Riots, coups and civil war: revisiting the greed and grievance debate

Cristina Bodea and Ibrahim A. Elbadawi

No 4397, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: The most influential recent work on the determinants of civil wars found the factors associated with the grievance motivation to be largely irrelevant. Our paper subjects the results of this empirical work to further scrutiny by embedding the study of civil war in a more general analysis of varieties of violent contestation of political power within the borders of the state. Such an approach, we argue, will have important implications for how we think theoretically about the occurrence of domestic war as well as how we specify our empirical tests. In the empirical model, the manifestation of domestic conflict range from low intensity violence and coups to civil war. Our multinomial specification of domestic conflict supports the hypothesis that diversity accentuates distributional conflict and thus increases the risk of civil war. We also find that democracies may be more efficient than autocracies in reducing the risk of civil war.

Keywords: Post Conflict Reconstruction; Population Policies; Social Conflict and Violence; Peace&Peacekeeping; Hazard Risk Management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-his and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4397

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