Explaining the Severity of Civil Wars

Bethany Lacina
Additional contact information
Bethany Lacina: Political Science Department, Stanford University

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2006, vol. 50, issue 2, 276-289

Abstract: The burgeoning literature on civil conflicts seldom considers why some civil wars are so much deadlier than others. This article investigates that question using a new data set of the number of combat deaths in internal conflicts from 1946 to 2002. The first section presents descriptive statistics on battle deaths by era, conflict type, and region. The article then tests state strength, regime type, and cultural characteristics as predictors of the number of combat deaths in civil war. The determinants of conflict severity seem to be quite different from those for conflict onset. Democracy, rather than economic development or state military strength, is most strongly correlated with fewer deaths; wars have also been less deadly on average since the end of the cold war. Religious heterogeneity does not explain the military severity of internal violence, and surprisingly, ethnic homogeneity may be related to more deadly conflicts.

Keywords: civil war; battle deaths; democracy; state strength; ethnic violence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022002705284828 (text/html)

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:sae:jocore:v:50:y:2006:i:2:p:276-289

DOI: 10.1177/0022002705284828

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().