James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin.

“Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War”

American Political Science Review 97, 1 (Feb 2003): pp.75-90

General argument:
What explains: civil wars (127 from 1945-1999, vs. 25 interstate wars) and the apparent
increase of civil wars after the end of the Cold War?
Common explanations (rejected):

The end of the Cold War and associated changes in the international environment
 More civil wars

More ethnic or religious diversity  More civil war

Higher political grievances (less civil liberties, repression of minorities)  More
civil war
Fearon and Laitin argue that:

First, the higher numbers of civil wars in the 1990s result from a gradual
accumulation of conflicts since WWII, not because the rate of civil war outbreak
increased with the end of the Cold War. The rate of outbreak of civil conflict is,
on average, about 2.31 per year since 1945, highly variable but no significant
trends going up or down. Civil conflicts break out at a faster rate than they die.

Theories of ethnic fractionalization or religious/political grievances don’t account
for civil war. None of the variables are significant, once income is controlled for.
The causes of civil conflict lie in Insurgency Theory – Most civil conflicts have
been insurgencies, “a technology of military conflict characterized by small,
lightly armed bands practicing guerrilla warfare from rural base areas.”
Conditions for insurgency are the key independent variables. Theory about
political opportunity. Most important ones include:
o Weak governments – in terms of political and military capabilities and
control over rural areas (post-colonization new governments)
o Rough terrain (rural base, distanced from center of power)
o Large population
o Access to weapons/foreign support for the insurgency

They test the ethnic, religious, and political grievance variables against the insurgency
variables, and find strong support for insurgency variables. In short, it’s conditions for
insurgency that predict outbreak of civil wars, not culture/identity or domestic political
regime variables.
The sources of preferences don’t matter, it seems – what matters is whether opportunities
are available to translate whatever the preferences are into insurgencies.

Empirics: Large N analysis using several models, with outbreak of civil conflict as the
DV, and a large number of IVs testing the competing explanations.

One of the most important IVs is Per Capita Income, which is a proxy for state power
(higher per capita income means stronger state, lower means weaker state, which is a
condition for insurgency) – Fearon and Laitin believe weak state power, rather than
economic variables are doing the real work, though they use an economic variable to
approximate state power. The argue that the assumption is warranted because other
economic variables (% of young males and male secondary schooling rates) don’t predict
as well as they should, if economics were driving civil war. But they admit that this is not
definitive (so can they really be sure it’s weak state power and no poverty that makes for
insurgency?)

The results:
Ethnic diversity, inequality, discrimination, and democratic institutions are weakly
correlated with the onset of civil war.
Instead, the odds of a civil war are most strongly correlated with log per capita income,
whether the state is new, whether a state is an oil exporter, and the extent of mountainous
terrain. This supports the insurgency hypotheses above.

Critiques:
Like Mueller, this approach takes interests or preferences as given, and says that without
certain conditions (those favoring insurgency) these interests are not actual movers of
conflict. A motive, even an ethnic or cultural one, isn’t enough to spur conflict.
However, without a motive, even if there is conflict, it may be directed towards other
victims. And are there instances where there exist conditions for insurgency but there’s
no conflict? Can you have conflict if you don’t have a motive?

Proving that ethnicity is not the main driver of conflict does not show us that ethnicity
doesn’t matter, only that ethnic differences alone don’t cause conflict, for even hate
crimes require arms. Ethnicity is important in preference formation, whether at the elite
or non-elite level, though other factors translate preferences into action. The content of
preferences does matter, however, for two fundamentally opposed sets of preferences will
have a harder time converging peacefully than two similar ones.

Where this fits in the literature: Speaks to literatures on identity and conflict and civil
wars