Riots, Coups and Civil War: Revisiting the Greed and Grievance Debate

35 Pages Posted: 20 Apr 2016

See all articles by Cristina Bodea

Cristina Bodea

Michigan State University

Ibrahim Elbadawi

World Bank - Economic Development Institute

Date Written: November 1, 2007

Abstract

The most influential recent work on the determinants of civil warsfound 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

Suggested Citation

Bodea, Cristina and Elbadawi, Ibrahim, Riots, Coups and Civil War: Revisiting the Greed and Grievance Debate (November 1, 2007). World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 4397, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1030167

Cristina Bodea

Michigan State University ( email )

Agriculture Hall
East Lansing, MI 48824-1122
United States

Ibrahim Elbadawi (Contact Author)

World Bank - Economic Development Institute ( email )

1818 H Street
Washington, DC 20433
United States

HOME PAGE: http://econ.worldbank.org/staff/ielbadawi