Understanding Civil War: a New Agenda

1 The papers in this Special Issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution are drawn from the first round of a research project on civil war initiated by the World Bank. 2 Civil war is pertinent to the World Bank because it occurs disproportionately in low-income countries and evidently further reduces income. Hence, it is of concern for an organization whose mission is poverty reduction. Since the World Bank is a financial institution, the instruments over which it has influence are primarily economic. One focus of the project has therefore been to investigate the extent to which civil war might have economic causes, as well as the more evident economic consequences. However, the project's objective is wider than to help guide the Bank's own activities. In the international community, many policies towards conflict have to date been guided by little more than rules of thumb derived by practitioners from their experience. Policy has not rested on a solid foundation of research-derived knowledge. The ultimate goal of our research project is to stimulate the research community into providing these foundations. 3 If conflict has a substantial economic dimension, economists can make a positive contribution to conflict analysis. Most contributors to this volume are economists, but this does not presuppose that economics is more important—or even as important—as political science in generating better research foundations for policy. Rather, it is an effort to rectify what we perceive as the relative neglect of economics in the study of conflict and, correspondingly, the integration of conflict in the study of economics. Conflict policy and analysis can be divided into three areas: prevention, settlement, and post-conflict recovery. The papers in this collection discuss questions of relevance to all three areas: they attempt to empirically discover the factors that cause conflict; they deal explicitly with the problem of reaching a settlement of civil war; and 2 they analyze the problem of securing credible commitments to a settlement, an issue that bears directly upon the problems of maintaining a post-settlement peace. In considering the causes of conflict, we draw on Hirshleifer's (1995) distinction between preferences, opportunities, and misperceptions. This distinction can also be applied to the difficulties of reaching a settlement and maintaining postwar peace. Let us start with the causes of conflict. Understanding the causes of observed conflict is not necessarily synonymous with understanding its motivation. Motive may or may not be more decisive than opportunity …