Why They Fight Hypotheses on the Causes of Contemporary Deadly Conflict

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Why they fight: Hypotheses on the causes of contemporary deadly conflict a

Daniel Byman & Stephen Van Evera a

b

Policy analyst at the RAND Corporation,

b

Associate professor of political science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Published online: 24 Dec 2007.

To cite this article: Daniel Byman & Stephen Van Evera (1998) Why they fight: Hypotheses on the causes of contemporary deadly conflict, Security Studies, 7:3, 1-50, DOI: 10.1080/09636419808429350 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09636419808429350

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WHY THEY FIGHT: HYPOTHESES ON THE CAUSES OF CONTEMPORARY DEADLY CONFLICT

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DANIEL BYMAN AND STEPHEN VAN EVERA

HE COLD WAR'S end in 1989 evoked both euphoria and gloom about the prospects for a peaceful world. Many greeted the fall of the Berlin Wall as a harbinger of a tranquil new millennium. Then an opposite view emerged as violence erupted in the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and elsewhere: the world was falling into a "new world disorder." One scholar claimed in 1992 that "while the end of die cold war has greatly reduced the chance of global nuclear catastrophe, it has, inadvertendy, increased the chances for lesser disasters such as regional wars."1 Anodier argued in 1993 that "the key narrative of the new world order is the disintegration of nation-states into ethnic civil war."2 What pattern has in fact emerged? Specifically, has violence increased or diminished since die end of die cold war? Where is post—cold war violence located, and what form does it assume—civil or international? What are its causes? What future for war can we extrapolate from current conditions? These are the questions diis paper addresses. We argue that the optimists of 1989 were closer to the truth than the Cassandras: there is no "new world disorder." While the post-cold war

T

Daniel Byman is policy analyst at the RAND Corporation; Stephen Van Evera is associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The authors would like to thank Michael Brown, Taylor Seybolt, Jeremy Shapiro, Benjamin Valentino, and the reviewers of Security Studies for comments on earlier versions of this work. 1. Kim R. Holmes, "The New World Disorder," The Heritage Lectures no. 42, 22 October 1992. 2. Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging (New York: Noonday Press, 1993), 5. Daniel Schorr likewise noted in 1994 that the cold war's end had spawned "conflict and misery more horrible than the theoretical visions of superpower collision. The danger now is not bombs but people, people in rage against each other and people fleeing from the rage" (Daniel Schorr, "End of Cold War Leads to Ethnic Strife," 6 September 1992, broadcast on National Public Radio).

SECURITY STUDIES 7, no. 3 (spring 1998): 1-50 Published by Frank Cass, London.

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SECURITY STUDIES 7, NO. 3

world is hardly tranquil, the number of active wars worldwide has fallen markedly since 1989. The number of civil wars has fallen significantly— eleven states experienced civil wars in 1996 compared with seventeen in 1989—and international conflict has nearly vanished, at least for now. We hypothesi2e that seven causes of civil violence stand out in importance (that is, in their potence and prevalence) in the cold war and post—cold war periods. They are: 1. The collapse of post—Second World War empires; 2. A lack of regime legitimacy; 3. State weakness; 4. Communal hegemonism; 5. Revolutionary ideology; 6. Aristocratic intransigence; 7. Superpower proxy wars. Together, we argue, these seven causes account for most civil violence in recent times. These hypotheses were inferred by studying all the civil wars that have occurred since 1989. Some also were borrowed from existing works on civil violence. Our first hypothesis is that the collapse of empire, embodied in the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, generated a number of recent wars. Imperial collapse spawns successor states that are primed for civil war. These states often have illegitimate regimes, commingled hostile populations, and contested borders. Moreover, no "rules of the road" define the rights and responsibilities of the former metropole or other external powers in the former imperial zone; hence outsiders often intervene to claim a sphere of influence or to disrupt another power's sphere, sparking civil conflict. These dangers caused considerable carnage after many past imperial collapses. Massive killing occurred after the 3. We use the terms "civil war," "civil violence" and "civil conflict" interchangeably in this paper. By these terms we include political conflicts with the following attributes: (1) at least 1,000 deaths during the total span of the conflict; (2) the people involved in the violence are geographically contiguous (to exclude European colonial wars); and (3) the people involved are concerned about living together in the same political unit. This definition includes organized civil wars and also communal riots, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and other instances where bloodshed was high but only one side was responsible for the killings while the other side (or sides) suffered disproportionately. This definition resembles the definitions other scholars use for civil war but is broader than two commonly accepted definitions—those of Roy Licklider and of J. David Singer and Melvin Small. See Roy Licklider, "How Civil Wars End," in Roy Licklider, ed., Stopping the Killing (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 9, and Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816-1980 (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982), 210.

Licklider defines civil war to include "large-scale violence among geographically contiguous people concerned about possibly having to live with one another in the same political unit after the conflict." For Licklider, however, civil war must also involve multiple sovereignty— a fact that distinguishes civil wars from other types of domestic violence. We do not, however, include multiple sovereignty in our definition. In their definition of civil war, Singer and Small are careful to exclude both "regional internal war"—a situation where subnational governments clash—and communal violence, where there is no government. Our definition of civil conflict would include both of these phenomena. Small and Singer also limit the cases they examine to wars where over 1,000 people died in one year, while we also examine cases where 1,000 people died during the total span of the conflict.

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Hypotheses on the Causes of Contemporary Deadly Conflict

3

British, French, Ottomans, and Portuguese withdrew from their empires earlier in this century. Chaos likewise followed the collapse of ancient empires from China to Rome. The collapses of the Soviet and Yugoslav empires resulted in massive bloodshed for similar reasons: they spawned frail successor governments that ruled hostile intermingled populations and often faced destructive interference by the former metropole. A lack of regime legitimacy caused many civil wars both during and after the cold war. Civil-war-causing crises of government legitimacy have sprung from two main causes: the growth of restive middle classes in authoritarian states, and a lack of regime accountability, which leads in turn to corrupt or incompetent state policies. Such legitimacy crises cause violence both when a regime tries to regain legitimacy and when a regime tries to suppress dissent—a dilemma we label "the reform trap." To regain legitimacy, besieged authoritarian regimes may move to democratize. Democratization, however, can spawn conflict as old elites inflame and manipulate hatreds in an effort to gain or remain in power. Democratization can also spawn conflict if majoritarian democratic rules are adopted that cast all power to tyrannical majorities, driving oppressed minorities to rebel. Finally, democratization can spawn war by giving political space to hardened secessionist groups that cannot be appeased by power-sharing and instead exploit democratic freedoms to organize for war. Democracy causes peace between mature democracies, but democratization is a dangerous cause of war in multiethnic authoritarian states; hence crises of regime legitimacy that trigger democratization are also causes of war. Alternately, regimes that eschew democratization and instead attempt to suppress dissent often "hunker down," relying on an increasingly narrow core to defend them. Hunkering down may enable a regime to survive a short-term challenge to its legitimacy, but it can cause violent resistance by excluded social groups and does little to ease the original legitimacy crisis. 4. For works on the politics of empire, see Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century (New York: Dell, 1966); Richard L. Rudolph and David F. Good, eds., Nationalism and Empire: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin's, 1992); and Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and InternationalAmbition(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). For an examination of the relationship between the collapse of empires and war, see Jonathan Ladinsky, "After the Fall: The Collapse of Empires and the Causes of War" (Ph.D. diss., MIT, forthcoming). 5. The "reform trap" is similar to the "King's dilemma" analyzed definitively by Samuel Huntington. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 177-91. Huntington argues that a traditional leader seeking to modernize may inadvertently create instability that, in the end, causes the collapse of the traditional order.

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SECURITY STUDIES 7, NO. 3

This second war-cause grew more prevalent with the cold war's end, as the collapse of communism and the triumph of free-market liberalism discredited repressive and statist ideologies throughout the world. Regimes that embraced these ideologies lost legitimacy and often undertook destabilizing reforms. A third leading cause of civil conflict is state weakness. The spread of modern small arms among Third World populations has weakened governments' relative position vis-a-vis potential civil opponents over the past few decades. The end of superpower aid to beleaguered governments has further weakened many authoritarian regimes since 1989. This weakening, in turn, has made it easier for groups to challenge governments by force. A fourth cause is communal hegemonism —the aspiration of ethnic, religious, clan or class groups for hegemony over other groups. Violence often results when hegemonistic groups seek to impose their way of life on others, particularly on peoples that have a well-developed group identity of their own. Peace is strongest when groups adopt a live-and-let-live stance toward others. The war-causing effects of communal hegemonism are catalyzed by the first three causes. Submerged hegemonistic groups are freer to go on a rampage, and are more likely to provoke defensive violence by others, when an empire collapses, regime legitimacy declines, or central power weakens. Fifth, revolutionary political ideas have caused civil war by leading groups to adopt extreme goals and tactics that precluded peaceful compromise with others. Marxist-Leninist ideas have fueled civil wars worldwide since 1917, by leading movements of the disenfranchised to embrace extreme communist political programs. Muslim revolutionary movements have likewise triggered civil violence in the Arab world and South Asia in recent years. By delegitimizing Marxist-Leninist political ideas, the Soviet collapse vastly reduced the prevalence of this important cause of war. Sixth, aristocratic intransigence—the refusal of elites in some steeply stratified states to share power and wealth—has triggered several recent civil wars (for example, in Nicaragua in the 1970s and in El Salvador and 6. We use the term "communal" in this essay to encompass ethnic, religious, tribal, and linguistic groups. A communal group is a group of people bound together by a belief of common heritage and group distinctiveness, often reinforced by religion, perceived kinship ties, language, and history. Examples of communal groups are Turks (a common language, perceptions of a shared history) and Jews (belief in common ancestry reinforced by a common religion and history). Large tribal groups and clans that perceive themselves as having a common identity fall under this category as well.

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Hypotheses on the Causes of Contemporary Deadly Conflict

5

Guatemala in the 1980s). This danger has diminished with the cold war's end, as democratic norms have spread to conservative elites and as these elites have lost unqualified U.S. backing. This loss has forced them to moderate their behavior. The fourth, fifth and sixth causes are all examples of a more general phenomenon—extremism in political ends and means. Peace among groups, classes and movements is most threatened when they insist on dominance and adopt take-no-prisoners tactics. Seventh, the superpower competition for influence in Third World states was a major cause of civil conflict during the cold war. A number of Third World states (Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Ethiopia, among others) became cold-war battlegrounds when one or both superpowers backed proxies or directly intervened to support client groups. The cold war's end stopped this competition and slowed or ended the civil violence it spawned. All seven causes operated both during and after the cold war, but some were more prevalent during the cold war while some have been more prevalent afterward. Specifically, the first three causes listed above (collapse of empire, regime illegitimacy, and state weakness) grew more abundant after 1989, the fourth (communal hegemonism) stood roughly constant across both periods, and the last three (revolutionary ideology, aristocratic intransigence, and superpower competition) abated sharply after 1989. The abatement of these last three causes largely explains the net decline in civil violence since 1989. The most important of these causes of war since 1989 were the loss of government legitimacy and communal hegemonism. Of thirty-seven countries that have suffered conflicts since the fall of the Berlin Wall, conflict between a hegemonistic ethnic group and other groups helped fuel twenty-five conflicts. The loss of regime legitimacy was a major cause of nineteen wars. In fourteen conflicts the governments were too weak to suppress or appease even minor rebellions, a weakness that led to a larger conflagration. The collapse of empire also helped precipitate thirteen recent conflicts, including five of the eleven "new" conflicts which were not active before 1989. Revolutionary ideologies were a major cause of eleven conflicts (with communism being the culprit ideology in five of these eleven). Superpower competition was a major causes of eight conflicts; aristocratic intransigence a major cause of four.

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Table 1 LOCATIONS OF RECENT CIVIL VIOLENCE

Conflict location

Conflict active in year 1989

Afghanistan

Yes

1990 Yes

1991 Yes

1992 Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Azerbaijan/Armenia Burma

No*

?*

?*

Yes

No*

Chad

?*

Yes

Colombia

Yes

El Salvador Ethiopia

Haiti

1996

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No*

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No*

Yes

P*

No*

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No*

No*

No*

No*

No*

No*

Yes

No*

Yes

Yes

No*

No*

Yes**

Yes

Yes

No*

Yes

Yes

Yes Yes

?*

Yes

No*

No*

?*

?*

?*

Georgia Guatemala

1995

Yes

Burundi Cambodia

1994

Yes

Algeria Angola

1993

No*

No*

No* ?*

No*

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India***

Yes (Punjab)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Indonesia

No*

Yes

No*

No*

Iraq

No*

No*

Yes

Lebanon

Yes

Yes Yes Yes

Liberia Mozambique

Yes

Yes (Kashmir)

No*

No*

No*

Yes**

Yes**

Yes**

Yes**

Yes'

?*

Yes

?*

?*

?*

?*

Yes

Yes ?*

Yes

No*

No*

No*

Yes

Yes

Pakistan Peru

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No*

Philippines

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No*

No*

Romania

Yes

Russia (Chechnya) Rwanda

Yes

Yes

Sierra Leone

Yes

Yes

?*

?*

Yes

Somalia

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

?*

?*

?*

South Africa****

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

?*

Sri Lanka

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

?*

Yes

(see key on pp. 8-9)

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Table 1 (continued) Conflict active in year

Conflict location 1989 Sudan

Yes

1990 Yes

1991 Yes

Tajikistan Turkey

No*

?*

?*

Uganda

Yes

?*

Yes

1992

1993

Yes

?*

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

1994 ?*

1995

1996

Yes

Yes**

No*

No*

No*

Yes

Yes

Yes ?*

Yes

Yemen Yugoslavia (and successor states)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Zaire

Yes

Total Wars

17

17

14

20

17

12

11

11

Total conflicts active*****

23

23

23

23

24

25

23

22

Countries in italics are home to recurring or constant conflicts (that is countries that suffered internal wars on and off or continually in the 1970s and 1980s.) Of the thirty-sevn conflicts listed above, twenty-six were recurring or constant conflicts. *

Conflict was active in the year in question but probably did not reach 1,000 deaths a year. A "no" in the box indicates that data are available, while a "?" indicates that precise figures are not available. Conflicts with a "?" and a "no" are not included in the "Total Wars" figure, but are included in the "Total Conflicts Active" box.

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**

Conflict deaths probably reached 1,000 deaths a year, but precise figures are unavailable. In some cases, such as the Sudan, it is highly likely that deaths from civil violence, exceeded the 1,000 death figure considerably.

***

India is home to both recurring conflicts (Punjab) and nonrecurring ones (Assam).

****

The South African conflict changed from an ANC-government struggle to one between Zulu groups and ANC partisans. An "active" conflict includes conflicts that reached the 1,000 deaths a year criteria and those that did not reach this level but were not completely resolved.

*****

We list each conflict by location even though several locations (such as India) are home to multiple conflicts that often have highly different causes. When a conflict occurred in an area under different sovereignties (for example the CroatSerb conflict occurred in both "Yugoslavia" and "Croatia") we list it according to where the conflict began. Thus, conflicts in the former Soviet Union are generally listed under their successor states, as the fighting did not break out until after the Soviet Union collapse. On the other hand, we count the former Yugoslavia as one location because the fighting began there when the union was intact. Thus, other descriptions of civil violence might list more conflicts or fewer, depending on how they code various conflicts. A change in coding, however, would not significantly change the conclusions of this paper.

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SECURITY STUDIES 7, NO. 3

The next section defines civil violence and describes post-cold war trends in its incidence and location. The subsequent section describes the seven prime causes of recent (that is, since 1989) civil violence. Our conclusion argues that civil war seems likely to diminish further in the decades ahead, but one major cause of civil war—democratization in multiethnic states—will raise serious risks down the road. There is no widely used source that codes the causes of the civil wars we discuss. Lacking such a source, our judgments on these wars' causes are authors' estimates based on our survey of mainstream press accounts and other secondary sources. Others would code many of these cases differently, but we think our coding fairly reflects press and other secondary accounts.

RECENT TRENDS IN THE INCIDENCE OF CIVIL CONFLICT

J-ylHREE SEPARATE measures of civil conflict indicate that it briefly J . increased after the cold war ended, but it then quickly faded back to levels at or below those of the late cold war. Although each measure uses different criteria, all three show the same overall trend. The "new world disorder" was short-lived, and the world today is becoming more peaceful. The number of states experiencing civil conflict. It offers our count of the

number of states with major civil conflicts under way.8 Table 1 reveals that the number of states with ongoing conflicts increased right after the end of the cold war but then declined sharply, falling to levels well below late coldwar levels by 1995. In 1989 seventeen countries suffered civil conflicts involving more than 1,000 deaths. The number of states with active civil conflicts peaked in 1992, when twenty countries had major civil conflicts under way. By 1996, however, the total number of countries experiencing 7. We examine all the instances of widespread civil violence active after the end of the cold war. For the purposes of this article, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 marks the end of the cold war. Any widespread civil violence that broke out after that point is examined in this study. 8. Our count was compiled primarily from descriptions in The Europa World Book series, the Economist, the New York Times, Jane's Intelligence Review, articles in academic journals such as Problems of Communism, Conflict Studies, and Current History, and selected works noted specifically in the text. We also drew on Peter Wallensteen and Margareta Sollenberg, "The End of International War? Armed Conflict 1989-95," Journal of Peace Research 33, no. 3 (August 1996): 353-70; Patrick Brogan, The Fighting Never Stopped: A Comprehensive Guide to World Conflicts Since 1945 (New York: Vintage, 1990); Ruth Leger Sivard, World Miltary and Social Expenditures 1996 (Leesburg, VA: WMSE Publicaitons, 1996); SIPRI Yearbook 1996 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1996).

Hypotheses on the Causes of Contemporary Deadly Conflict

11

such major conflicts had fallen to eleven. Civil warfare had hardly disappeared, but it was down from late cold war period. The number of separate civil conflicts. A count of the number of dyadic civil

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conflicts (that is, a count of each separate feud) by Peter Wallensteen and Margareta Sollenberg reveals the same pattern. They report that the number of civil conflicts under way rose from forty-four in 1989 to forty-six in 1990 and fifty in 1991, and then peaked at fifty-four in 1992. (See Table 4 below.) The number of conflicts then fell to forty-six in 1993, to forty-two in 1994, and to thirty-four—well below the 1989 count—in 1995.9 Table 2 WORLDWIDE REFUGEES,

Year

1980-9510

Number of refugees (in millions)

1980

5.7

1981

8.2

1982

9.8

1983

10.4

1984

10.9

1985

10.5

1986

11.6

1987

12.4

1988

13.3

1989

14.8

1990

14.9

1991

17.2

1992

17.0

1993

18.2

1994

16.4

1995

14.4

9. Wallensteen and Sollenberg, "The End of International War?" table 2 on p. 354. Their war-count is higher than ours because they count war-dyads instead of states with wars and because they use a more inclusive definition of civil conflict than we do, including some minor wars involving fewer than 1,000 total deaths. 10. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, The State of the World's'Refugees:In Search ofSolutions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 248.

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Table 3 CAUSES O F R E C E N T CIVIL CONFLICTS

Conflict Location

Major Parties Involved

Causes of the Conflict Collapse of empire Lack of (postregime 1945) legitimacy

Afghanistan

1. Mujahedin v. Sovietbacked government

Yes

State weakness

SuperCommunal Aristocratic Revolutionary power hegemonism intransigence ideology proxy*

Yes

Yes

Yes

2. Mujahedin v. other Mujahedin factions Algeria

Islamist (FIS, GIA) v. government (FLN)

Angola

UNITA v. government (MPLA)

Azerbaijan/ Armenians v. Azeris Armenia

Yes Yes Yes

Yes (v. Soviets only)

Yes Yes

Yes Yes

Yes

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Burma

1. Government v. Yes democratic opposition 2. Government v. Karen ethnic group

Yes

Yes

(crushing democracy forces)

(Karen, Mong Tai, other ethnic struggles)

3. Government v. Mong Tai Army 4. Government v. other ethnic groups Burundi

Hutu v. Tutsi

Cambodia

Khmer Rouge v. rival organizations (KPNLF,

Yes

Yes Yes

Yes

FUNCINEC)

Chad

1. Government versus military faction and Movement for the National Salvation of Chad 2. Clan infighting

(see key on p. 21)

Yes

Yes

Yes (clan fighting)

Yes

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Table 3 (continued) Conflict Location

Major Parties Involved

Causes of the Conflict Collapse of empire Lack of (postregime 1945) legitimacy

Colombia

1. Government v. M-19, FARC, EPLO, ELN, and splinter groups

Yes

State weakness

SuperCommunal Aristocratic Revolutionary power hegemonism intransigence ideology proxy*

Yes

Yes

2. Guerrilla groups fighting one another El Salvador FMLN v. government Ethiopia

1. Government versus Yes Eritrean People's Liberation Movement 2. Government versus Tigray People's Liberation Front 3. Government versus other communal factions

Yes Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

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Yes

Yes

Georgia

1. Abkhaz v. Georgians Yes 2. Ossetians v. Georgians

Guatemala

Government v. leftist guerrillas

Yes

Haiti

Military government vs. Aristide supporters

Yes

India

1. Government v. Kashmiri separatists

Yes Yes (Kashmir) (Kashmir)

(Assam, Hindu-Muslim fighting)

3. Government v. Assamese separatists (and Bengalis v. Assamese) 1. Aceh separatists v. government forces

Iraq

1. Kurds (PUK, KDP) v. Sunni Arab government 2. Shi'a v. Sunni Arab

government (see key on p. 21)

Yes

Yes

2. Hindu v. Muslim

Indonesia

Yes

Yes

Yes**

Yes

Yes

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Table 3 (continued) Conflict Location

Major Parties Involved

Causes of the Conflict Collapse of empire Lack of (postregime 1945) legitimacy

State weakness

SuperCommunal Aristocratic Revolutionary power hegemonism intransigence ideology proxy*

Lebanon

Sunnis, Shi'a, Druze, Maronite Christians, others against one another and themselves

Yes

Yes

Yes

Liberia

Krahn, Gio, Mano, and other tribes and their associated militias

Yes

Yes

Yes

Mozambique RENAMO vs Yes government (FRELIMO) Pakistan

Yes

1. Violence among political parties, often ethnically linked

Yes (political violence

2. Ann-mobajir violence

on

ty)

Yes

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Peru

Government versus Shining Path, Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement

Yes

Philippines

1. Government v. NPA 2. Government v. Muslim groups (MNLF,

Yes

Yes

Yes (v. Musi groups)

MILF)

Romania

Armed forces/security services v. National Salvation Front and popular backers

Russia

Russia v. Chechen separatists

Yes

Rwanda

1. Hutu v. Tutsi 2. interha/mMuxn v. Hutu moderates

Yes

Sierra Leone Government versus Revolutionary United Front forces

(see key on p. 21)

Yes

Yes

Yes (Hutuv. Tutsi)

Yes (Hutuv. Hutu) Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

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Table 3 (continued) Conflict Location

Major Parties Involved

Causes of the Conflict Collapse of empire Lack of (postregime 1945) legitimacy

Somalia

Clan-based political fighting (USC factions,

Yes

State weakness

Communal hegemonism

Yes

Yes

SSDF, SPM)

South Africa 1. Apartheid government versus ANC, other antiapartheid forces

Yes

2. ANC-Inkatha fighting Sri Lanka

1. Government v. Tamil insurgents (LTTE, etc.) 2. Government v. Sinhalese radicals (JVP)

Yes

SuperAristocratic Revolutionary power intransigence ideology proxy*

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Sudan

Islamist, Arab Yes government v. Christian and animist African

Yes

Yes

SPLA

Tajikistan

Tajik "old guard" and Yes Uzbeks v. democratic/religious coalition (United Tajik Opposition)

Turkey

Govt. v. Kurds (PKK)

Uganda

1. Government v. Uganda People's Democratic Army 2. Government v. Holy Spirit Movement

Yemen

Former North Yemen v. forces of former South Yemen

(see key on p. 21)

Yes

Yes

Yes Yes

Yes

Yes (Holy Spirit Movement)

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Table 3 (continued) Conflict Location

Major Parties Involved

Causes of the Conflict Collapse of empire Lack of (postregime 1945) legitimacy

Yugoslavia (and successor states)

1. Croat government Yes and militias v. Serb forces 2. Serb paramilitary forces v. Muslim militias and govt. forces 3. Muslim government and militias v. Croat government and militias

Zaire

Government v. Kabila's movement.

Total number

37

13

State weakness

SuperCommunal Aristocratic Revolutionary power hegemonism intransigence ideology proxy* Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

19

14

25

11

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* **

We consider a conflict to be caused by a superpower proxy struggle if the superpower intervention caused, widened, or sustained the civil war in question. The Iraqi state in general was strong, but it hovered on the brink of collapse in 1991 after the Gulf War. This weakness encouraged several repressed minorities to rise up.

The causes identified above were major and active factors at the time of the outbreak of the latest round of fighting. As such, they played a important role in the concerns or motivations of the combatants. Determining the cause of a conflict is difficult and involves subjective judgments. Moreover, several of the causes we identify function concurrently, making it hard to decide which one was the most important. To avoid "double counting," we do not list "lack of regime legitimacy" as a cause when the lack occurs because an empire has collapsed, leaving illegitimate successor states, or because hegemonistic communal groups or intransigent aristocrats hold power, alienating other groups. If these excluded cases were double counted as cases of "lack of regime legitimacy," that category would be much larger. The list of major parties involved includes only the primary movements or groups involved in the fighting. Many, indeed perhaps most, conflicts involved a staggering array of small militias and factions—an array we often agglomerate into broad descriptive communal or political labels. Separate groups are noted if the country experienced multiple, largely unrelated conflicts or if the groups in question had highly different motivations or are easily distinguishable. Thus Burma, where the government v. democratic opposition conflict is quite different in nature from the government's struggle against the Karen people, has multiple listings. Colombia's many guerrilla groups, while quite different in their particular agendas, all felt the regime was illegitimate, considered themselves revolutionary, and took advantage of state weakness to carry out their struggle. Thus we list them as one entry while noting the major groups. When a conflict cause applies to only one of the parties involved in the fighting, it is so noted in the table. The purpose of this list is to describe the current state of violence and to help the reader understand our coding of certain conflicts, not to provide a comprehensive account of the identity of the parties in each conflict.-)†. Although the patterns in this table might be examined further by more sophisticated quantitative techniques, we have chosen not to do so given the ambiguous nature of the data and the high degree of uncertainty regarding many of the conditions necessary for the various causes to function. See Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, DesigningSocialInquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative'Research(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 44, for an argument that quantitative indexes that do not relate closely to the events in question can actually increase measurement and causal inference problems.

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SECURITY STUDIES 7, NO. 3

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Total casualties, measured by counting total refugees. Counts of civil wars

measure global civil violence imperfectly because great and small wars weigh the same in the measure. Estimates of total worldwide civil war casualties would be a better measure, but casualty figures are unavailable or unreliable for most civil wars. Hence any measure of total worldwide casualties is also unreliable. Global casualties can be measured indirectly, however, by counting the global war refugee population. The refugee population is a useful surrogate measure of war casualties—people flee in rough proportion to the violence they suffer—and like our "number of states with wars" measure it indicates that the "new world disorder" is a myth. As Table 2 reveals, the global refugee population rose slightly after the end of the cold war, from 14.8 million in 1989 to a peak of 18.2 million in 1993.11 Then the refugee population fell back to 14.4 million in 1995, that is, roughly to late cold war levels. Thus this refugee measure, like our "number of states with wars" measure and Wallensteen and Sollenberg's "number of wars" measure, indicates that the "new world disorder" was a spike phenomenon of the early 1990s that quickly faded. Specifically, it suggests that violence in the mid-1990s was above mid-1980s levels but slightly below the level of 1989. Are the conflicts of the mid-1990s old or new? Of the thirty-seven wars during the period 1989—96 listed in Table 1, twenty-six are "recurring or constant," meaning that they easily span the cold war and post—cold war periods. The remaining eleven are "new" conflicts, meaning that they broke out after the cold war ended and their causes are not rooted deeply in pre1989 events in their countries. Five of these eleven new conflicts erupted in the former Soviet and Yugoslav empires and reflect the war-causing effects of imperial collapse.

11. Refugee flows are a crude measure of civil violence. One important measure of refugees—internally displaced refugees—is not listed here though a more complete account of refugee totals would include these individuals. Civil wars often generate massive refugee flows within a country's borders, as individuals flee areas of fighting for relatively safer regions. Historic data on such flows, however, are incomplete and probably would be misleading for comparison purposes, as flows in wealthier states that receive more media attention are more likely to be recorded. Moreover, refugees often remain in the country of refuge even after a civil war in their country of origin ends. Furthermore, many refugees flee for economic reasons, not because of civil violence. Refugee flow data also may be biased due to changes in the policies of receiving states, which may take fewer refugees even though the number of people wanting to flee remains unchanged. In general, however, there is a high correlation between internal wars, particularly ethnic conflicts, and refugee flows. See Myron Weiner, "Bad Neighbors, Bad Neighborhoods: An Inquiry into the Causes of Refugee Flows," International Security21,no. 1 (summer 1996): 5-42.

Hypotheses on the Causes of Contemporary Deadly Conflict

23

Table 4 INTERSTATE AND INTRASTATE ARMED CONFLICT,

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

199

43

44

49

52

42

42

34

Intrastate with foreign intervention

1

2

1

2

4

0

0

Interstate

3

3

1

1

0

0

1

All armed conflict

47

49

51

55

46

42

35

Type of Conflict Intrastate

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1989-95

Source. Wallensteen and Sollenberg, "The End of International War?" 354.

Where are recent civil wars occurring? Africa and Asia have had the most (thirteen states in Africa and eleven in Asia have experienced civil wars since 1989). Trailing are the Middle East (five states), the Western hemisphere (five states), and Europe (three states). What proportion of total warfare do these civil conflicts represent? In recent years, civil war has replaced international war as the dominant form of war and has nearly replaced it as the only form of war. Wallensteen and Sollenberg report that purely intrastate wars outnumbered purely interstate wars worldwide by 43-3 in 1989, 44-3 in 1990, 49-1 in 1991, 52-1 in 1992, 42-0 in 1993 and again in 1994, and 34-1 in 1995.12 Moreover, most of these few interstate wars were small affairs: the Persian Gulf war of 1990— 91 has been the only major old-fashioned interstate war since 1989.

12 .Wallensteen and Sollenberg, "The End of International War?" 354. Wallensteen and Sollenberg also classify several wars as "intrastate with foreign intervention" and count them as follows: one in 1989, two in 1990, one in 1991, two in 1992, four in 1993, and none in 1994 and 1995 (ibid.). For other works noting the importance of internal conflict since the end of the cold war, see Ted Robert Gurr, "People Against States: Ethnopolitical Conflict and the Changing World System," International Studies Quarterly 38, no. 3 (September 1994): 347-77; Stephen R. David, "Internal War: Causes and Cures," World Politics 49 0uly 1997): 552-76; Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A. Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts (Washington: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1993); and S'laughter Among Neighbors: The Political Origins of Communal Violence, Human Rights Watch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Good discussions of the interplay between international conflict and internal conflict can be found in Michael E. Brown, ed., Ethnic Conflict and International Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Myron Weiner, The Global Migration Crisis: Challenge to States and to Human Rights (New York: HarperCollins, 1995); Ted Robert Gurr and Barbara Harff, Ethnic Conflict in World Politics (Boulder: Westview, 1994); and Michael E. Brown, ed., The International Dimensions of Internal Conflict (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).

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SECURITY STUDIES 7, NO. 3

This pattern continues a striking change in the nature of warfare that began in the 1960s, a change revealed in data collected by Frank Whelon Wayman, J. David Singer, and Meredith Sarkees and summarized in Table 5. It reveals a sharp drop in the number of international wars beginning in the 1980s and a sharp rise in civil warfare beginning in the 1960s, causing a marked rise in the proportion of all warfare worldwide that is civil in nature. Some 60 percent of the 171 wars of the nineteenth century were international. Some 51 percent of the 115 wars of 1900-60 were international. The percent of wars that were international then plummets to 36 percent in the 1960s, 26 percent in the 1970s, and 17 percent in the 1980s. Only 10 percent of the conflicts in the 1990s were international. The war problem is now largely synonymous with the civil war problem.

CAUSES OF CONTEMPORARY CIVIL CONFLICT

VIOLENCE has many causes, but several stand out in importance. C This section examines seven common and potent causes that together explain the bulk of civil conflict since 1989. These seven causes are not IVIL

wholly exclusive or unrelated. Several overlap or cause each other in ways noted below.

13 .The count of recent civil wars by Wayman, Singer, and Sarkees is lower than ours because they define civil war more restrictively than we do. See Frank Whelon Wayman, J. David Singer, and Meredith Sarkees, "Intra-State, and Extra-Systemic Wars, 1816-1995" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, San Diego, Calif., April 1996), Table 1, 10. 14. Scholarly work on the causes of civil conflict is vast. Recent works include Roy Licklider, "The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945-1993," American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (September 1995): 681-90; Chaim Kaufmann, "Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars," International Security 20, no. 4 (spring 1996): 136-75; Stuart J. Kaufman, "Spiraling to Ethnic War: Elites, Masses, and Moscow in Moldova's Civil War," International Security 21, no. 2 (fall 1996): 108-38; David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild, "Containing Fear: The Origins and Management of Ethnic Conflict," International Security 21, no. 2 (fall 1996): 41-75; Barry R. Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," in Brown, Ethnic Conflict and International Security, 103-24; and Stephen Van Evera, "Hypotheses on Nationalism and War," International Security 18, no. 4 (spring 1994): 5-39. Classic works of value on internal war include Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Myron Weiner, Sonsofthe Soil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); and Robert H. Bates, "Modernization, Ethnic Competition, and the Rationality of Politics in Contemporary Africa" in State Versus Ethnic Claims: African Policy Dilemmas, ed. D. Rothchild and V. Olorunsola (Boulder Westview, 1985).

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COLLAPSE OF EMPIRE

Much post-cold war violence has occurred in the successor states of former empires, especially the Soviet and Yugoslav empires.15 The reason lies in the powerful war-causing effects of imperial collapse. Before the end of the cold war, the collapse of the British, French, Portuguese, and other colonial empires caused many conflicts in Asia and Africa, including some conflicts that continued into the 1980s and 1990s. Imperial collapses also account for a large share of recently erupting deadly conflicts. Specifically, wars caused by the 1991 collapse of the Soviet and Yugoslav empires explain much of the "spike" in conflict observed in 1992 and 1993.16 The collapse of an empire can cause conflict in five ways. (1) The governments that emerge in the successor states often lack legitimacy, hence suffering the neuroses of illegitimate regimes. (2) The successor states' governments, even if legitimate, are often too weak to deter citizens from violence or to reassure them that they need not use violence in selfdefense. (3) Successor states often have artificial borders that are unrelated to local demography and are unsetded by formal agreement; this generates border quarrels. (4) The populations of successor states are often comprised of hostile groups who intermingled during imperial times. Their proximity breeds mutual fear, hostility, and violence. (5) The rights and duties of major powers in the zone of imperial collapse are often undefined. As a result the former metropole and other outside powers often collide as they contend for power in the zone of imperial retraction. The metropole interferes to recover lost influence; outside powers interfere to prevent disorder or to expand their influence. These causes are detailed below. Illegitimate governments. Many of the successor governments that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Yugoslavia had little legitimacy. This lack of legitimacy encouraged a violent scramble for power among leaders and interest groups and encouraged minorities to resist incorporation into die successor state. During the days of empire, local leaders depended on ties to the metropole, not local communities, for their power and authority. When the empires collapsed, these leaders suddenly found themselves governing without institutions or a popular mandate, under challenge from rival elites. 15. For a complete treatment of the relationship between the collapse of empire and the outbreak of war, see Ladinsky, "After the Fall." 16. Thus Kim Holmes notes that "we have witnessed the collapse of the world's greatest land empire. As with the demise of other great empires in history—whether they be Spanish, French, Turkish, Austro-Hungarian, Germany, or British—war is the fruit of disorder" (Holmes, "The New World Disorder").

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SECURITY STUDIES 7, NO. 3

In Tajikistan, for example, Rakhmon Nabiyev and associated apparatchiks essentially stumbled into power after his predecessor left due to popular protests following the failed coup in Moscow. To stay in power, Nabiyev played up nationalism, armed selected followers, suppressed opposition, and otherwise strove to find substitutes for his regime's lack of legitimacy. These substitutes failed to satisfy many residents. Democrats, Islamists, and rival communal groups all rejected Nabiyev's bona fides and took up arms to oust his government. This lack of legitimacy invites rebellion by minorities in the new states. Minorities that accepted a subordinate status in a large, multiethnic empire often reject a minority status when an empire's collapse empowers an ethnic rival. In Georgia, for example, Georgian nationalists led by Zviad Gamsakhurdia took power as the Soviet Union collapsed, with widespread support among ethnic Georgians. Two large minority communities in Georgia, however, that had apparently accepted their minority status in the Soviet Union—the Abkhaz and the Ossetians—took up arms to prevent their incorporation into the Georgian-dominated state. Similarly, Moldova's nationalist movement alarmed residents in the Transdniesteria region, which is 60 percent ethnic Russian and Ukrainian. These Transdniestrian Russians and Ukrainians proclaimed the Transdniesterian Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic and tried to remain attached to the Soviet Union. Only the dispatch of Soviet troops prevented massive violence.20 The Chechens in Russia and the Armenians in Azerbaijan also resisted incorporation into a new state dominated by what they feared would be their community's persecutors. In all these cases, minorities in a multiethnic empire sought their own state after the empire collapsed in part because they rejected the legitimacy of the successor government. (For a 17. Due to this illegitimacy problem, some parts of the Soviet empire resisted the empire's collapse. 18. See Barnett Rubin, "The Fragmentation of Tajikistan," Survival35,no. 4 (winter 19931994): 71-91; and "Tajikistan: Islam wins," Economist, 21 October 1992, 32. 19. For an analysis of minority tension in the Georgian quest for independence, see Darrell Slider, "The Politics of Georgia's Independence," Problems of Communism 40, no. 6 (November 1991): 63-79. 20. V. Solnar, "Hatred and fear on both banks of the Dniester," New Times International, no. 14 (April 1992): 8-9; and William Crowther, "Moldova after Independence," Current History 93, no. 585 (October 1994): 342-47. The Gagauzi, a Turkic-speaking, Orthodox Christian people from Bulgaria, also resisted incorporation into the new state and proclaimed their independence. 21. See Mark Saroyan, "The 'Karabakh Syndrome' and Azerbaijani Politics," Problems of Communism 39, no. 5 (September 1990): 14-29, for information on the origins of the conflict in Azerbaijan. For background on the conflict in Chechnya, see Christopher Panico, Conflicts in the Caucasus: Russia's War in Chechnya, Conflict Studies no. 281 (Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, 1995).

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more detailed discussion of the problems that illegitimate governments face, see "Loss of Legitimacy" below.) Weak governments. Even legitimate successor governments often emerge from collapsed empires in a frail condition. State security services and the military must often be purged, reformed, or created out of whole cloth. Frequently, the successor state relied on subsidies from the metropole and now must do without. Thus, successor regimes often lack the resources to deter, suppress, or buy off dissent. Tajikistan, for example, became independent without a clear national identity, a strong economic base, or national security forces.22 It quickly collapsed into civil war. Successor governments also may have little control over government institutions. In Georgia, the nationalist successor governments often lacked control of the military and other institutions. Tengis Kitovani, who controlled the Georgian National Guard, deployed troops to the capital of Abkhazia and shelled the capital of South Ossetia, despite Georgian President Shevardnadze's desire for peace talks. Similarly, paramilitary leaders in Georgia often controlled the supply of food, fuel, and other necessities. (We examine government weakness as a source of conflict in greater detail in the section "Weak States" below.) Artificial borders. Successor states often inherit artificial borders that correspond poorly to natural boundaries or to local demography and have not been settled by agreements with neighbors. These borders often follow administrative boundaries that were imposed by the metropole without regard for local feelings. As a result these borders bisect national groups and create ethnic-minority enclaves. Thus, the European powers partitioned Africa at the 1878 Congress of Berlin with little regard for the unity of African peoples, drawing lines that seldom followed geographic or communal boundaries.2 Later, Stalin drew borders that split the Turkic and Muslim peoples of the Soviet Empire into different administrative units in order to weaken their political strength. Cursed with such borders, several successor states to the Soviet and Yugoslav empires have fought bloody wars to resolve questions raised by 22. See Rubin, "The Fragmentation of Tajikistan," 75-78. 23. For an assessment of these divisions on conflict in Georgia, see "Georgia: Unholy Trinity," New Statesman and Society 5, no. 219, 11 September 1992, 19-20; and "Georgia: Tearing Apart," Economist, 3 October 1992, 55. 24. At the conference, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck "continually warned the representatives of the Great Powers that their principal business was to reach a settlement among themselves and not to worry unduly about the happiness of lesser breeds without the law" (Gordon A. Craig, Germany: 1866-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978], 112). For more on the European role in the creation of borders in Africa, see Thomas Pakenham, The Scramblefor Africa (New York: Avon, 1991).

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SECURITY STUDIES 7, NO. 3

maldesigned boundaries. The Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict stemmed from Armenian demands that Nagorno-Karabakh—an Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan—be transferred to Armenia. The Serb-Croat-Muslim war of 1991—95 likewise stemmed from arbitrary borders that bisected the Serbian and Croat nations, leaving each with large diasporas living as minorities outside the national state. Each then fought to recover its diaspora. Intermingled populations. Empires foster national intermingling that can plague the politics of their successor states. During the imperial era, individuals can more easily move about within the empire, causing intermingling. Moreover, some empires deliberately intermingle the empire's national groups by inducing or compelling cross-migration among groups. As a result, the empire's successor states may have populations composed of mutually antagonistic peoples. Stalin's forced marches of millions of subjects are the most famous example of such enforced intermingling, and they sowed the seeds of current conflict. The recent conflict in Chechnya, for example, stems from Stalin's 1944 deportation of the Chechens. Moscow allowed these Chechens to return to Chechnya in 1956, but on returning they met a hostile welcome from new, largely Russian setders, who had been encouraged by Moscow to migrate there. This settler-native tension fueled Chechen nationalism and secessionism. Intermingling causes conflict by shoving antagonistic groups together and by producing an ethnic security dilemma between diem (mat is, a situation where the security of two groups is mutually incompatible, and each group's efforts to secure itself reduce the other's security). Hostile intermingled groups each must fear that the other may turn on them at an opportune moment, leading each to think in turn that it should strike at a time of its own advantage. Such thinking played a major role in fueling Serbia's attacks on the Croatians and Bosnians in 1991—92 and in motivating Armenia's war against Azerbaijan. Metropole interference. Former metropoles often intervene in dieir former empire, sometimes triggering new colonial wars. The metropole may be animated by perceptions of a security threat, by claims to a sphere of influence, or by the need to protect or recover diaspora populations in the periphery. Moscow today, for example, claims the right to intervene in 25. "Azerbaijan," EuropaWorld Book 1994 (London: Europa Publications Limited, 1993), 438-40. 26. For works noting the importance of the security dilemma, see Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict"; James Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War," International Organization 49, no. 3 (summer 1995); Kaufmann, "Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars"; and Barbara F. Walter, "The Resolution of Civil Wars: Why Negotiations Fail" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1994).

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parts of its former empire to protect Russian citizens. Many Russian nationalists also assert that this area remains their sphere of influence, and some Russians fear the possibility of former republics allying with outside powers. Such thinking led Russia to intervene in conflicts in Moldova, Georgia, and Tajikistan. In Moldova, Russian intervention probably reduced civil violence, but in Tajikistan it probably fed a bloody civil war. In Georgia its effects were mixed, sometimes fueling violence by encouraging Abkhaz separatism, yet intervening in the end to help enforce a cease-fire after Schevardnadze agreed to join the Commonwealth of Independent States. External intervention. Outside powers intervene in collapsed empires for three reasons. First, these powers often see the successor states of a collapsed empire as easy prey for their imperial ambitions. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, for example, Britain quickly abandoned wartime promises to Middle Eastern leaders and divided much of the Ottoman lands with France.29 Similarly, the European powers often clashed over the Balkans—most notably in 1914—after the Balkan states escaped Ottoman rule. In 1975 Indonesia seized East Timor after the Portuguese withdrawal, triggering a bloody neocolonial war. Second, outside powers may intervene to avert threats that the imperial collapse creates. Thus, after Portugal abandoned its empire, South Africa fought bloody interventionary wars in Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique, largely because it feared that the new black-ruled governments would support South Africa's antiapartheid resistance. Finally, outside powers may intervene to protect embattled co-ethnics in the former empire. Thus, ethnic Tajiks in Afghanistan have lately provided arms and a haven for Islamic rebels in Tajikistan, while Uzbekistan has bolstered the Tajik government for fear that any alternative regime would oppress ethnic Uzbeks living in Tajikistan. ° Mozambique supported black liberation forces waging war against the white minority regime in Rhodesia during the 1970s. This spurred Rhodesia to create the Renamo insurgency that spread death and destruction in Mozambique into the 1990s. 27. Bruce D. Porter, "A Country Instead of a Cause: Russian Foreign Policy in the PostSoviet Era," in Order and Disorder after the Cold War, ed. Brad Roberts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 7-8. 28. Although accurate information is scarce, it appears that local Russian forces—perhaps with encouragement from Moscow—aided Ossetian and Abkhaz separatists in their struggle against Georgian forces. 29. A good account of this process is David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Avon, 1990). 30. See Rubin, "The Fragmentation of Tajikistan."

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SECURITY STUDIES 7, NO. 3

Table 5

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CIVIL AND INTERNATIONAL WARS,

Decade

Interstate war

1816-1995: WARS INITIATED PER DECADE

Extrasystemic (largely colonial) international

Subtotal for international

war

war

Intrastate war

Grand total

Percent of all wars that are international

1816-19

0

2

(2)

1

3

67

1820-29

2

6

(8)

7

15

53

1830-39

0

5

(5)

10

15

33

1840-49

4

7

(11)

9

20

55

1850-59

5

9

(14)

7

21

67

1860-69

8

5

(13)

15

28

46

1870-79

4

10

(14)

8

22

64

1880-89

3

12

(15)

3

18

83

1890-99

4

16

(20)

9

29

69

19th C total

30

72

(102)

69

171

60

1900-1909

4

(10)

7

17

59

1910-19

6

(14)

10

24

58

1920-29

2

6

(8)

12

20

40

1930-39

8

2

(10)

8

18

56

1940-49

3

5

(8)

9t

17

47

1950-59

3

6

(9)

10

19

47

1960-69

6

3

(9)

16

25

36

1970-79

7

2

(9)

25

34

26

1980-89

4

0

(4)

19

23

17

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Hypotheses on the Causes of Contemporary Deadly Conflict

1990-95

2

0

(2)

19

21

10

20th C total

49

34

(83)

135

218

38

Grand total

79

106

(185)

204

389

48

31

Source: Frank Whelon Wayman, J. David Singer, and Meredith Sarkees, "Inter-State, IntraState, and Extra-Systemic Wars 1816-1995" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, San Diego, Calif., April 1996), Table 1, p. 10.

LOSS OF LEGITIMACY

Much of today's violence occurs in states whose governments have somehow lost their legitimacy. ' This section discusses how legitimacy is lost and why such losses cause civil conflict. Causes of Legitimacy Loss

Four factors are frequent sources of lost legitimacy in states recently at war: the discrediting of the Soviet model; poor economic performance; a lack of regime accountability (which gives rise in turn to incompetent and corrupt governance); and the rise of a restive new middle class that seeks a greater political power. Each of these underlying factors, alone or in conjunction with others, can discredit a regime and lead to civil violence. The discrediting of the Soviet model. When the Berlin Wall fell, regimes that relied on the Soviet Union as a model for their economies and politics suffered a blow to their legitimacy. Indeed, throughout the Third World the collapse of Communism discredited authoritarian regimes of all stripes,33 for example, many regimes in sub-Saharan Africa, and also those in Algeria

31. An illegitimate regime is one broadly believed by the public to have lost its right to rule because of its perceived failure to provide for the common good. 32. Defeat in a war can also cause a government to lose its legitimacy. The dearth of international war in the post-cold war period, however, has reduced the importance of this cause of regime legitimacy loss. 33. Peter W. Rodman, More Precious Than Peace (New York: Scribner's, 1994), 532-33. Rodman notes that Syria's dictator Hafez al-Asad was equated with Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucsescu and East Germany's Erich Honecker. Similarly, the collapse of Eastern European regimes strengthened African democratic forces and disheartened Africa's autocrats. See Copson, Africa's Wars in the 1990s, 167. For information on the impact of the spread of the liberal democratic model, see Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

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SECURITY STUDIES 7, NO. 3

and the former South Yemen, which relied heavily on the state-led

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34

economy and society. Poor economicperformance. Regimes that preside over stagnating or declining economies may lose legitimacy. Poor economic performance directly generates popular unhappiness. Remedies to poor performance can also stir public opposition if they require bitter medicine, such as trimming government subsidies and payrolls. Such measures further decrease a regime's legitimacy. A lack of regime accountability. Regimes that are not accountable to their populations have less incentive to serve their publics well, so they serve them poorly. Incompetence and corruption are their hallmarks.3 They often cannot be removed peacefully, moreover, compelling their opponents to resort to force. The rise of a middle class and resulting demands to democratize. Industrialization

and the spread of literacy are potent causes of democracy. The literate middle classes that these processes create nearly always demand political pluralization—a reality reflected in the close correlation worldwide between levels of democratization and the size of literate middle classes.37 The emergence of educated middle classes in authoritarian states is therefore regime-delegitimating: it brings on the scene middle-class voices that will reject the authoritarian old political order. Response to Legitimacy Loss

The loss of legitimacy is the underlying cause of conflict, but the conflict's proximate causes are the regime's responses to this loss of legitimacy. Regimes losing their legitimacy often choose between two responses:

34. George Joffe, "Yemen—The Reasons for Conflict," Jane's Intelligence Review (August 1994): 369; John P. Entelis, "The Crisis of Authoritarianism in North Africa: The Case of Algeria," Problems of Communism 41, no. 3 (May 1992): 71-82. 35. Corruption often comes with a lack of accountability. In Pakistan and the Philippines, for example, widespread corruption has discredited governments and led to the growth of opposition movements. Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos stole with such abandon that he became one of Asia's most wealthy men before he was ousted in 1986. In 1996 Transparency International ranked Pakistan the second most corrupt country in the world after Nigeria. New York Times, 28 November 1996, C1. 36. In short, regime accountability often determines whether "voice" is expressed in ballots or bullets. The definitive description of this tradeoff remains Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organisations, and States (1970; Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1981). 37. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 62-80; Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, exp. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 27-63.

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democratizing in an attempt to gain broader support and hunkering down in order to weather any disgruntlement. 8 By democratizing, regimes can increase government accountability and popular participation and thus dampen dissent. Democratization, however, can also raise the risk of civil war. A large political science literature has shown that democracy causes peace among mature democracies. Democracy, however, is a Janus-faced phenomenon: democratization is also a potent cause of civil conflict in multiethnic authoritarian states. Democratic institutions are often poor vehicles for organizing the equal division of power and privilege among hostile ethnic groups. Hence losergroups are often even more dissatisfied under democracy than they were under the previous authoritarian regime. Democratic freedoms (of speech, press, assembly, etc.) also give political space to determined secessionist groups, allowing them more room to organize for war. Hence democratization can unleash communal conflicts that lay dormant under previous authoritarian regimes. The alternative to democratization is hunkering down: relying increasingly on one edinic, tribal, or religious group or one sector of society, such as the military or members of wealthier social classes. Hunkering down, in the short term, can allow a regime to weather a crisis as it can count on the loyalty of key elites. In the long term, however, hunkering down can provoke greater popular discontent with the regime. Democratization

Democratization offers four paths to civil war. Incumbent authoritarian elites may crush emerging democratic forces because they fear that the first democratic victors will exploit state power to impose a new dictatorship)— what has been called "one person one vote once." Minorities may fight because they fear that majority rule would install in power a permanent elected majority that allows the minority no voice in decision making. After democratic transitions, victorious groups may fight over the division of spoils. Finally, democratization may empower hardened secessionists who exploit democratic freedoms to organize secessionist rebellion. Several recent conflicts, including those in .Algeria, Azerbaijan-Armenia, Chechnya, Georgia, India (Kashmir), Pakistan, South Africa, Tajikistan, and the united 38. Regime responses to legitimacy loss are not limited to democratizing and hunkering down. Regimes at time promote economic reform to recover their legitimacy. Other, bloodier, alternatives include provoking an international conflict and blaming problems on minorities or other scapegoats at home.

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Yemen, stemmed in part from attempts at democratization and followed one of these paths from democratization to war. The Algerian case suggests a general lesson noted by Adam Przeworski, who argues that a necessary condition of successful democratization is the realistic expectation that relinquishing power now will not require doing so for ever. In Algeria the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) elites refused to concede a lost election in 1993 in part from fear that the Islamist winners would impose a dictatorship once in power. This led the FLN to hunker down instead of accepting the results of democratization. In Georgia, democratization produced war by causing minority fears of majority tyranny.40 As noted above, the minority Abkhaz feared that their distinct cultures would be overrun by a power-monopolizing Georgian majority. Hence they opted for violent resistance when Georgian nationalists appeared poised to win elections. The experiences of Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland teach the same lesson. In Sri Lanka, the majority Sinhalese long monopolized power at the expense of the minority Tamils, provoking the bloody Tiger rebellion.41 In Northern Ireland, the Protestant majority monopolized power at the expense of the Catholic minority during 1922—69, provoking violent Catholic nationalism. The victors of democratization can also quarrel over the spoils. South Africa's transition to democracy led to increased tension between Inkatha and the ANC over the division of power within the victorious African

39. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 26-34. The fear of the FLN was not without some merit. For discussions of why Algeria's leaders were reluctant to surrender power and doubted the good faith of the Islamists, see "Shooting or voting for Islam," Economist, 28 August 1993, 39; and Claire Spencer, "Algeria in Crisis," Survival36,no. 2 (summer 1994): 149-63. For an overview on the general question of the tension between democratic ideals and Islamic movements, see John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Islam and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). The authors discuss Algeria on pages 151-72. 40. Discussion of majority tyranny traces back to James Madison, "The Same Subject Continued..." (Federalist no. 10), The Federalist Papers, intro. Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961), 77-84. Madison discusses the risks that arise when "a majority is included in a faction" (80) and the dangers of tyranny by "the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority" (77). Discussing remedies are Arend Lijphart, "The Power-Sharing Approach," in Conflict and Peacemaking in Multiethnic Societies ed. Joseph V.

Montville (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1990), 491-509; Kenneth D. McRae, "Theories of Power-Sharing and Conflict Management," in Montville, Conflict and Peacemaking, 93-106; Jurg Steiner, "Power-Sharing: Another Swiss 'Export Product?" in Montville, Conflict and Peacemaking, 107-14; and Timothy D. Sisk, Power Sharing and International

Mediation in Ethnic Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1996), 34-45, 58-63. 41. An account is Brogan, Fighting Never Stopped, 221-34.

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community. In Yemen, the former southern leaders felt cheated out of their share of power after elections there. The Chechen experience illustrates the risk that hardened groups will exploit democratic freedoms to promote separatism. After suffering repeated cruelties by Russian rulers, many Chechens want no part of the Russian state, regardless of its government type or its respect for minority rights. When given the right to assemble and speak freely, they found a consensus on rejecting any ties to Moscow—a position that triggered a brutal Russian crackdown in which tens of thousands of Chechens and Russians died. Hunkering Down

Instead of democratizing, some regimes respond to pressure to pluralize by "hunkering down"—relying on a narrower base of support to stay in power. Such a move, however, can provoke further dissent and violence. The very problems that provoke a legitimacy crisis in the first place— corruption, a lack of accountability, demands for a say in decision making, etc.—are exacerbated by the hunkering-down process. Thus, even though in the short term a regime may survive a challenge, in die long term die scope and scale of dissent is likely to grow. Hunkering-down behavior fueled many current disputes, including bodi those that began before and after the end of die cold war. In Rwanda and Burundi, for example, regimes have relied increasingly on edinic kinsmen with no pretense of including others. Similarly, regimes in Burma, Chad, El Salvador, Ediiopia, Guatemala, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Liberia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Uganda, and Zaire have relied more and more on one particular ethnic, religious, or tribal group or one sector of society, usually 42. Joffee, "Yemen—The Reasons for Conflict," 370-71. 43. The road to democracy contains other potential perils. In their work discussing the relationship between democratization and interstate war, Mansfield and Snyder note that the initial stage of democratization is extremely dangerous for several reasons. First, threatened elites from the autocratic regime often use chauvinistic rhetoric as they compete for allies among the populace. Second, social groups that might be losers in a mature democracy often manipulate information and otherwise distort the democratic process. Third, a lack of strong institutions—the checks and balances that places power in the hands of a responsible, wellinformed voter—can further increase the chances of war. All these reasons why democratization can cause interstate war apply to internal conflict as well. Elites' chauvinistic rhetoric can be targeted at ethnic minorities, particularly if they are traditional enemies, as well as other countries. Beleaguered social groups often manipulate information and demonize their opponents, making power-sharing extremely difficult. The lack of strong institutions can allow a small number of individuals to take the steps necessary to bring about internal war. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, "Democratization and the Danger of War," International Security 20, no. 1 (summer 1995): 5-38.

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the military, to govern after challenges to their legitimacy arose. This reliance has created a self-sustaining cycle: as dissent increases, regimes fall back more and more on "trusted" individuals from the same communal group or sector; this reliance in turn increase resentment among the excluded groups and engendered charges of corruption and favoritism.

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The "Reform Trap"

Hunkering down often follows democratization when regimes face a legitimacy challenge. Efforts to democratize lead to a growing governability crisis, which in turn leads the regime to hunker down and abort its democratization experiment. This "reform trap" generates further dissent and leads to civil war. The democratization process and subsequent hunkering down often share the same cause: a regime attempting to stay in power while gaining popular support for painful reforms. Algeria, for example, began its democratization process after food riots in 1988, and Sierra Leone allowed elections after it adopted unpopular economic reforms under IMF pressure. The pain engendered by the economic reform process, however, often leads the regime to lose the elections, causing it to hunker down in order to stay in power.45 The "reform trap" is a common factor in civil wars throughout the world today. Algeria, Burma, Pakistan, Somalia, and Tajikistan all initiated hesitant democratization and then, when the results were not to the liking of the regime or a powerful group, chose instead to hunker down and ignore the elections. Algeria's experience illustrates the reform trap neatly. In 1989 the ruling FLN leaders authorized elections in order to reach out to a hostile society disgruntled by regime corruption, a lack of accountability, 44. On Sierra Leone, see Christopher Clapham "Recent History," Europa World Book Africa 1995 (London: Europa Publications Limited, 1994), 803-7. 45. Angola's recent return to violence in 1992 illustrates the other side of this coin. There UNITA, the leading opposition group, expected to defeat the government in elections and returned to violence when it lost. For articles that note Savimbi's reluctance to accept the obvious verdict of the polls, see Alex Vines, Angola and Mozambique: Aftermath of Conflict,

Conflict Studies 280 (Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, 1995); and Andrew Meldrum, "Lessons from Angola," Africa Report 38, no. 1 Qanuary-February 1993): 22-24. 46. Such a tension is common in collapsed empires. As noted above, the governments of the successor states often lack legitimacy and thus face the choice of democratizing to try to gain popular support or hunkering down if they fear popular rejection. Furthermore, many former empires, including both the Yugoslav and the Soviet Empire, often contain hostile minorities. Thus, the polarization that makes democratization extremely difficult often is present.

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and economic stagnation. Reformers within the FLN hoped to use elections to regain popular support and to acquire a mandate to carry out difficult economic changes. Not surprisingly, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won the elections, much to the horror of the FLN. The FLN then decided to "hunker down." It nullified the elections and tried to disband the FIS. Bloody civil war soon followed as the FIS resisted these measures.

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WEAK STATES

Weakness in the capacities of states has been an important cause of current civil violence. Defeat in war, loosened central control over economic activity, and other factors that lessen a state's strength can spark civil violence. Recently, states have been weakened by the end of the cold war, which ended superpower aid to client Third World regimes, and by the spread of powerful small armaments. The weakening of the state increased the incidence of civil war in two ways: it decreased the state's coercive power, and reduced its ability to co-opt opponents and rival groups. A decrease in a state's coercive ability fosters civil conflict in two ways. First, if the state is weak, restive ethnic groups or other threats to peace are no longer reassured or deterred from organizing. Predatory groups plot war because they are less deterred by fear of state repression. This alarms other groups who then mobilrze for war in self-defense, taking security into their own hands because they no longer trust the central state to provide it. Thus as the weakness of the state in Lebanon became apparent in the early 1970s, various communal groups began forming militias for self-defense. The second, related, impact of decreased state coercive ability is an inability to defeat groups committed to violence. Even unpopular regimes can stamp out potentially violent opposition when they have enough resources to overwhelm the insurgents directly, arrest their leaders, or otherwise 47. A weak state is one that lacks financial, military, and institutional resources to implement its policies. For works that note the importance of the strength of the state, see Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of Nation States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); and Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 48. One traditionally important cause of government weakness is defeat in an international war. In the post-cold war period, however, only the Iraqi case fits this pattern—an unsurprising development given the overall dearth of international conflict in this period. The Second World War era conflicts in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Greece, however, are examples of how an international conflict can weaken (or remove) state governments, thus catalyzing groups for civil conflict. 49. Dilip Hiro, Lebanon: Fire and Embers (New York: St. Martin's, 1992), 12.

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interfere with group organization before the violence becomes widespread. When the state weakens, however, insurgencies become more difficult to defeat. In Iraq, for example, Shi'a Muslim organizations had long opposed the Ba'athist regime, but it was only after the near collapse of Saddam Hussein's government following Operation Desert Storm that they gained widespread support and almost toppled the government.50 Weakened states also have fewer resources with which to buy off opposition.51 Somalia's economy collapsed in the 1980s as income from remittances fell and the regime's appalling human rights record led to a decrease in international aid.52 Hence, Siad Barre's government lost its ability to play off various clans by dangling aid in front of them. As a result, he was forced to consider elections, and the country soon unraveled. Cold war factors. During the cold war both superpowers bolstered frail Third World client regimes with arms, military training, money, and at times troops. This aid lost its rationale as the cold war faded, hence the superpowers sharply reduced their largesse. This caused a marked decline in the strength of the superpowers' client regimes.53 Between 1981 and 1984, the United States gave or sold $800 million (in current dollars) in arms to Africa, while the Soviet Union delivered $11.1 billion. This pattern continued from 1985 to 1988, widi Moscow sending over $13.5 billion in arms and Washington sending $900 million. Deliveries plummeted after the cold war ended. Between 1992 and 1994, the United States delivered $395 million in arms to Africa, while Russia sent $610 million worth of arms.54 If Western aid was given, it was now often conditioned on democratic or market reforms. This reform pressure, in turn, often precipitated 50. For a discussion of the impact of the Gulf War on Iraqi Shi'a, see Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi'is of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 273-81. For a detailed analysis of political Shi'ism in Iraq, see Joyce N. Wiley, The Islamic Movement of Iraqi Shi'as (Boulder Lynne Rienner, 1992). 51. If governments can win elites to their side and prevent them from encouraging conflict, fighting may be mitigated despite widespread hostility on the part of the population at large. Robert Dahl notes the importance of political activists in the stability of a system. See Democracy and Its Critics, 261. 52. Patrick Gilkes, "Somalia: Recent History," Europa World Book 1995 (London: Europa Publications, 1994), 820-26. 53. As Owen Harries noted at the end of the cold war, "Third World countries no longer have a ready-made, automatic way of linking themselves to the central issues of world politics—as counters in a game, as trophies to be won, or as reluctant neutrals to be seduced" (quoted in Peter Rodman, More Precious Than Peace, 528). 54. These estimates of arms deliveries were taken from World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1985 (U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1985), 45; World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1989 (U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1989), 120; and World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1995 (U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1995), 153. 55. Copson, Africa's Wars and the Prospectsfor Peace, 158.

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politically difficult economic reforms. As noted above, in several countries this led to bloody attempts at democratization as regimes tried to broaden their bases of support without truly yielding a portion of political power. Regimes that refused reform were crippled, sometimes fatally weakened, by their loss of great power support. The case of Zaire during 1990-97 illustrates this phenomenon. Zaire possessed a respectable military in 1990, built with major aid from several Western military powers—the United States, France, Belgium, Italy, and Israel. They ended these aid programs in 1990. Zaire's army then rotted away, suffering decay so massive that a tiny rebel force of only 6,000 experienced soldiers and 20,000 recent recruits under Laurent Kabila could conquer the country and oust the corrupt Mobutu regime with little loss in an eight-month campaign in 1996-97.56 Spread of weapons. The spread of lethal modern small arms is another source of state weakness. Until recently, only governments had access to large quantities of modern weapons, giving them a tremendous military advantage over insurgents. Today, however, small arms are available in many states to anyone with a litde money. In Uganda, for example, an AK47 costs roughly the same as a chicken.57 Thus, the state's monopoly on violence is more easily challenged by armed citizens. This cause of weak states is self-perpetuating: a weak state cannot stop the flow of weapons across its borders, and this flow in turn further weakens die state. COMMUNAL HEGEMONISM

Some ethnic groups are not content with equality or social recognition. Instead, they demand that their language be the only official language, dieir religion be enshrined as the only permitted faith, and their culture and customs be followed by the rest of society. Such hegemonic beliefs can come from many sources, ranging from culture to ideology. What these sources share is a common commitment to the idea that one particular cultural system is more wordiy than others. The quest for communal hegemony—and resistance to it—is a major source of conflict in the world today. Concerns about hegemony, both real and imagined, contributed to the post-cold war conflicts that broke out in Georgia, Indonesia (with the Aceh), Russia, and die former Yugoslavia. 56. Raymond Bonner and Howard W. French, "Rebel Army Captured Zaire in T-Shirts and Tennis Shoes," New York Times, 19 May 1997, A1. 57. Swadesh Rana, Small Arms and Intra-State Conflicts, UNIDIR Research Paper no. 34, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (1995).

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This follows a pattern common before the cold war. Religious, tribal, or ethnic hegemonism fed communal violence in Afghanistan, Angola, Burma, Burundi, Chad, Ethiopia, India, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, Pakistan, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Turkey. Hegemonism causes conflict in two fundamental ways. First, groups often strive for preeminence by attacking, intimidating, and destroying other communal groups. Bengalis in Bangladesh, Hutu interahamwe murderers in Rwanda, and chauvinistic Hindus in India are but a few examples of groups that used violence in their attempts to ensure communal hegemony.58 The cause of conflict—the will to dominance—is readily apparent. When other ethnic groups refuse to submit, the hegemonic group imposes its will by force. Second, hegemonism causes more conflict when it incites the defensive concerns of odier communal groups. In Turkey, for example, the Turks' desire to promote Turkish identity, language, and culture to the exclusion of all others has provoked conflict with Turkey's Kurdish population (until recently referred to by Turkish officials as "mountain Turks"), which sought to preserve its traditions and way of life. The Kurds "began" die conflict in the sense mat they took up arms or killed a Turkish official, but from their point of view the first blow was struck by the laws that degraded Kurdish identity. Communal hegemonism does not always produce violence. Minority groups frequendy live side-by-side with a dominant group without bloodshed, accepting their inferior status as the price of communal peace. Religious minorities in the Ottoman empire, for example, accepted their second-class status for centuries with litde violence. Nation-building also can lead subordinate groups not to embrace violence. Edinic, regional, and tribal minorities have often embraced national identities, welcoming the 58. In Bangladesh the Chittagong Hills peoples have faced constant attempts at hegemony by the Bengali majority. Bangladesh's first President Mujibur Rahman once declared, "Forget your ethnic identity; be Bengalis." See "Bangladesh: Chittagong Chatter," Economist, 14 November 1992, 38. A Bangladeshi army commander in the area had similarly noted, "We want the Soil but not the People of the Chittagong Hill Tracts." Richard A. Gray: "Genocide in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh," RJR; Reference Services Review 22, no. 4 (winter 1994): 59-80. For works that address the tragedy in Rwanda and the role of a supremacist racial ideology, see Alex de Waal and Rakiya Omaar, "The Genocide in Rwanda and the International Response," Current History 94, no. 591 (1995): 156-61; James Fenton, "The Rwanda Crisis," New York Review of Books 43, no. 3, 15 February 1996, 7-9; and Robert Block, "The Tragedy of Rwanda," New York Review of Books 31, no. 17, 20 October 1994, 3 8. For an interesting analysis of Hindu fundamentalism in India, see Robert Eric Frykenberg, "Hindu Fundamentalism and the Structural Stability of India," in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

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possibility of advancement as part of the new nation. Many Kurds in Turkey have attained positions of social, economic, and political prominence, but they have done so as Turks, not as Kurds. When are subordinate groups more likely to rebel? Minority resistance to attempted hegemony is made more likely by three factors: past bloodshed, a strong, established culture, and progress on minority rights elsewhere. Past bloodshed and a strong culture "harden" communal identity, thus increasing the likelihood that the group will take up arms to preserve its identity. In addition to hardening communal identity, a bloody past also creates a sentiment of hostility toward the dominant group and makes "security dilemma" situations far more likely. Finally, the fate of minorities elsewhere can have a large impact abroad. The civil rights movement in the United States, for example, inspired Catholics in Northern Ireland to demonstrate for civil rights and equality. REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY

Revolutionary ideology causes civil war by leading movements of the poor and disenfranchised to adopt extreme goals and extreme tactics that foreclose compromise with others. Common ground is hard to find with movements that demand complete power and pursue social upheaval. 59. For example, Ismet Inonu, president from 1938 to 1950, was said to be a Kurd as was Admiral Fehmi Koruturk, who also became president. David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1996), 405-6. 60. Kaufmann, "Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars," 153-54. Whether group members are willing to change their identity depends heavily on the emotional strength and malleability of this identity in the first place—factors that vary from culture to culture. Past suffering and discrimination increases emotional ties to the identity. The weight of many deaths is yet another attachment that individuals will form to their communal identity. A strong culture, particularly a written record, reduces the malleability of the identity by reducing the flexibility of its symbols. Obviously, even a written text can have many meanings, but it is open to far fewer interpretations than an oral tradition. Identity is not always fixed. In Nigeria the colonial power, by recognizing certain identities as salient, reinforced them and gave a certain set of elites political power. David Laitin, "Hegemony and Religious Conflict: British Imperial Control and Political Cleavages in Yorubaland," in Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In, 285-316. Other scholars who endorse the view that ethnic identity can be manipulated include Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); and Paul R. Brass, Language, Religion, and Politics in North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Walker Connor proposes a reasonable middle ground: that identities are social constructs but are solid ones, reinforced by both culture and psychology, making them extremely hard to change. See Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Questfor Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 61. Brendan O'Leary and John McGarry, The Politics of Antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland(AtlanticHighlands, N.J.: Athlone, 1993), 160. 62. A revolutionary ideology is one that seeks to impose a new social order and concept of society on a nation or on the entire world.

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Many civil conflicts were fueled by communist movements over the past century. These include civil wars in Argentina, China, Finland, Germany, Greece, Malaysia, Russia, Spain, Thailand, Uruguay, and the vast murders by the communist regimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. Since 1989 communist movements have fueled civil wars in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Colombia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Peru, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Muslim and Christian revolutionary movements have engendered civil wars in Algeria, Afghanistan, the Sudan, and Uganda. Communist movements, however, faded around the world after communist ideology was delegitimi2ed by the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, and by the economic and political failure that this collapse symbolized. The communist idea is now a spent force, leaving Muslim extremism as the only major live revolutionary ideology with wide appeal. Thus the problem of revolutionary ideology, a cause of much civil war over the past century, has largely abated worldwide and has abated almost completely outside the Muslim world.64 ARISTOCRATIC INTRANSIGENCE

Aristocratic intransigence is the mirror image of leftist revolutionary ideology: it breeds war by driving opponents to violence who otherwise might accept compromise. Aristocratic oligarchies have often ended with peaceful democratic transitions when oligarchs agreed to pluralize national politics. Oligarchies, however, have provoked violent rebellion when they have demanded all power and monopolized wealth and social privilege. Such aristocratic intransigence helped spawn many of the great violent upheavals of modern history, including the French, Mexican, Russian, Chinese, Greek and Nicaraguan revolutions. It also played a major role in sparking or sustaining die recent (since 1989) civil wars in El Salvador,

63. One source estimates that the Soviet regime murdered nearly 62 million people and that the Chinese communist regime was responsible for over 35 million deaths, figures so staggering as to almost defy comprehension. Rummel, Death by Government, 79-110. For more on the killing in Stalinist Russia, see Robert Conquest, The Gnat Terror. A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 64. Many religious groups have agendas that are more communal than ideological. Hamas, for example, organizes itself with a religious idiom, but its primary goals—the establishment of a Muslim-dominated Palestinian state to replace Israel—reflects a strong communal component as well as a new vision of society. Other Islamic groups, such as Hizballah in Lebanon and Shi'a movements in Iraq, share this communal emphasis.

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Guatemala, Haiti, and the Philippines. 5 It is now on the wane, however. Aristocratic elites enjoy less support from the United States and face more pressure to pluralize in the wake of the cold war's end. The spread of democratic and human rights norms worldwide has also created pressures to pluralize. As a result, many of the world's aristocratic oligarchies have begun ceding power to popular movements they once dismissed. The old elites in El Salvador now accept leftist election victories. The Marcos oligarchy in the Philippines has been replaced by more plural politics. Aristocratic oligarchs retain a tight grip on a few states (for example, Guatemala), but even there they now concede more than they once did. Overall, aristocratic extremism is a fading force worldwide. SUPERPOWER COMPETITION

The cold war superpower competition caused or magnified civil conflicts when the superpowers used Third World states as battlegrounds.67 Sometimes the superpowers aided proxy belligerents, sometimes they intervened directly. Sometimes they sought to control the target states, and sometimes they sought to bleed the other superpower by creating chaos in its sphere of influence. In some cases they merely magnified conflicts born of other causes; in others they helped trigger the conflict at the outset. Superpower competition fueled several major wars between 1947 and the late 1980s, including the Greek civil war, the Korean War, and the Indochina War. The recent wars in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Ethiopia also were magnified by superpower

65. Accounts of the war in El Salvador include William Stanley, The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and the Civil War in El Salvador (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); and Tommie Sue Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador. From Civil Strife to Civil Peace (Boulder: Westview, 1994). Accounts on Guatemala include Sheldon H. Davis, "State Violence and Agrarian Crisis in Guatemala: The Roots of the Indian-Peasant Revolt," in Trouble in our Backyard: Central America and the United States in the Eighties, ed. Martin Diskin (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 155-72; and Suzanne Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads and U.S. Power (Westview: Boulder, 1991). On the Philippines, see James Putzel, A Captive Land: The Politics of Agrarian Reform in the Philippines (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1992). 66. On the 1996 El Salvador election, see Tommie Sue Montgomery, "El Salvador's Extraordinary Elections," LASA Forum 28, no. 1 (spring 1997): 4-8 67. The superpowers were not the only countries to use proxies to further their ends. China supported the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Israel and Syria aided factions in Lebanon, and Iran backed Shi'a groups around the world. The apartheid regime of South Africa was particularly active, supporting antigovernment groups in Namibia, Mozambique, and Angola as part of its effort to ensure white hegemony.

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intervention.68 The Afghan war was triggered by the Soviet invasion of 1979;69 the long war in Angola traces back to the joint U.S. and Soviet breakage of the Alvor accord in 1975;70 U.S. support for the antigovernment insurgency in the 1980s lengthened die Cambodian war; the United States sustained the Salvadoran regime early in the Salvadoran civil war; and Soviet intervention magnified the conflict in Ethiopia. Superpower competition will cause few civil wars in die future. The cold war's end left the Third World more an object of neglect than of competition. There is some interaction among diese seven causes. Specifically, die collapse of empire spawns illegitimate regimes and weak states; all three of diese causes allow communal hegemonism to flourish. Aristocratic intransigence and revolutionary ideology cause each other by driving opponents to the odier extreme. Superpower competition weakens some governments vis-a-vis dieir societies and can encourage both revolutionary ideologies and aristocratic intransigence. Communal hegemonism, revolutionary ideology, and aristocratic intransigence cause die delegitimation of regimes when hegemonistic, revolutionary, or aristocratically intransigent groups are in power (by leading others to view the regime as illegitimate) and also when such groups are out of power (by leading these groups to reject pluralistic regimes). Thus, these seven factors are interconnected in important ways.

68. For an account of the war in Afghanistan, Angola, and Cambodia, see Peter J. Schraeder, "Paramilitary Intervention," in Peter J. Schraeder, ed., Intervention Into the 1990s, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 131-51 at 137-49. 69. Accounts include Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relationsfrom Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1985), 887-965; Brogan, Fighting Never Stopped, 117-29. 70. A synopsis is Timothy D. Sisk, "Angola," in Encyclopedia of U.S. Foreign Relations 1, ed. Bruce W. Jentleson and Thomas G. Paterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 79-81. A longer account is Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation, 502-37. 71. An account is John McAuliff and Mary Byrne McDonnell, "The Cambodian Stalemate: America's Obstructionist Role in Indochina," WorldPolicyJournal7,no. 1 (winter 1989-90): 71-106. 72. See Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, Brogan, Fighting Never Stopped, 414-25. 73. An account is Brogan, Fighting Never Stopped, 27-38. 74. Further research on all seven of these causes is necessary for a complete understanding of their relationship to civil violence and to one another. Determining the necessary and sufficient conditions for the operation of each cause is a first step. Work on how to make more nebulous causes such as "a lack of regime legitimacy" operationalizeable also would be useful.

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THE FUTURE OF DEADLY CONFLICT

lS ARTICLE has argued that no new world disorder emerged after 1989. X Rather, a brief surge of violence was soon followed by a growing calm. Three causes of conflict were enhanced by the cold war's end and the Soviet collapse, but their effects were overridden by the reduction of three other important causes of conflict. The net impact of the cold war's end has been to reduce civil violence. Recent wars have caused horrific bloodshed, but things can be—and for many years were—far worse. What can we expect in the future? Most current trends are auspicious for peace. Six of the seven causes of civil conflict noted above seem likely to remain at current levels or diminish further in the future; only one seems likely to grow more prevalent. If so, peace should grow in the years ahead, although the question of how to respond to a lack of regime legitimacy when the state in question faces communal tension poses an important challenge. The aftershocks of the Soviet imperial collapse will fade in time, and imperial collapse is less likely to recur elsewhere since the world has fewer major empires. This will reduce a major cause of recent civil violence. Few empires remain in existence. Both China and Iran, for example, are states where one group has conquered others and dominates politics. No large colonial empires remain, however. States are not likely to grow dramatically weaker in the future. The loss of superpower support for despotic clients was a one-time event whose effects are already felt. Superpower (that is, U.S.) aid to client regimes is already so low that it cannot go much lower and is already often conditional on respect for human rights. Communal hegemonism should continue at current levels. We see no remedy for it on the horizon, but we also see few reasons why it should increase. Communist revolutionary ideology will fade further until it becomes an archaic relic. Other forms of revolutionary ideology (such as Islamic extremism) will continue, but we see no reason why they should increase and some reason to expect them to fade. Moreover, Islamic extremism has litde appeal outside the Muslim world, which will limit its war-causing effects considerably when compared with the more universal ideology of communism. 75. For a superb assessment of why Islamic extremism may fade, see Olivier Roy, The Failure ofPolitical Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

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SECURITY STUDIES 7, NO. 3 Table 6 WORLD DEMOCRATIZATION AND ETHNIC DIVISION

Number of homogeneous states1

Number of heterogeneous states2

Total number of states

Population in homogeneous states3

Population in heterogeneous states3

Total population (in (thousands)

Free

42 (62)

27 (38)

69 (100)

862,127 (82)

185,302 (18)

18 (31)

41 (69)

59 (100)

509,659 (22)

15 (29)

36

51

(71)

(100)

Partly free and not free total

33 (30)

77 (70)

110 (100)

1,471,85 3 (67) 1,978,51 2 (44)

1,811,99 0 (78) 714,975 (33)

1,040,42 9 (100) 2,318,64 9 (100) 2,186,82 8

Partly free

Not free

Grand total

75 (42)

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Degree of democratic freedom

104 (58)

179 (100)

2,526,96 5 (56)

(100) 4,505,44 7

(100)

2,840,63

2,527,15

5,367,78

9

0

9

(53)

(47)

(100)

1. One ethnic group is 80 percent or more of total population (percent in parentheses). 2. No ethnic group is 80 percent of total population (percent in parentheses). 3. In thousands (percent in parentheses). Sources and methods:

Data on degrees of democratic freedoms are from: Adrian Karatnycky et al. (Freedom House Survey Team), Freedom in the World: The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties 1995—

1996 (New York: Freedom House, 1996), 541, which classifies states as "free," "partly free," and "not free." Data on state populations are from ibid., passim. Data on the degree of ethnic heterogeneity are from three sources: ibid.; Robert Famighetti, ed., The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1997 (Mahwah, N.J.: K-III Reference, 1996), 737-837; Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook 1992 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, n.d.). A state is coded "homogeneous" if one ethnic group comprises 80 percent or more of its total population, and "heterogeneous" if no ethnic group comprises 80 percent of its total population. Coding was performed as follows. If Freedom in the World offered a statistical breakdown of a state's population by ethnic group, its numbers were followed. If not, numbers were taken from the World Almanac and the CIA World Factbook. If no numbers estimating group sizes were found in these sources, a state was coded "homogeneous" if the language in these three sources indicated that one group was an overwhelming majority or that the state population comprised a homogeneous blend of several ethnic stocks. A state was coded "heterogeneous" if any source mentioned four or more major groups without claiming they were blended. Also, a state was coded homogeneous if more than 80 percent

Hypotheses on the Causes oj"Contemporary Deadly Conflict

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of its population was composed of voluntary immigrants, even if Freedom in the World broke these immigrants into sub-groups. (Under this rule the United States got a "homogeneous" rating, as it otherwise might not). Finally, we coded Lebanon "heterogeneous" to recognke divisions among its religious groups, despite its Arab preponderance. Our sources provided insufficient data to code the ethnic heterogeneity of ten states, having a total population of 106,011,000. These states are omitted from Table 5.

Aristocratic intransigence, already much faded, will wane further as more egalitarian norms infuse the world's remaining aristocratic oligarchies and external pressures compel them to pluralize. Superpower competition requires competing superpowers. Today the world has only one superpower, and it competes only mildly with the other great powers. An early return to cold-war levels of hostility between great powers seems unlikely. The current hiatus in superpower competition will not last for ever, but a new cold war seems far over the horizon. The future of regime legitimacy is more worrisome. Three of the four ingredients leading to a lack of regime legitimacy discussed above should remain constant or diminish, which augurs well for peace. The discrediting of the Soviet model is a one-time event whose effects will fade as the world's last communist regimes are overthrown or evolve away from communism. An across-the-board increase in poor economic performance by governments seems plausible only in event of a global economic crises, a danger that seems remote. Regimes seem likely to become more accountable as the global trend toward pluralization continues. The fourth ingredient of lost regime legitimacy, however—the rise of the middle classes and resulting demands to democratize—seems bound to increase. Authoritarian states will respond by hunkering down or by democratizing. Both responses raise the risk of war. Hunkering down risks war for reasons outlined above: groups excluded from governance grow more dissatisfied and willing to use force against regimes that hunker down. Democratization will risk war because venues for future democratization will be less auspicious than past venues. Past waves of democratization occurred largely in fairly ethnically homogeneous societies (Scandinavia, Japan, Australia) or in immigrant societies with cultures of mutual tolerance among the migrants (the United States, Argentina, Israel). In contrast, future democratization will occur largely in multiethnic states with an authoritarian tradition. Burma, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, Angola, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Zaire, Guatemala, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are among the diverse and divided lands where future waves of democratization will break.

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SECURITY STUDIES 7, NO. 3

Table 6 summarizes this trend. It cross-tabulates the states of the world by their degree of ethnic heterogeneity and by their degree of democratization, using a three-way scale of democratic freedoms ("Free," 'Tartly Free" and "Not Free") developed by Freedom House. It shows that the world's democratic states are somewhat more homogeneous than its nondemocratic states. Specifically, 62 percent of the world's democratic states are homogeneous (that is, one ethnic group comprises 80 percent or more of their population), but only 30 percent of the world's partly democratic and nondemocratic states are homogenous. Hence our past experience with democratization is a poor guide to the future: past democratization has been focused in more homogeneous places than future democratizations. Table 6 also shows that die absolute number and population of the world's heterogeneous authoritarian states is large. Over 700 million people live in 36 "not free" heterogeneous states, and over 1.8 billion people live in 41 "partly free" heterogeneous states. This warns that if the democratization of multiethnic authoritarian states sparks war, future democratizations may spawn substantial violence. Can multiedinic authoritarian states democratize peacefully? Three remedies have been offered to the risks raised by democratization in divided societies, but none has proven reliable. Power-sharing ("consociational") democratic constitutional designs have succeeded in some settings (for example, in Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands) but require a culture of mutual tolerance and compromise that is often missing in today's multiethnic authoritarian states.7 "Integrative" electoral rules diat reward politicians who form multiethnic coalitions have been proposed but often are not successfully used. Finally, some suggest that heterogeneous societies can be made more homogeneous by somehow causing ethnic identities to fade, but die ethnic identities of literate nonimmigrant edinic groups have proven intractable. In past centuries illiterate groups often lost their identities by forgetting diem, and immigrant groups have often melded their identities with cultures dominant in dieir new homes. Very few nonimmigrant ethnic groups widi a written history and culture, however, have ever let dieir identities fade. Even Stalin's harsh totalitarian rule could not melt die identities of non-Russian Soviet citizens, for example. This suggests a grim forecast: democratization is inevitable, but it will often happen in multiethnic states where it will unleash the dogs of war. 76. For a summary of the consociational approach, see Sisk, Power Sharing and International Mediation in Ethnic Conflicts, 34-40. 77. For a discussion, see ibid., 40-45, 58-63.

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Hypotheses on the Causes of Contemporary Deadly Conflict

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Three prescriptions follow: Democratize deliberately. Pressing for democratization in all situations is unwise. In some contexts, such as when regimes lack legitimacy or when intransigent aristocrats are in power, democratization can ease civil conflict and promote social peace. As this paper has argued, however, democratization in multiethnic authoritarian states has often led to war. Democratization requires preparation to dampen the risks that it poses. Without strong state institutions and credible guarantees of minority rights, the risks of democratization causing war are greater. Until these are in place, a patient approach that defers active pressure for democratization is best. In the meantime, policy should focus on creating the preconditions for peaceful democratization. Aid should be linked to the protection of minority rights, the dampening of ethnic hate-propaganda, and other factors that will decrease the probability of conflict. Governments that accept these reforms should be strengthened to help them overcome violent resistance by groups with extreme agendas. Only after these efforts bear fruit should democratization be pushed. Foster power-sharing in democratizing states. Despite their mixed records,

consociational and integrative political systems should be fostered in democratizing multiethnic states. Elections are not the panacea many in the West consider them to be unless they are coupled with institutional protections of minority rights. Pure majoritarian systems should be avoided. Although our above discussion of power-sharing suggests that such attempts are likely to fail, they are nevertheless worthwhile given the paucity of peaceful alternatives. Consider partition as a last resort. Some multiethnic states simply cannot be democratized peacefully. If so, the partition of these divided societies into smaller, more homogeneous units should be considered as an alternative. Partition would often involve large social disruption and injury to individual rights. It would require large transfers of minority populations caught behind new partition boundaries. It could not be achieved peacefully without active management and assistance by outside powers. Partition,

78. Making this argument is Kaufmann, "Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars." An antipartition argument is Robert Schaeffer, Warpaths: The Politics of Partition (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990). A comparison of both pro- and antipartition arguments can be found in Daniel L. Byman, "Divided They Stand: Lessons about Partition from Iraq and Lebanon," Security Studies7,no. 1 (autumn 1997): 1-29. 79. We have argued that the Bosnian and Kurdish conflicts are best resolved by partition. See John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Van Evera, "When Peace Means War," New Republic, 18 December 1995; and Daniel L. Byman, "Let Iraq Collapse," The National Interest (fall 1996): 48-60.

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SECURITY STUDIES 7, NO. 3

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however, is still the better option if the alternative is massive civil violence of the kind lately seen in Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Rwanda.