Nations 2000:46)

Another of the profound international consequences of civil wars is human displacement in the form of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) or people who have not crossed international borders to avoid violence but instead remain within their country’s borders. At the beginning of 2013 there were over 15 million refugees in the world—most of whom had been displaced by civil conflict (UN High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR] 2014b). Between 1999 and 2004, there were 500,000 displaced from the war in Aceh, Indonesia, alone (Czaika and Kis-Katos 2009), and in a more extreme and short-term example, over 2.5 million people have been internally displaced in Syria since 2011 (UNHCR 2014a). In the past, governments and international organizations have more or less ignored the issue of displacement, but in recent years, partly because of UN and other international pressure, there have been greater efforts to address refugee needs.

International forces have also been mobilized to hold those accountable for crimes committed during civil wars: For instance, in April 2012, the UN-sponsored Special Court for Sierra Leone convicted former warlord and President of Liberia Charles Taylor (pictured in the photo on page 3) for crimes, such as mass murders, sex slavery, and using child soldiers (ABC News 2012). Still, the scale, frequency, and severity of civil wars warrants sustained attention and research to understand its many dimensions.

THEME OF THE BOOK

This book focuses on the central factors that explain civil war, including defining what scholars mean by civil war, who the major actors are, why civil wars start, how they are fought, the costs in life and livelihood, what explains their duration, how they end, and what makes them recur. At the end of each chapter, I return to conflict management, the theme of the book. The features of civil war discussed in this book have relevance for conflict management. For example, an understanding of the causes of civil war can help inform conflict prevention. Knowing the determinants of duration can help shape policies to shorten wars, and knowledge of war recurrence and civil war-related terrorism can help shape better peace agreements that are more likely to hold. Each of these features forms the basis of the chapters, but here in the Introduction, we will start with the basics: an overview of theoretical approaches to war in general and civil war in particular and discussion of the key terms and concepts involved in its empirical study.

Conflict management, as the term is applied here, refers to a set of practices, encompassing negotiation, mediation, conflict prevention, peace agreements, “peacebuilding,” and peacekeeping operations that are designed to ameliorate, resolve, and even prevent future conflict. While each of these processes is discussed in detail in the relevant chapters, I can describe each of these processes in general terms.

Negotiations are talks between disputants or between a disputant and an outside negotiator. The goal of negotiations might be a cease-fire or peace agreement. Mediation is similar with the exception that the mediator shares information between the disputants either directly (in same room) or indirectly (separate locations). Conflict prevention takes place before a crisis situation escalates to armed violence. Peace agreements are documents containing provisions designed to stem the violence and lead the country toward stable peace. The provisions often address grievances, reconciliation, and power sharing. Agreements are often preceded by mediation and/or negotiations. It should also be mentioned that as peace talks near the agreement stage, they can trigger spoilers who see the process as a threat to their interests. Spoilers sometimes carry out terrorism to disrupt the peace process.

Charles Taylor

Former President of Liberia, Charles Taylor, seated during his trial in the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) in the Netherlands.

Credit: UN Photo/SCSL/AP Pool/Peter DeJong

Peacebuilding is a process that occurs after the violence has ended. It is often preceded by a peace agreement. Peacebuilding often entails building democratic institutions so that peace is consolidated (see Doyle and Sambanis 2000). Peacekeeping operations (typically under the auspices of the United Nations) are also active after the violence has stopped. As such, they are also sometimes part of the peacebuilding process. Peacekeeping troops and trained civilians have many roles, such as maintaining law and order, assisting with new constitutions and elections, and, in many cases, patrolling to deter a recurrence of the civil war.

THE BASICS OF CIVIL WAR

There are several basic features of civil war that must first be considered before proceeding on to more advanced topics. These features include the definition of civil war, human costs of civil war, the disputants, and types of civil wars. They form the basic tool kit needed to analyze more advanced topics covered later in the chapter such as onset, duration, termination, and recurrence of civil war.

Definitions of Civil War

Researchers have long drawn a distinction between wars that occur between states, namely, interstate wars, and civil wars that take place between parties within the boundaries of a state. However, there are differences in the various ways that civil war is defined according to empirical standards, and the student of civil war must appreciate the fact that small changes in definitions can give rise to large differences in research discoveries. Indeed, as it will be noted later in the chapter, one of the reasons for varying opinions on what causes civil wars lies with differences in classification as indicated in Table 1.1. Notice that all of the definitions are based on two specific criteria: the number of deaths and the identity of the disputants.

Number of Deaths

I begin with a definition of armed conflict:

Armed conflict is a contested incompatibility that concerns government or territory or both, where the use of armed force between two parties results in at least 25 battle-related deaths. Of these two parties, at least one has to be the government of a state. (Themnér and Wallensteen 2011:532)

While definitions vary, civil war is a type of armed conflict. Of the five major sources of data on civil wars, four define a civil war as a conflict causing 1,000 deaths, though distribution of those deaths across time varies. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), however, provides a benchmark of 25 battle-related deaths per year, which are classified as “civil conflicts.” Conflicts involving over 1,000 deaths are “civil wars.”

Each of these can be considered civil war, though some researchers may prefer to focus only on one definition over the other. In this book, all intrastate conflicts with at least 25 battle deaths in a calendar year are considered a civil war.

TABLE 1.1

Comparing Different Definitions of Civil War

If we follow UCDP’s definition of civil conflict, then there were 36 active conflicts in 2009 and 30 active conflicts in 2010 (Themnér and Wallensteen 2011). In contrast, using the higher threshold of 1,000 battle-related deaths gives only six civil wars in 2009 and four in 2010. The value or virtue of using the lower threshold is that many low-intensity civil wars are utilized in the analysis. It is important that these wars not be ignored because even though they might be minor in terms of deaths, they can still have a devastating impact on human displacement, democratization, economic growth, and foreign investment.

The UCDP dataset work is highlighted in Box 1.1.

BOX 1.1 Key Civil War Datasets

Since the 1970s, the Peace and Conflict Research Department at Uppsala University, Sweden, has kept track of armed conflicts worldwide through the UCDP. The department compiles on an annual basis every account of civil war, and it produces a comprehensive publication. In collaboration with the Center for the Study of Civil War at PRIO, a detailed, comprehensive dataset covering armed conflicts from 1946 to the present has been maintained. These data are typically referred to as UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Data (ACD), and they also reflect interstate conflict. The data are employed in quantitative research, meaning statistical techniques are used in a scientific process aimed at analyzing civil war onset, duration, and outcome. The ACD data list all the parties that have been engaged in war, the location of the conflict, years of the war, the intensity of the war, and the type of war, among others factors.

Over time, the Armed Conflict Data continue to be refined, and revisions are published in subsequent issues of Journal of Peace Research. The UCDP Conflict Encyclopedia website is the broadest UCDP publication as it covers conflicts since 1975 and includes a large number of variables relevant for conflict analysis. Thus, there is a dataset with data from 1946 on a limited number of variables and a database with information from 1975 on many variables and containing detailed conflict descriptions (UCDP 2014a).

Wars are classified according to three different categories. A civil war may be of the general type (internal armed conflict) or one that has involved other countries (internationalized internal armed conflict) or perhaps one in which the government of a country fights the rebel group outside the boundary of that country (extra-systemic armed conflict). A more detailed discussion of this is found in Chapter 3.

To be considered a civil war, UCDP/PRIO uses a relatively low threshold of 25 battle-related deaths per year. The “incompatibility” of the war describes whether the war is over a disputed territory (war over control of a territory) or over the control of government (war over control of government) or both. Most civil wars happen over one of these issues and not both. The data are available to the public at the UCDP website (http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/UCDP/) at no cost. It should be noted that the UCDP also maintains an extensive catalog of datasets on other aspects of armed conflict, such as peace agreements, war termination, and civil war onsets.

The Correlates of War (COW) project maintains datasets comprising various information on civil and interstate wars. Founded by the late Professor J. David Singer of University of Michigan in 1963 and later joined by Professor Melvin Small, the project maintains data for wars back to 1816. The COW project has data on both interstate and civil wars. A clear difference exists between UCDP/PRIO and COW in terms of what constitutes armed conflict. The COW requires interstate and intrastate to have at least 1,000 battle deaths per year. Some scholars prefer to focus on major wars and some scholars prefer studying a wider range of civil wars from very minor to major. In addition to data on war, the COW houses data on the power of countries as judged by factors such as military and economic power, energy consumption, iron and steel production, and population size. Other times, series information held by the COW includes data on bilateral trade between countries, state membership in intergovernmental organizations, and alliance data. In fact, the COW project was the first major foray into the use of scientific methods in the study of international relations. The data are available to the public online at the COW website, www.correlatesofwar.org (at no cost).

Parties to Conflict: Governments and Rebel Groups

UCDP/PRIO defines a government as the party at that time which is in control of the country’s capital (Gleditsch et al. 2002). A government is an organized bureaucracy—elected or unelected—that manages the affairs of state. Governments comprise institutions that make policies for citizens to follow, and its functions include rule making, service delivery, adjudication, and national security. In contrast, rebels usually do not have institutions or provide service delivery. However, in some cases, rebels create and control a de facto state (e.g., the Tamil Tigers in northern Sri Lanka). UCDP/PRIO data and definitions are employed in this text because of their widespread usage in research and their reputation for accuracy.

A key aspect of defining civil war is recognizing what constitutes a rebel group. Whether they use sticks and stones, grenades and machine guns, or the latest weapons, rebel groups and organized criminal groups employ weapons to fight their enemies. They both have a clear leadership with some sort of an organizational structure. Key differences exist between the two, however. For example, a rebel group may or may not be motivated by profits. Although a group may be fighting the government because of discrimination or barriers to progress, Collier and Hoeffler (1999, 2001) view rebel leaders as generating profits from war for self-gain and maintenance of the group. On the other hand, an organized criminal group’s goal is always profit (Saab and Taylor 2009:457). Though they fight against government troops and police, the violent drug gangs of Mexico are not considered rebels as they have no formal political agenda, goal to secede, exact political change policy, or government takeover plan. For the purposes of this book, the UCDP/PRIO definitions and data (e.g., onset, duration, battle deaths, termination type, peace agreements) are utilized to the fullest extent possible because of their international reputation for being comprehensive and accurate.

Governments and rebels may enter into armed conflict for a number of reasons. Two of the main schools of thought here are the grievance and greed models. The former represents a traditional line of reasoning that rebels start civil wars because they have suffered some deprivation at the hands of the government or another ethnic or religious group. This model has been challenged by other scholars who argue that some rebels do not fight because of grievance but rather because they are pros...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Halftitle
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Features
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1.  Introduction
• 2.  Costs of Civil War
• 3.  Civil War Dynamics
• 4.  What Causes Civil War?
• 5.  Natural Resources and Civil War
• 6.  The Termination of Civil War and Post-Conflict Issues
• 7.  International Intervention
• 8.  Terrorism and Civil War
• 9.  Conclusion
• Appendix 1 UCDP Civil Wars Involving at Least 25 Battle-Related Deaths per Year, 1946–2009
• References
• Index
• About the Author
• CQ Press
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