The 1990s and 2000s produced a flurry of academic research into civil war. For a number of commentators, it seemed that while the possibility of a catastrophic war between the worldâs superpowers was becoming an increasingly distant memory, political violence in the form of civil war was a scourge of the âglobalisedâ world. While for some, this period â the epoch of globalisation â was as momentous as the industrial revolution in the sense that the world was argued to be experiencing a profound, irreversible and irresistible transformation, civil war concurrently stretched across large swathes of the Global South. As processes of globalisation appeared to permeate the global political economy like never before, so too did civil war.
Rising academic interest into civil wars during the 1990s and 2000s may seem peculiar to some: while it is true that during this period civil war was the preponderant type of armed conflict, this had been the case for some time. According to most scholarly sources, civil war â also often referred to (inter alia) as intrastate conflict and internal armed conflict, terms which are used interchangeably throughout this book â has been the dominant type of armed conflict since at least the end of the Second World War (see below for a discussion on defining civil war). While it can be argued that the rise in academic interest came late in the day, and despite stark differences between competing theories, civil war scholarship has helped to foreground the acute suffering of millions of people across the globe, particularly in poor countries of the Global South.
Attempts to mitigate the problem of civil war have thus been high on the agenda of the scholarly and development communities. In particular, understanding the links between armed conflict and development became a central tenet of the security and development agendas. This was epitomised by the âacademic mergerâ of security and development studies during the 1990s and 2000s, which included âa liberal reproblematisation of underdevelopment as dangerousâ (Duffield 2001: 23). A dominant view emerged, positing that conflict reflects a developmental malaise (Duffield 2001: 27). Discussions of this âsecurity-developmentâ nexus were largely donor and policy oriented, with an emphasis on âglobalised discussions among donor countries about how to best implement security and development in countries that are challenged on both accountsâ (Nilsson and Taylor 2017: 75).
Within this context, the concept of the âliberal peaceâ was increasingly discussed. For Duffield (2001: 11), the liberal peace is a reflection of a âradical developmental agenda of social transformationâ with an aim to transform malfunctioning and war-torn societies into âcooperative, representative and, especially, stable entitiesâ. As Pugh and Cooper (2004: 6) summarise, Duffieldâs explication of the liberal peace involves âan ideological mix of neoliberal concepts of democracy, market sovereignty, and conflict resolution that determine contemporary strategies of interventionâ.1 Other trends in the literature include an increasing focus on the concept of human security, with proponents providing a less state-centric definition of security that traditionally placed inter-state relations at the centre of analysis. Instead, the notion of human security would apply definitions of security to the broader ambit of human welfare, encompassing both security and development to create a single overarching concept (Tschirgi et al. 2010: 2).
The Political Economy of Armed Conflict
In light of the greater appreciation of the links between civil war and development, scholarship increasingly took a political economy approach to understanding armed conflict. This political economy approach provided a corrective to accounts of civil war that simplistically and problematically blamed internal conflict on factors such as âancient hatredsâ and that foregrounded the irrationality of civil war violence. Instead, critics of this perspective argued that civil war is a much more complex phenomenon that is typically underpinned by very rational actions. The rational, economic agendas of armed groups are cases in point. A political economy perspective to studying conflict â which, in its broadest sense, analyses both the political and economic causes and dynamics of conflict â was thus argued to provide a more convincing account of civil war (for example, see the edited volumes by Berdal and Malone 2000; Ballentine and Sherman 2003; see also Pugh and Cooper 2004).
Another area of analysis focused on how economic development impacts the likelihood of civil war. Does poverty cause civil war? Do grievances like economic inequality increase the likelihood of intrastate conflict? Is greed the principal driver of civil war onset? And does globalisation, such as the neo-liberal economic policies underpinning âeconomic globalisationâ, have conflict producing/mitigating effects? These types of questions were becoming increasingly pervasive within academic and policy making spheres.
Some rather famous (some would say infamous) debates within the civil war scholarly community duly arose. One example is the âNew Warsâ thesis, the argument that the character of conflict began to change as the turn of the twentieth century neared. An era of so-called New Wars had emerged, it was argued: (typically) intrastate conflict disconnected from Cold War ideology or EastâWest competition and linked to the contemporary era of globalisation of the 1980s and 1990s, with a greater emphasis on criminality (Kaldor 1999). For others, the âNew Warsâ thesis was deeply flawed. For instance, scholars questioned the ânewnessâ of this type of conflict, arguing that â New Warsâ were not unique to the post-Cold War era of globalisation. Moreover, the characterisation of âOld Warsâ â an idea of a Clauzwitzian era of conflict that pervaded the global political economy pre-âglobalisationâ â was argued to be simplistic and problematic (see Kalyvas 2001; Berdal 2003; Fearon and Laitin 2003a).
Another discussion was labelled the âGreed versus Grievanceâ debate. One of the progenitors of this debate, Paul Collier (for example, 2000), argued that rebel motivations in civil wars are centred on greed (for instance, rebel self-enrichment), and therefore civil war is better understood through greed-based explanations instead of grievance-based theories related to, say, poverty or inequality . These greed-based explanations challenged earlier investigations that highlighted a link between relative deprivation and the outbreak of political violence (Gurr 1970). Collier did modify his argument (see Collier et al. 2003: 64), explaining rebellion more in terms of the economic opportunities that conflict may present to rebel groups, although Collier maintained that greed cannot be entirely discounted . Others (for example, Cramer 2002b, 2005; Stewart 2002; Ballentine and Sherman 2003) critiqued the idea that civil war should be understood simply in terms of greed (in particular, rebel greed) and that grievances (such as horizontal inequalities ) had a crucial role to play.
Development, Conflict and the Prominent Set of Studies in the Civil War Literature
As research increasingly investigated the links between development and civil war, a body of evidence emerged that suggested low levels of development are firmly linked to civil war onset.2 Characterised by poverty , a weak state, a large population and instability â conditions that were argued to favour insurgencies â low-income countries were understood to be particularly susceptible to civil war. Critics, however, pointed out that the rational-choice models pervading much of this literature simply assume that less affluent people have a greater comparative advantage in engaging in civil war than wealthier people (for example, Cramer 2002b). These studies are thus guilty , claims Cramer (2002b: 1847), of overlooking compelling evidence of coercive recruitment of both children and young adults into armed groups, and the rational-choice assumptions underpinning the aforementioned literature âis simply a formal version of the widespread common assumption that in poor countries âlife is cheapââ. Others questioned the assumption that low development and therefore poverty are causally linked to civil war. For instance, Miller (2000) argues that poverty and war have coexisted throughout recorded history but, nonetheless, he asserts that âcorrelation does not imply causationâ. Miller notes, for example, that the organisation of the poor into a collective movement needed to fight a war is often difficult to accomplish (Miller 2000: 275â6).
Notwithstanding these criticisms, what emerged from this renewed interest in conflict and development was an influential body of civil war scholarship with some discernible characteristics. This body of literature is typically (but not exclus...