Fearon, James D. and David Laitin. (2003) Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War.

American Political Science Review 97, 1 (February), 75-90. Fearon and Laitin ask what explains the apparent recent prevalence of violent civil wars. Fearon and Laitins findings run counter to 3 points of conventional wisdom: 1) they argue that the present number of civil wars is due to the gradual accumulation in number of conflicts rather than a dramatic upswing since the end of the Cold War 2) a great degree of ethnic or religious diversity does not by itself make a country more prone to war 3) strong ethnic or political grievances are not good predictors of the onset of civil conflict Instead, the authors argue that when conditions favor insurgency the onset of civil conflict is more likely. They suggest that states that are weak organizationally, financially, and politically are more likely to experience insurgencies, while insurgents are aided by rough terrain, local knowledge, and large populations. The authors have built their own dataset for civil war between 1945 and 1999 that is very similar to the Correlates of War except that Fearon and Laitin include anti-colonial wars (although they perform the analysis both with and without these cases). The authors identify several existing explanations for the ethnic nationalism understanding of civil war, labeling them perennialists and modernists and present a hypothesis to test these positions by measuring diversity as well as separate hypotheses to include economic modernization, a single ethnic majority and significant minority, democracy and civil liberties, discriminatory policies along lines of language or religion, greater income inequality, and for countries with ethnic minorities of 5% or more. Fearon and Laitin then turn to insurgencies, describing it as a technology of military conflict characterized by small, lightly armed bands practicing guerrilla warfare from rural base areas. From this they hypothesize that rough terrain, cross-border sanctuaries, a cooperative local population, and a rural base will make insurgencies and civil war more likely. The capabilities of the state are also important and the authors use per capita income as a proxy with the hypothesis that it will stand in for a states overall ability to fight against insurgency, the degree of penetration into rural areas, and the ease with which fighters can be recruited into the insurgency. Additionally, the authors hypothesize that insurgency will be favored by a newly independent state, political instability, a mixed democratic and autocratic regime, a large population, a base separate from the states power center, foreign assistance, high-value low-weight resources, and a state with high oil revenues. Finally, Fearon and Laitin present the hypothesis that after controlling for per capita income neither political democracy, the presence of civil liberties, higher income inequality, nor nondiscriminatory linguistic or religious policies should associate strongly with lower odds of civil war. (81) The authors find support for the hypotheses that conditions that favor insurgency make the onset of civil war more likely, while those related to ethnicity are not statistically significant once they control for per capita income. Strengths: the authors perform a systemic test of the onset of civil war and produce findings that contravene conventional wisdom concerning the role of ethnicity. Weaknesses: the authors dismiss ethnic division as a probable cause of civil war, and while they find that conditions that favor insurgency are more likely to result in war they offer nothing

as what the causes of these conflicts are; is per capita income really an accurate proxy for state capability?