Group Grievances, Opportunity, and the Onset of Civil War: Some Theory and Tests of Competing Mechanisms, 1990–2017

Indra de Soysa (), Finseraas Henning and Vadlamannati Krishna
Additional contact information
Indra de Soysa: Department of Political Science (ISS), Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU), 7491 Trondheim, Norway
Finseraas Henning: Department of Political Science (ISS), Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU), 7491 Trondheim, Norway
Vadlamannati Krishna: Department of Politics and International Relations (SPIRE), 8797 University College Dublin (UCD) , Dublin, Ireland

Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, 2024, vol. 30, issue 2, 171-205

Abstract: Recent scholarship claims that group grievances due to political exclusion and discrimination drive civil wars. The grievance perspective suggests that socio-psychological factors allow groups to overcome collective action problems. We argue that the grievance perspective (over)focuses on the ends and not means, which are critical to explain how groups survive state sanction, allowing contention to escalate to civil war. We suggest that inclusive economic governance reduces investment in state-evading infrastructures for quotidian economic reasons, leading to the buildup of rebellion-specific capital. Physical and human infrastructures of state evasion form the logistical bases for survival against state sanction. Our analyses show that group-grievance-generating political factors are poorer predictors of civil war compared with economic freedoms measured as free-market friendly policies and the private ownership of economies, which should reduce economic rents accruing to state-evading shadow markets. Our results are robust to several alternative models, data, and estimating method. Theory that ignores the means explain the main causes of costly violence only partially, or mistake symptom for cause. Freedom and inclusiveness, which should reduce grievances, are intrinsically valuable, but they are hard to obtain when violence is waged successfully for more narrower ends.

Keywords: civil war; grievances; opportunity; economic freedom; parallel markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D74 H56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/peps-2023-0053 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:pepspp:v:30:y:2024:i:2:p:171-205:n:1001

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/peps/html

DOI: 10.1515/peps-2023-0053

Access Statistics for this article

Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy is currently edited by Raul Caruso

More articles in Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().