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Why do civil wars occur? Another look at the theoretical dichotomy of opportunity versus grievance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2011

ZEYNEP TAYDAS ,
JASON ENIA  and
PATRICK JAMES
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Abstract

The purpose of this article is to review major theoretical arguments with regard to the causes of civil war and identify problems associated with the conceptual juxtaposition of opportunity versus grievance that predominates in the field. While they are critical aspects of conflict processes, perception of opportunity and grievance as two mutually competing explanations or separate categories ultimately can limit, rather than facilitate, our understanding of civil conflicts. For example, we show that not all motives can be designated easily as deriving from one or the other. In addition, the existing dichotomous framework masks other important questions about the way that collective action is achieved in some circumstances and not others or the way that some factors seem to generate grievances at one stage, perhaps, but then an opportunity at another or vice versa. Thus the priority should be to develop an integrated, comprehensive approach that can account for fundamental aspects of complex conflict processes. We conclude by providing suggestions for future research on civil conflict.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 5 , December 2011 , pp. 2627 - 2650
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2011

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References

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67 Keen, ‘Liberalization and Conflict’; Mark Bradbury, ‘Rebels without a Cause? An Exploratory Report on the Conflict in Sierra Leone’ (CARE International, April 1995).

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70 David M. Malone and Heiko Nitzschke, ‘Economic Agendas in Civil Wars: What We Know, What We Need to Know’, UNU-WIDER Discussion Paper No. 7, 2005), p. 6.

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73 Jackson, ‘The March of the Lord's Resistance Army’; Vinci, ‘Greed and Grievance Reconsidered’; Vinci, Anthony, ‘Existential Motivations in the Lord's Resistance Army's Continuing Conflict’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 30:4 (2007), pp. 337–352CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

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75 Ibid., p. 47.

76 See Vinci, ‘Existential Motivations’. In fact, much of the qualitative literature on civil war points to a number of important causal factors that the quantitative literature does not. This is precisely because of the latter's focus on grievance and opportunity. This may be due in part to the fact that the qualitative approach to civil war starts by treating ideologically driven conflicts and ethnic conflicts as two distinctly different analytical concepts, while the quantitative literature begins with an amalgam concept that is easier to quantify. The result is that the qualitative approach has been able uncover a variety of important causal factors such as leadership and loyalty. As an example, see Branch, Daniel, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar .

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79 Tilly, Charles, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar . For examples see, Buhaug, ‘Relative Capability and Rebel Objectives’; Fearon and Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’.

80 It is a common practice in the literature to assess state capacity (especially the coercive capacity of the state) as described above using a catchall proxy, namely, income per capita. See Fearon and Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’; and Lacina, Bethany, ‘Explaining the Severity of Civil Wars’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50:2 (2006), pp. 276–289CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

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97 Gurr, Minorities at Risk; Gurr, Peoples Versus States; Saxton, ‘Repression, Grievances, Mobilization, and Rebellion; Saxton and Benson, ‘Means, Motives, and Opportunities’.

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100 See, for example, Brancati, Dawn, ‘Political Aftershocks: The Impact of Earthquakes on Intrastate Conflict’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 51:5 (2007), pp. 715–743CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Jason S. Enia, ‘Shaking The Foundations of Violent Civil Conflict: Institutions, Disasters, and the Political Economies of State-Rebel Interaction’, (PhD Dissertation: University of Southern California, 2009); and Nel and Righarts, ‘Natural Disasters and the Risk of Violent Civil Conflict’.

101 Ngaruko and Janvier D. Nkurunziza, ‘Civil War and Its Duration in Burundi’.

102 Zinn, ‘Theory Versus Reality’.

103 Humphreys and Mohamed, ‘Senegal and Mali’.

104 Ibid.

105 Makdisi and Richard Sadaka, ‘The Lebanese Civil War’.

106 Lund, ‘Greed and Grievance Diverted’.

107 Zinn, ‘Theory Versus Reality’.

108 Ngaruko and Janvier D. Nkurunziza, ‘Civil War and Its Duration in Burundi’.

109 Lowi, ‘Algeria, 1992–2002’.

110 Kalyvas and Nicholas Sambanis ‘Bosnia's Civil War’.

111 Olsson and Fors, ‘Congo: The Prize for Predation’; Ndikumana and Emizet, ‘The Economics of Civil War’.

112 Weinstein, Jeremy and Francisco, L., ‘The Civil War in Mozambique’ in Collier, and Sambanis, (eds), Understanding Civil WarGoogle Scholar .

113 Ross, ‘Resources and Rebellion in Aceh’; Aspinall, Edward, ‘The Construction of Grievance Natural Resources and Identity in a Separatist Conflict’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 51:6 (2007), pp. 950–972CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

114 Zinn, ‘Theory Versus Reality’.

115 Humphreys, Macartan and Weinstein, Jeremy M., ‘Who Fights? The Determinants of Participation in Civil War’, American Journal of Political Science, 52:2 (2008), pp. 436–455CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

116 The cases and years coded as false negatives in the table represent years where the Collier-Hoeffler model predicts a low probability for civil war when it actually occurred. For those cases and years coded as false positives, the model predicts a high probability for civil war, but in reality civil war either does not break out or the violence that does occur misses the threshold of 1,000 battle-related deaths that is commonly used to identify civil wars.