Political Science
Univeristy
1 Severity of Civil Wars: A quantitative analysis report
1.0 Introduction
Civil wars are brutal and cruel wars: but other than those two realities not enough is known about internal conflicts on many levels. The characteristic length of duration for a civil war is about six years (Fearon and Laitin, 2003). Black (2003) and Fortna (2004) explained that the children under the age often suffers the highest mortality rates
Lacina (2006) asked the question why the number of deaths is higher in some civil wars than others. Lacina (2006) used data from the years 1946 to 2000 to evacuate the combat deaths during the duration of internal conflicts. The severity determinants, when compared the reasons for the conflict starting are not the same, but in fact are very different (Lacina 2006). Three frames were scrutinized; research: the region, the conflict and “the battle deaths by era” during the time between 1946 and 2002 (Lacina, 2006, p. 276). This research used the same quantitative methodology as Lacina (2006) to compare civil wars and their severity from 2006 to 2016.
2.0 Literature Review.
Political literature The outcomes of any war are socially disruptive because they cause poverty and reduce public health plus a change in the population demographics is initiated at the locations where civil wars are fought (Bayer and Rupert 2004; Ghobarah, Huth, and Russett 2003; Black, Morris, and Bryce 2003).
Lacine (20060 raised the issue of the severity of war and identifying the impacts of civil wars based on their severity. The more severe the war the more likely the war will disrupt again (Lacine, 2006). The theoretical determinants of what causes the highest severity in causalities have considered if a large mortality rate in a civil due to a transition of the first part of a “marginal insurgency into a mass movement;” or on the other hand can a small number of insurgents cause a large amount of damage based on a nation-state with a weak government and one that is in disarray?” (Lacine, 2006: 277).
The results of the Lacina (2006) research on the severity of wars did not find that the commonly agreed upon assumptions in the media and general public are accurate. During the period between 1990 and 2002, the majority of wars were categorized as civil conflicts according to the data at PRIO. The half century of civil wars between 1946 and 2002 did not show a small range of battle deaths, but instead showed a range of from 900 to two million deaths (Lacina and Gleditsch, 2003). The median death toll in that period was 10,500 a value “less than 0.5 percent of the maximum deaths occurring during civil wars during the same time period (Lacina and Gleditsch, 2003, p. 278).
The consideration of the twelve years from 1990 to 2002 demonstrated to Lacine (2006) That although the drivers that motivated a civil war are known, the piece that remains unknown is the severity of the conflict. The researcher found that the two following variables did not explain the severity of civil war conflicts state strength and the ethnic or religious heterogeneity of the people in the war zone (Lacine 2006). The findings of the research showed a link between “large wars and ethnic homogeneity” (Lacine, 2006, p. 287). The predictor with the highest strength is the “availability of foreign assistance to the combatants” (Lacine, 2006, p. 287).
Schutte and Weidmann (2011) looked at ingenuous reasons for violence diffusion because most of the research in the area focuses upon the exogenous determinants for the conflict diffusion. Their research focused upon the
The research of Zhukov (2012) explored the impact of the availability of roads on violence diffusion carried out by insurgents using the North Caucus as the civil war studied. Zhukov’s (2012) study showed that contrary to commonly held beliefs insurgents, do rely on the transportation infrastructure and the condition of the roads to diffuse the war into a larger area. The research findings led to a cautionary tale that “logistical constraints” must be included into research methodologies used to predict the determinants of civil war diffusion (Zhukov, 2012). For example the impact of transportation costs will be underestimated if the distances traveled are not included in the calculations about spreading the war (Zhukov, 2012).
A variety of suggestions for the highest determinants in internal wars and the capability to predict the winner based global financial fluctuations has even been proposed (Mitchener et al., 2015). Researchers found that indeed, the international markets can predict the victorious part in a civil war. Their hypothesis was tested on three locations in three different eras
Hypotheses
The hypotheses of this research are the same as reported in the Lacine (2006) publication so that a comparison can be made between the findings of this research and of Lacines. The time period is shifted from 1996 to 2016, firstly the overlap in time gives an indication whether this research was in fact carried out in the same way as Lacine’s (2006) of if the findings greatly diverged from each other.
Hypothesis: If states are experiencng a civil war; the war will be more severe if external support in the form of military assistance is given to one or the others of the parties in conflict (either the government or the insurgents against the government).
Data and Methodology
Severity is not an easy measurement to quantify, so Lacine used the “military severity” in civil wars as a measurement (Lacine, 2006, p. 277). Lacine (2006, p. 277) defined civil war severity as the number of combatants and civilians killed by means of violence in the course of a military contest Lacine (2006) noted that she found her data on the number of battle severities during incidents that are reported by Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Lacina and Gleditsch (2003) justified the definition as based upon the Forth Geneva Convention and international treaties from that event. Civilians in war are protected to a degree that is not forthcoming for combatants in international treaties.
The research used a count of all mortalities as battle deaths that kill “people, soldiers and civilians (who are) killed in combat” (Lacina and Gleditsch, 2003, p. 147). Lacina and Gleditsch (2003) considered “battle deaths” the correct measure for severity because the numbers of deaths are clearly reported; the number of battle deaths gives a measure for the scope, scale and how the military engagement was carried out during the conflict. The value for the numbers of deaths are for deaths directly caused by battled and not the indirect deaths caused by lack of food, medicine and general poverty that results after civil war (Lacina and Gleditsch, 2003). The findings from the last decade were compared to the Lacine (2006) research in order to identify any differences.
Figure 1 Conflicts by Region (https://www.prio.org, 2009)
The general belief is that since the end of the Cold War, conflicts decreased, yet research shows that conflicts has fluctuated (Lacine, 2006). The validity of the data on battle deaths was discussed in the academic in BMJ when an article first came out claiming that PRIO’s database showed that ‘three times as many people were killed in global conflicts and no decline in war deaths is evident’ (Obermeier et al., 2008). Spagat el. (2009) answered with another journal article on methodology that accused Obermeir et al. (2008) of a bad critique. Debate is good for discussing the data, because the number of battle death totals of combatants, non-combatants and civilians is not reported by governments. The largest type of conflict is the Intrastate or Civil War type of conflict as can be easily seen in figure 2. The number of conflicts peaked between 1990 and 1994. (See fig. 3).
Figure onflict types 1946 to 2008 (https://www.prio.org, 2009)
Intensity 1946-2008 (https://www.prio.org)
Data is available on the internet as several websites including PRIO, the Department of Peace and Conflict Research (PCR) at Uppsal Universitet (www.pcr.uu.se). The datasets available are supposed to be easily customized but this researcher did not find that to be the case. The intention was to prepare a graph with the years from 1994 to the present to compare the data with that from Racine (2006) for the years from 1995 to 2002. And then an attempt was made to collect the battle deaths high and battle deaths low, the intensity and the third party data from2002 to the most recent data, in order to pick up where Lacine’s (2006) published research stopped. The variables were to be graphed with the years on the x-axis and the location of the conflicts on the y-axis. That amount of values is too much for the computer system at my disposal to graph, so once again I shortened my ambitious plans.
Conclusion
The collection of battle deaths needs to be standardized and the data needs to be verifiable. Future research is wide open when addressing the issue of intensity(severity) of conflicts because so little has been done up to this point. Another research project could compare the number of battle deaths in the countries caught up in the Cold War to compare battl4e deaths 10 years before the Cold War began, during the Cold War and after the Cold War until the present. A recommendation is that datasets available on the web include intensity and third party columns with the number of battle deaths (in the same data set). Comprehensive data sets on the topic are still being built. In conclusion, the number of conflicts has not been reduced since the end of the Cold War. In fact the number of conflicts, particularly civil wars has grown. I suggest that this is because the world is not held rigid by two great powers is a balance anymore. Instead on country is investing an overwhelming amount of money and soldiers to become involved in ‘pre-emptive’ conflicts. That is a topic that needs more exploration and evaluation.
References
Bayer, R., and M. C. Rupert. 2004. Effects of civil wars on international trade, 1950-92. Journal of Peace Research 41 (6): 699-713.
Black, R., S. Morris, and J. Bryce. 2003. Where and why are 10 million children dying every year? Lancet 361 (9376): 2226-34.
Lacina, B. (2006) ‘Explaining the Severity of Civil Wars’. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50 (2), 276-289
Lacina, B. and Gleditsch, N. P. (2005) 'Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New of Battle Deaths'. European Journal of Population, 21(2), 145-166.
Fearon, James, Laitin, David, 2003. Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war. Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 97, 75–90.
Ghobarah, H. A., P. K. Huth, and B. Russett. 2003. Civilwars kill and maim people—long after the shooting stops. American Political Science Review 97 (2): 189-202.
Guidolin, Massimo, La Ferrara, Eliana, 2007. Diamonds are forever, wars are not: is
conflict bad for private firms? Am. Econ. Rev. 97, 1978–1993.
Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO): https://www.prio.org/Data/Armed-Conflict/Battle-Deaths/
Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) (2009https://www.prio.org/Data/Armed-Conflict/UCDP-PRIO/Armed-Conflicts-Version-X-2009/
Sebastian Schutte, Nils B. Weidmann, Diffusion patterns of violence in civil wars, Political Geography, Volume 30, Issue 3, March 2011, Pages 143-152, ISSN 0962-6298, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.03.005.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629811000424)
Spagat, M. Mack, A., Cooper, T. and Kreutz, J. Estimating war deaths: An arena of Contestation. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 53, 934-950, http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/Additional-Publications/Spagat-Mack-JConflict-Resolution-EstimatingWarDeaths.pdf
Uppsala Conflict Data Program (Date of retrieval: yy/mm/dd) UCDP Conflict Encyclopedia: www.ucdp.uu.se/database, Uppsala University
Appendices
Table A- 1 Asia
