US CIvil War - Models of War

 

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

A quick literature review shows a  couple of ways to classify civil war types

1. economic, including resource predation
2. ethnic
3. coups
4. genocides
5. politicides
6. self-determination (similar to my mid-sized polity bifurcation idea the other month)

 Sambanis' excellent paper on civil war suggests some feedback and feedforward between different aspects of civil conflict. For instance, an attempted coup may or may not start a civil war and a civil war may or may not start genocide or politicide.

I'd also add, that my own thinking (from a cultural multi-level selection frame) suggests we may have to distinguish civil wars of supremacy, like those focused on genocide or politicide, from those which are ostensibibly supremacist but are more aligned toward bifurcation into stable mid-sized polities.

Near the end of his paper, Sambanis gives a list of some vectors out of which civil wars emerge;

1. violent anticolonial movements
2. international wars
3. occupations
4. coups
5. proxy wars fought in a third country
6. riots
7. intercomunal (ethnic, religious or ideological) fighting
8. nationalistic strife

Background

Here's a list of quotes from the Sambini paper. It should give people a flavour of things. His paper seems to take a systems (multi-scale perspective) and to be aware of process issues, including complex emergence and (probabilistic) structural attractor basins.

"Finally, both Collier & Hoefller and Fearon & Laitin find that democracy does not significantly reduce the risk of civil war and that ethnic fractionalization does not increase it—although, according to CH, ethnic dominance increases risk. CH and FL seem to agree that countries in the middle of the democracy-autocracy spectrum and those with political instability are more prone to civil war"

"Thus, we come back to the distinction between micro- and macro-level research on civil wars that I made earlier. It is true, as argued by Stathis Kalyvas in an earlier issue of this journal, that motives for violence vary wildly at the micro level and that micro-level and macro-level determinants of civil war often do not directly correspond to one another. But analysis at different levels of social conflict will necessarily reveal different causal patterns."

"The disjuncture between micro-level actions and macro-level identities that Kalyvas expertly demonstrates implies one of two things: the variation at the micro-level is irrelevant to the question of civil war onset, or civil war is such an aggregate concept that it is not useful as an analytical category. Supposing the latter, if civil war includes coups, riots, gang violence, crime, and genocide, are we right in analyzing civil war as distinct from all these other forms of violence? If what we are trying to explain is the outbreak of civil war, then the process of interest is that by which divergent incentives and myriad personal calculations generate civil war rather than another type of violence. The theories proposed by CH and FL assume that civil war is a distinct category of violence and try to explain when and where civil wars are likely to occur. But these theories can partially explain many forms of violence—even organized crime—and are not specific to civil war. We must therefore consider a wider array of both micro- and macro-level theories, including ones that explain how emotions, ideology, revenge, or coercion can interact to produce collective action that culminates in a civil war."

"Thus, terrorism, coups, and riots may be leading indicators of civil war (and may precipitate civil war), yet we must explain why in some countries we observe those forms of violence without also observing violence escalation into civil war. A general theory of political violence must explain how and why we shift from one form of violence to another, and it must analyze civil war as part of a dynamic process."

"quantitative studies of civil war fail to account for the effects of low-level violence that typically precedes war, reducing both income and growth by reducing investment and encouraging capital flight. This is particularly true for studies using data sets that code civil war onset during the year that deaths cross the 1,000 threshold (as is common in the literature), even though armed conflict may have been occurring for several years."

"that may be irrelevant if the civil war was motivated by religious difference and fueled by repressive government policies. The opportunity-cost argument does not apply well to “volunteer forces” such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) that are more concerned with ideology than with looting."

"Some analysts classify wars fought by ethnic groups as ethnic wars.80 Others argue that ethnicity is just a cover for economic motives,81 personal hostilities,82 criminality,83 or an assortment of other objectives that are not truly ethnonationalist at their core.84 But even though many conflicts can become ethnicized after they start, and ethnic mobilization can be used by political elites to support nonethnic rebellions, it may be significant that ethnicity is mobilized in some wars but not in others. After all, many rebel groups are organized within ethnoreligious parameters (in Burundi, recruitment follows tribal lines; in Lebanon, recruitment and alliance patterns follow religious lines ). A common-sense definition of ethnic war is a war fought between ethnic groups over issues that relate to ethnicity. It does not matter whether ethnic identity can be manipulated by elites pursuing private goals; the fact that ethnicity lends itself to manipulation and can be used to motivate collective action is in itself significant"

"I have been arguing that we cannot understand the causes of civil war without looking both below civil war (at individual level violence) and around it (at different forms of organized political violence)"

"For many countries caught in a conflict trap, civil war is a phase in a cycle of violence. By isolating civil war in quantitative studies, we choose to focus on an event rather than a process, and we discard a lot of useful information that explains how we end up having a civil war"

"In sum, organized violence is the result of four interacting factors: the demand for loot, the demand for political change, the opportunity to mobilize criminal or insurgent groups, and the mechanisms (relational, emotional, cognitive, or environmental) that characterize claim making and resource extraction. And there are important links between political and criminal forms of violence: while a strong state can deter the escalation of a conflict to violence, criminal and political violence can reinforce each other and thereby undermine a state’s authority and capacity."

Some of the most useful insights from the case studies discussed here come from analyses of the dynamics of conflict in countries where civil war did not occur despite a large number of risk factors...A strong state can afford to be accommodating or repressive, at low cost.134 But even accommodating policies may not effectively curb opposition if the state is weak and therefore cannot uphold its end of the bargain"

"Nondemocratic states can use selective repression more easily than democratic ones can to reduce the risk of conflict escalation. Thus, a government’s likelihood of using repression or accommodation—and the effects of these approaches—may be determined by state capacity and regime type combined. The conflict escalation potential of incomplete repression strategies may explain why democratization increases civil war risk. A democratic or democratizing regime cannot easily use repression, because the state’s enforcement apparatus becomes weaker as its activities become more transparent. The state is therefore less able to root out opposition in its early stages."