Abstract: Of the 27 major armed conflicts that occurred in 1999, all but two took place within national boundaries. As an impediment to development, internal rebellion especially hurts the world's poorest countries. What motivates civil wars? Greed or grievance? This paper compares two contrasting motivations for rebellion: greed and grievance. Most rebellions are ostensibly in pursuit of a cause, supported by a narrative of grievance. But since grievanceassuagement through rebellion is a public good which a government will not supply, economists predict such rebellions would be rare. Empirically, many rebellions appear to be linked to the capture of resources (such as diamonds in Angola and Sierra Leone, drugs in Colombia, and timber in Cambodia). This paper sets up a simple rational choice model of greed-rebellion and contrasts its predictions with those of a simple grievance model. Some countries return to conflict repeatedly. Are they conflict-prone or is there a feedback effect whereby conflict generates grievance which in turn generates further conflict? It is shown why such a feedback effect might be present in both greed-motivated and grievance rebellions. The results contrast with conventional beliefs about the causes of conflict. A stylized version of conventional beliefs would be that grievance begets conflict which begets grievance which begets further conflict. With such a model, the only point at which to intervene is to reduce the level of objective grievance. The model suggests that what actually happens is that opportunities for predation (controlling primary commodity exports) cause conflict and the grievances this generates induce diasporas to finance further conflict. The point of policy intervention here is to reduce the absolute and relative attraction of primary commodity predation and to reduce the ability of diasporas to fund rebel movements. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent

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Most nations have experienced an internal armed conflict since 1960. Yet while civil war is central to many nations’ development, it has stood at the periphery of economics research and teaching. The past decade has witnessed a long overdue explosion of research into war’s causes and consequences. We summarize progress, identify weaknesses, and chart a path forward. Why war? Existing theory is provocative but incomplete, omitting advances in behavioral economics and making little progress in key areas, like why armed groups form and cohere, or how more than two armed sides compete. Empirical work finds that low per capita incomes and slow economic growth are both robustly linked to civil war. Yet there is little consensus on the most effective policies to avert conflicts or promote postwar recovery. Cross-country analysis of war will benefit from more attention to causal identification and stronger links to theory. We argue that micro-level analysis and case studies are also crucial to decipher war’s causes, conduct, and consequences. We bring a growth theoretic approach to the study of conflict consequences to highlight areas for research, most of all the study of war’s impact on institutions. We

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A key distinction among theories of civil war is between those that are built upon motivation and those that are built upon feasibility. We analyze a comprehensive global sample of civil wars for the period 1965-2004 and subject the results to a range of robustness tests. The data constitute a substantial advance on previous work. We find that variables that are close proxies for feasibility have powerful consequences for the risk of a civil war. Our results substantiate the 'feasibility hypothesis ' that where civil war is feasible it will occur without reference to motivation. 2 1.

The increasing incidence of ethnic conflicts, and the much-publicized consequences of these conflicts, have attracted the interest of many researchers in the social sciences. Many studies have addressed directly the issue of ethnic di-versity and its effects on social conflicts and civil wars. Political scientists have stressed the importance of institutions in the attenuation or intensification of social conflict in ethnically divided societies. Recently economists have connected ethnic diversity with important eco-nomic phenomena like investment, growth, or the quality of government (William Easterly and

Applications of modern methods for analyzing data with missing values, based primarily on multiple imputation, have in the last half-decade become common in American politics and political behavior. Scholars in this subset of political science have thus increasingly avoided the biases and inefficiencies caused by ad hoc methods like listwise deletion and best guess imputation. However, researchers in much of comparative politics and international relations, and others with similar data, have been unable to do the same because the best available imputation methods work poorly with the time-series cross section data structures common in these fields. Weattempttorectify this situation with three related developments. First, we build a multiple imputation model that allows smooth time trends, shifts across cross-sectional units, and correlations over time and space, resulting in far more accurate imputations. Second, we enable analysts to incorporate knowledge from area studies experts via priors on individual missing cell values, rather than on difficult-to-interpret model parameters. Third, because these tasks could not be accomplished within existing imputation algorithms, in that they cannot handle as many variables as needed even in the simpler cross-sectional data for which they were designed, we also develop a new algorithm that substantially expands the range of computationally feasible data types and sizes for which multiple imputation can be used. These developments also make it possible to implement the methods introduced here in freely available open source software that is considerably more reliable than existing algorithms. We develop an approach to analyzing data with

In this paper we apply an econometric model of civil war to the analysis of conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. We show that Africa has had a similar incidence of civil conflict to that of other developing regions, and that, with minor exceptions, its conflicts are consistent with the global pattern of behavior. However, the structure of risk differs considerably from other regions. Africas economic characteristics have made it more vulnerable to conflict, but this has been offset by social characteristics which make its societies atypically safe. We then analyze the contrasting trends of conflict: rising in Africa and declining in other regions. We show that these trends are predicted by the model. Africas rising trend of conflict is due to its atypically poor economic performance. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) stated recently that Africa is the most conflict ridden region of the World and the only region in which the number of armed conflicts is on the increase.

This article provides an empirical investigation of the determinants of terrorism at the country level. In contrast with the previous literature on this subject, which focuses on transnational terrorism only, I use a new measure of terrorism that encompasses both domestic and transnational terrorism. In line with the results of some recent studies, this article shows that terrorist risk is not significantly higher for poorer countries, once the effects of other country-specific characteristics such as the level of political freedom are taken into account. Political freedom is shown to explain terrorism, but it does so in a non-monotonic way: countries in some intermediate range of political freedom are shown to be more prone to terrorism than countries with high levels of political freedom or countries with highly authoritarian regimes. This result suggests that, as experienced recently in Iraq and previously in Spain and Russia, transitions from an authoritarian regime to a democracy may be accompanied by temporary increases in terrorism. Finally, the results suggest that geographic factors are important to sustain terrorist activities.

would like to thank the many individuals who helped assemble the data set on which this article relies. We cannot list all country experts who generously shared their knowledge, but we should