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Second Edition
Edited by
T. David Mason
University of North Texas
Sara McLaughlin Mitchell
University of Iowa
Credits and acknowledgments for material borrowed from other sources, and reproduced
with permission, appear on the appropriate pages within the text.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents
List of Figures v
List of Tables vii
Preface ix
Introduction: What Do We Know about Civil Wars? xiii
T. David Mason, Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, and Alyssa K. Prorok
PART II: FACTORS THAT END CIVIL WARS AND PROMOTE PEACE
6 Third-Party Intervention, Duration, and Outcome of Civil Wars 85
Christopher Linebarger and Andrew Enterline
iii
iv Contents
1.1 T
he Number of Ongoing Armed Conflicts by Type and Year,
1946–2020 5
1.2 S
hare of Countries with Intrastate Armed Conflict
on their Territory, 1946–2020 6
1.3 S
hare of Countries Participating in Armed Conflict,
1946–2020 7
1.4 The Number of Annual Battle Deaths, 1946–2020 9
1.5 Conflict Zones, 2018–2020 12
1.6 Battle Deaths by Region, 1946–2020 13
1.7 Armed Conflicts by Religious Issue, 1975–2015 14
1.8 Armed Conflicts by Incompatibility, 1946–2020 15
1.9 Civil Conflict Onset and Terminations (Five-year Averages),
1950–2020 16
1.10 eaths in Intrastate Conflict, Non-State Conflict, and One-Sided
D
Violence, 1989–2020 18
1.11 Average Magnitude of Genocide in Civil Conflict, 1955–2020 19
5.1 Clustering 70
5.2 Contagion 71
5.3 Connectedness 75
10.1 Civil Wars and Health 155
v
vi Figures
vii
Preface
Since the publication in 2016 of the first edition of What Do We Know About Civil
Wars? there have been some dramatic changes in the patterns of armed conflict
around the world. Not surprisingly, there have been some important advances in
research on civil wars since then as well. The second edition of this book high-
lights those changing patterns of civil conflict and gives readers some sense of the
forces driving those patterns by grounding the new streams of research on civil
war onset, duration, and outcome, and postwar peacebuilding in the evolving
intellectual map of the field. Enough has changed—in the patterns of civil war
and in our knowledge concerning the causes and outcomes of civil wars—that we
thought it was an appropriate time to present a new edition.
Some of the changing patterns of conflict, highlighted in substantial detail in
chapter 1, are rather troubling. The early years of this century were marked by a
decline in the number and deadliness of civil wars. This post–Cold War trend was
driven largely by the number of civil wars ending in a given year exceeding the
number of new wars starting. The increased rate of civil conflict termination was
largely a function of the international community getting more adept at mediat-
ing, designing, and implementing peace agreements, rather than simply letting
governments and rebels fight it out until one side or the other achieved military
victory.
As the new century progressed, the conflict landscape transitioned into a
period of stasis, where the number of ongoing civil wars remained about the
same, at about thirty, from one year to the next. The interruption of the downward
trend in the incidence of conflicts was driven in part by the protracted conflicts
in Iraq and Afghanistan and the civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen that grew
out of the Arab Spring movement. These wars generated spillover conflicts in
North Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere, driven in many cases by Islamic State
cells taking their war organization and war ideology, born in the Iraq and Syrian
conflicts, to new locales. As a consequence, the number of ongoing conflicts
ix
x Preface
began to increase, and the number of people killed and displaced by civil war also
increased dramatically. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) reports that
over one hundred thousand people were killed in armed conflicts in 2014, most
of them in civil wars in Syria and Iraq. That marked the deadliest single year of
civil conflicts since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. While total fatalities have
declined somewhat since 2014 (to about fifty thousand in 2019), the number of
ongoing civil conflicts in the world increased to the highest recorded number
(fifty-six) since the end of World War II (see chapter 1 in this volume).
Given these trends, it became apparent to us as scholars who teach classes on
civil wars that it was time to provide students and scholars in the field with an
updated version of the original (2016) edition of this book. Our goal is still to
present comprehensive and rigorous reviews of what we think we know and what
we don’t know about the causes and consequences of civil wars. This second
edition is intended to present the ways in which the state of our knowledge has
evolved, expanded, and otherwise changed in the six years since the first edition
of this book was published. This includes updated references and discussions of
literature published since 2016, descriptions of new data patterns and datasets,
and connections to recent conflicts (e.g., Syria) and comprehensive peace agree-
ments (e.g., Colombia). We are grateful to the scholars who have revised and
updated their chapters in this book. Their insightful reviews and analyses of the
state of our knowledge concerning civil conflict processes have helped students
of civil conflict to understand what prior research teaches us about civil wars
and what new paths for future research await us as a community of scholars. For
students, a volume such as this not only offers a concise, thorough, and accessible
overview of the field but also gives them a taste of political science research with-
out overwhelming the reader with complex methodologies. Those can be found
in the original articles cited and discussed in these chapters.
The book is divided into three sections. The first five chapters (part I) focus
on issues of civil war onset: what do we know about the factors that make a
nation-state more or less susceptible to the outbreak of civil war? The second
set of chapters (part II) is concerned with the dynamics and outcome of civil
wars, once they are underway. What factors explain the duration and outcome of
civil wars (i.e., whether they end in rebel victory, government victory, or a peace
agreement of some sort)? Once a civil war has ended, what factors make a post-
war country more or less likely to relapse into renewed conflict? The third set of
chapters (part III) addresses new directions in civil war research on phenomena
that may not be implicated exclusively in either the onset, outcome, or duration
of civil wars and that, therefore, have implications beyond any one phase of the
civil conflict process. These topics include the emergence of transitional justice
institutions in post-conflict environments, the “resource curse,” the impact of
the status of women in a society on the civil conflict process, the relationship
between the environment and civil conflicts, and trends in civil war data collec-
tion that have enabled scholars to examine the geographic and temporal patterns
of conflict within a given civil war. Finally, we have added a new chapter on the
role of paramilitary organizations—pro-government militias (PGMs), civilian
Preface xi
self-defense forces (CDFs), and the like—that are distinct from the state’s formal
armed forces but can have critical effects on the duration and outcome of civil
wars, as well as the prospects for one-sided violence against civilian populations.
Courses on revolution and political violence, civil war, and civil conflict man-
agement continue to proliferate across college curricula in the United States and
abroad. Undergraduate and graduate programs in Peace Studies, Conflict and
Conflict Management, and Human Rights have proliferated as well. We orga-
nized this book to meet the curriculum needs of these important and emerging
degree programs and concentrations. In our own courses, we assign the chapters
as an overview each week on a given topic, and then we supplement each chap-
ter with examples of quantitative research and qualitative case studies that help
students see how each factor (e.g., state capacity, resources) relates to civil war
onset, duration, and outcomes. The chapters in this book enable students to place
these supplementary studies into the broader context of the research stream in
which those works are located.
We purposedly organized the original volume into fifteen chapters to corre-
spond to the number of weeks in the typical college semester. The second edition
adds a sixteenth chapter, but it is still relatively straightforward to structure each
weekly topic of a course around one of the sixteen chapters in this book, with that
chapter providing the broad road map of the important theories and findings in
the existing research on that week’s topic. In a similar fashion, this book provides
faculty and researchers for whom civil war research is not their primary field a
useful way to get up to speed quickly on the latest streams of research in the
sixteen topics featured in this book. It is probably no secret that doctoral students
preparing for the comprehensive exams have found the first edition to be of value
in preparing for those exams. The second edition should give them a more up to
date understanding of the state of research in the three phases of the civil conflict
process as well as the subtopics related to these three phases. In addition, chapter
15 provides detailed information on the evolution of datasets available for schol-
ars to use in their own research on civil wars.
The Department of Political Science Benjamin F. Shambaugh Memorial Fund
at the University of Iowa provided generous financial support to host a confer-
ence in September 2014 where contributors presented drafts of their chapters for
the first edition. We are grateful to our co-organizer for the conference, Alyssa
Prorok, who provided excellent feedback to the participants and took notes on all
discussions. We also acknowledge the support provided by our conference assis-
tants: Ruoxi Du, Dongkyu Kim, Samantha Lange, Sojeong Lee, and Desmond
Wallace. Several of our colleagues also served as discussants at the conference
including Kelly Kadera, Brian Lai, Tyler Pack, Bryce Reeder, Jason Renn,
Jessie Rumsey, Kieun Sung, Ashly Townsen, and John Vasquez. Will Moore, Pat
Regan, and Reed Wood presented chapters for authors who were unable to attend
and also provided useful feedback on several chapters as discussants. Shuai Jin
provided copyediting assistance for the final manuscript. We are also thankful
to the Castleberry Peace Institute at the University of North Texas for providing
financial support for the project.
xii Preface
We thank John Vasquez for bringing us together to co-edit this book. We were
both inspired by his edited volumes on What Do We Know About War? and we
thought that civil war scholars would benefit from a similar compilation of what
we know about civil wars. Enough people found that first edition to be useful that
an updated version was called for. We hope that you find this second edition to be
as useful and informative as the first. We are also grateful to Susan McEachern at
Rowman & Littlefield for her support of this project from its inception through
the proposal process, enlisting the participation of the authors, through the pub-
lication of the first edition. We are also deeply indebted to Michael Kerns for his
work on this new edition, to Elizabeth von Buhr for guiding us through the pro-
duction of this new edition, and to Katy Whipple for her careful and professional
copy editing of the manuscript. We hope that scholars and students will find the
second edition of this volume useful for teaching and conducting research on
civil wars.
Introduction
What Do We Know about Civil Wars?
T. David Mason, Sara McLaughlin Mitchell,
and Alyssa K. Prorok
Since the first edition of this book was published in 2016, there have been some
observable changes in the patterns of armed conflict around the world (see chap-
ter 1, this volume). The most disturbing is that, after a period of decline in the
incidence of armed conflicts following the end of the Cold War, the post–9/11
world has experienced an increase in the incidence of armed conflict, to the point
that in 2020 there were more conflicts ongoing (fifty-six) than at any previous
point in the post–World War II era.
What accounts for these trends? We began this introduction in the first edition
with the simple observation that since the end of World War II, civil wars (wars
within nations) have replaced interstate wars (wars between nations) as the most
frequent and deadly form of armed conflict in the world. There have been four to
five times as many civil wars as interstate wars during this time period (Sarkees
and Wayman 2010; Gleditsch et al. 2002: 620; chapter 1 in this volume). That
generalization is still largely true: despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022,
interstate wars remain rare.
Second, since 1945, armed conflict has been largely a phenomenon of the
Global South: the predominant form and location of wars has shifted from inter-
state wars among the major powers of Europe, North America, China, and Japan
(prior to 1945) to civil wars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Mason 2004:
3–4).
Third, for a subset of nations in the world, civil war has become a chronic
condition: almost half of the nations that had one civil war during this period later
experienced a relapse into renewed war within a few years after the initial conflict
ended (Collier, Hoeffler, and Söderbom 2004; Collier et al. 2003).
Finally, while the number of civil wars ongoing in the world at any given time
increased steadily from the late 1950s through the mid-1990s, that number began
to decline in the mid-1990s following the end of the Cold War, leveling off at a
relatively steady count of about thirty conflicts ongoing per year in the first years
xiii
xiv Introduction
of this century. As noted earlier, however, this trend has since reversed, with the
number of armed conflicts increasing to the point that 2020 marked a new peak
in the number of ongoing armed conflicts in the world. And the death tolls in the
ongoing Syrian civil war (estimated at more than 392,000 fatalities; Pettersson et
al. 2021) remind us of the serious risks that citizens face from intrastate violence
in today’s world.
Besides these observable patterns in armed conflict, what do we know about
civil wars? How do we explain these shifting patterns in armed conflict? More
specifically, how do we account for where and when civil wars are likely to occur,
when and how they are likely to end, and whether they will recur? In this book,
we have enlisted some of the leading scholars in the field of civil conflict research
to guide us through what the latest research tells us about these big questions in
civil war research. Perhaps more importantly, as each author delves into one of
these streams of civil war research, they highlight the most important questions
and puzzles that have emerged in the field over the last two decades. In mapping
out what the current state of our knowledge indicates about what we know about
civil wars, these authors also locate in that intellectual map the puzzles that define
what we do not know about civil wars. These research questions provide us with
a new research agenda going forward.
The book is divided into three sections. The first five chapters (part I) focus
on issues of civil war onset: what do we know about the factors that make a
nation-state more or less susceptible to the outbreak of civil war? The second
set of chapters (part II) is concerned with the dynamics and outcome of civil
wars, once they are underway. What factors explain the duration and outcome of
civil wars (i.e., whether they end in rebel victory, government victory, or a peace
agreement of some sort)? Once a civil war has ended, what factors make a post-
war country more or less likely to relapse into renewed conflict? The third set of
chapters (part III) addresses new directions in civil war research on phenomena
that may not be implicated exclusively in either the onset, outcome, or duration
of civil wars and that, therefore, have implications beyond any one phase of the
civil conflict process. These topics include the emergence of transitional justice
institutions in post-conflict environments, the “resource curse,” the impact of
the status of women in a society on the civil conflict process, the relationship
between the environment and civil conflicts, and trends in civil war data collec-
tion that have enabled scholars to examine the geographic and temporal patterns
of conflict within a given civil war. Finally, we have added a new chapter on the
role of paramilitary organizations—pro-government militias (PGMs), civilian
self-defense forces (CDFs), and the like—that are distinct from the state’s formal
armed forces but can have critical effects on the duration and outcome of civil
wars, as well as the prospects for one-sided violence against civilian populations.
The remainder of this introductory chapter presents some background on the
different forms of civil conflicts: ethnic versus ideological conflicts, and revolu-
tionary versus secessionist wars. These distinctions can be important in sorting
out different possible causal pathways to civil war onset, duration, and outcome
as well as post-conflict peace duration. Following this discussion, we delineate
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