Beyond 'Greed and Grievance': The Causes of Civil Wars

Abstract

Civil wars are the most common form of warfare in the world, yet the question of their causes remains not only under-researched, but in a state of confusion. The authors of the “greed-grievance” dichotomy have since written that this dichotomy should be abandoned, joining a long list of scholars calling for a theory which specifies the interaction of economic and social-psychological factors. This paper offers such a theory, but also delineates two questions in the causes of civil war onset, distinguishing the social-structural question of what creates the potential for war along a particular identity fault line from the temporal question of why war breaks out at a particular point in time. The former is addressed by applying the sociological concept of overlapping vs. cross-cutting cleavages to the relationship between identity divisions and economic and political divisions, with the potential for civil war arising from a situation of overlapping social cleavages. The temporal question focuses on the role of catalysts such as economic decline and regime change in escalating that potential in the buildup to civil war. Then, a third causal stage is discussed, focusing on whether the extent of violence meets definitional casualty thresholds to qualify as a civil war, as a function of government response to the outbreak of violence. Evidence is provided from four cases. Ivory Coast and Yugoslavia both represent clear examples of overlapping social cleavages, yet both were heralded for their stability and relative prosperity for decades before they were torn apart, thus demonstrating that overlapping cleavages are necessary but not sufficient without the temporal role of catalysts such as economic decline. Haiti illustrates a near-total lack of social cleavages, thus its abundance of negative catalysts has never resulted in a civil war, demonstrating that negative catalysts are not sufficient without an underlying social structure of overlapping social cleavages. The case of India’s Hindu-Muslim cleavage illustrates the structure of cross-cutting cleavages and its ability to mitigate conflict which has been to the brink of civil war many times. Finally, the implications of this theory for further research and for policy are discussed. It is emphasized that existing measures of inequality tell us nothing about how inequality is distributed among identity groups, thus quantifying this process cannot be achieved through reduced measurement error, nor through an interaction term combining gini coefficients with measures of ethnic fractionalization. New measures will be required. Further, this theory supports criticism of power-sharing agreements, as such arrangements entrench the structure of overlapping social cleavages, giving permanence to the potential for civil war.