Civil Wars
Civil Wars
Since the end of World War II (1939–1945), civil wars (wars within nations) have surpassed interstate wars (wars between nations) as the most frequent and destructive forms of organized armed conflict in the world. The Correlates of War Project, a major data archive on armed conflict, reports that there were only twenty-three interstate wars between 1945 and 1997, resulting in 3.3 million battle deaths. By contrast, there were more than four times as many civil wars (108), resulting in almost four times as many casualties (11.4 million; Sarkees 2000).
A second shift in the patterns of conflict is that until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, almost all of the civil wars that occurred since 1945 took place in third world nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By contrast, the interstate wars that punctuated the historical record of the three centuries prior to World War II took place primarily in Europe among the major powers of the international system (Holsti 1996). Yet from 1945 until 1991, Europe was almost completely free of armed conflict on its soil (Holsti 1992, p. 37; 1996).
A third salient pattern in the recent wave of civil wars is that once a nation experienced one civil war, it was very likely to experience a second one. The 108 civil wars in the Correlates of War data set occurred in only fifty-four nations. Only twenty-six of those nations had one and only one civil war, while the remaining twenty-eight nations had at least two and as many as five separate civil wars. Thus, for a certain subset of nations, civil war is a chronically recurrent condition.
One encouraging trend to emerge since the end of the Cold War is the willingness of the international community to broker negotiated settlements to civil wars and to support those settlements with peacekeeping forces. Nineteen of the twenty-six civil wars that ended in negotiated settlements were resolved after 1988, including United Nations (UN)–mediated settlements to protracted civil wars in Cambodia, Mozambique, and El Salvador, to name but a few. Not all of these peace settlements have lasted: the peace established by settlement agreements in Angola, Colombia, and Lebanon, for example, later broke down into renewed civil war. However, when negotiated settlements are supported by UN peacekeeping forces, the resulting peace has proven to be rather durable (Fortna 2004; Doyle and Sambanis 2000).
FORMS OF CIVIL WAR
The term civil war is used to describe organized armed conflict between the armed forces of a sovereign state and one or more rebel organizations drawn from the population of that nation. Two subtypes of civil war can be distinguished: revolutions and secessionist revolts. In a revolution, the rebels seek to overthrow the existing government and assume control of the state themselves. Civil wars in Nicaragua (1978–1979), El Salvador (1979– 1992), and Cambodia (1970–1975, 1979–1991) are examples of revolutionary civil wars. In a secessionist revolt, the rebels seek not to take over the existing state but to gain independence from it by creating a second sovereign nation-state out of a portion of the territory of the original nation. The Tamil revolt in Sri Lanka that began in 1983, the Eritrean revolt against Ethiopia (1974– 1990), and the Biafra revolt in Nigeria (1967–1970) are examples of secessionist revolts.
A further distinction among civil wars concerns whether they are ethnic conflicts or not. Among revolutionary civil wars, those that are nonethnic or ideological typically involved peasant-based insurgencies in nations where the agricultural sector dominates the economy. Where land ownership is concentrated in the hands of a small landed elite, the large peasant majority is often relegated to a life of poverty as landless or land-poor cultivators. When an authoritarian state employs repression to preserve the prerogatives of the landed elite against peasant-based dissident movements, revolutionary insurgencies can arise by drawing support from landless and land-poor peasants. The civil wars in El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, and Guatemala followed this pattern.
In ethnic conflicts, the same issues of inequality and repression generate the grievances that motivate rebels and their supporters. However, ethnicity adds another dimension to the conflict between state and society. In ethnic revolutions, ethnicity and inequality often coincide: those who are victims of various forms of inequality are from one ethnic group, while those who enjoy a disproportionate share of the advantages available in the nation are from a different ethnic group. Ethnic divisions add cultural and identity issues to the fuel of conflict. Members of one ethnic group fear the suppression of their culture, language, religion, and heritage at the hands of a regime dominated by a rival ethnic group. Where ethnic groups out of power are concentrated in geographic enclaves, their response to this ethnic security dilemma is often to launch a secessionist war aimed at establishing their homeland as a separate sovereign nation. The Eritrean secession from Ethiopia fits this pattern. Where ethnic groups are more intermixed geographically, groups out of power often resort to revolutionary violence in an attempt to overthrow a state dominated by their ethnic rivals and to establish themselves in power. The ethnic revolutions in Angola and Rwanda fit this pattern.
CAUSES OF CIVIL WAR
The observable patterns of conflict discussed earlier provide some clues as to the factors that make a nation more or less susceptible to the outbreak of civil war. The fact that until 1991 almost all civil wars occurred in third world nations suggests that factors common to third world nations but not postindustrial democracies or former Leninist regimes might be implicated in the causal process leading to civil war. One such feature is that almost all of these nations were at one time colonies of European powers. Colonial powers harnessed the economies of these regions to serve the demands of markets in Europe and North America. In so doing, they disrupted existing patterns of agricultural production for local markets, as well as the patterns of community organization that supported that production and provided indigenous communities with reliable survival strategies (Migdal 1988).
Decolonization may have conferred formal sovereignty on former colonies, but rarely did the departing colonial power endow the postcolonial state with the institutional capacity or economic wherewithal to develop a strong and effective state capable of providing its constituents with civil order and a reasonable level of material well-being. Lacking legitimacy based on effective performance, weak states came to perceive any dissident challenge—peaceful or otherwise—as a threat to the state itself. The weak state responded with the one policy instrument at its disposal: military repression. Repression forced challengers to resort to violence of their own in order to advance their claims and defend themselves against the state. This cycle of violence begetting violence often escalated to civil war.
Empirical research on predictors of civil war onset provides support for the proposition that the weak state syndrome described above is associated with susceptibility to civil war. A number of correlates of the weak state syndrome consistently distinguish nations that experience civil war from those that do not. Not surprisingly, civil wars are more likely to occur among nations that have lower levels of economic development (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Collier and Hoeffler 1998). Where poverty is widespread, the opportunity costs of participating in armed rebellion are lower: participants have less to lose by joining an armed rebellion than would be the case were they more prosperous. Rebel recruiting is facilitated by low levels of economic well-being (Collier and Hoeffler 1998). Economic underdevelopment also constrains the capacity of the state to respond to dissident movements with accommodative reforms that might defuse tensions short of armed conflict.
Other dimensions of state strength affect a nation’s susceptibility to civil war as well. Although the evidence is mixed, there is some support for the proposition that both democracies and autocracies are less likely to experience civil war than weak authoritarian regimes (Henderson and Singer 2000; Auvinen 1997; Hegre et al. 2001). The institutions of democracy provide aggrieved groups with an alternative to violence as a means to seek redress of their grievances. Elected leaders have an electoral incentive to address those grievances with accommodative policies, and they risk electoral costs if they respond with repression. Highly autocratic regimes are also relatively immune to civil war because the overwhelming coercive capacity of such states precludes armed uprisings by repressing dissent preemptively.
It is the weak authoritarian regimes (anocracies) or nations undergoing the transition to democracy that are the most susceptible to civil war (Hegre et al. 2001). They lack both the institutional capacity to resolve popular grievances through accommodative policies and the coercive capacity to repress dissent preemptively. When faced with a dissident challenge, such regimes attempt to repress it but fail, confronting dissidents with the choice of withdrawing from politics and suffering in silence or adopting violent tactics of their own to overthrow the incumbent regime.
HOW CIVIL WARS END
One feature of civil wars that has drawn considerable attention recently has been the question of their duration (how long they last) and their outcome (whether they end in a government victory, a rebel victory, or some sort of negotiated settlement). Civil wars do tend to last longer than interstate wars: the 108 civil wars described in the Correlates of War lasted an average of 1,665 days, whereas the twenty-three interstate wars lasted only 480 days on average. Because civil wars have lasted so long, new civil wars began at a faster rate than ongoing wars ended (until about 1994), with the result being a relentless accumulation of ongoing civil wars (Fearon 2004). The long duration of civil wars also accounts for their destructiveness. The rate at which casualties occur is usually lower in civil wars than in interstate wars; interstate wars are, on average, more intensely destructive. However, because civil wars last so much longer than interstate wars, their cumulative death toll usually exceeds that of interstate wars.
The duration of civil wars also affects their outcome. There is evidence that military victories by either the government or the rebels usually occur fairly early in the conflict if they occur at all. For rebel movements especially, the evidence suggests that if they are going to win, victory will occur within the first two or three years of the conflict. Governments, too, tend to win early if they win at all (Mason et al. 1999). Past some point (about eight to ten years into the civil war), neither side is likely to achieve military victory, and they settle into what William Zartman has termed a mutually hurting stalemate (1993, p. 24), whereby neither side has the capacity to defeat the other, but both sides have the capacity to deny victory to their rival.
It is at this point that civil wars become ripe for resolution. Third-party mediation—usually by the United Nations—can bring about a negotiated settlement to the conflict. While negotiated settlements are more likely than military victories to be followed by renewed conflict (Licklider 1995), negotiated settlements supported by UN peacekeeping forces are more likely to last (Fortna 2004; Doyle and Sambanis 2000). Peacekeepers provide both sides with credible guarantees that they can disarm and demobilize without fear of their rival violating the agreement and achieving through deception what they could not achieve on the battlefield (Walter 2002). Data from the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations indicate that forty-seven of the sixty peacekeeping operations established since 1945 have been deployed in civil wars, and forty-three of those were deployed after the cold war ended. Thus, UN brokering of peace agreements and deployment of peacekeeping forces have brought about a decline in the frequency, duration, and deadliness of civil wars, developments that offer some hope for future trends in the frequency, duration, and destructiveness of civil war.
SEE ALSO Coup d’Etat; Destabilization; Diplomacy; Dissidents; Genocide; Guerilla Warfare; Lebanese Civil War; Peace; Spanish Civil War; U.S. Civil War; United Nations; Yugoslavian Civil War
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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T. David Mason