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The Past is Ever-Present: Civil War as a Dynamic Process

Jones, Benjamin Thomas
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374173688

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Political Science.
Why are some states, in the aftermath of a civil war, able to transition to a consolidated form of peace, whereas others become enmeshed in a cycle of violence, repeatedly transitioning from war to peace and back again? This dissertation addresses this puzzle and challenges the prevailing approach to the study of civil war by reconceptualizing conflict as a dynamic, path dependent process that transitions through multiple successive stages of war, negative peace and consolidated peace. Thus, this dissertation develops a dynamic framework for the study of civil war by integrating the multiple stages of a civil war into a single bargaining process in which previous transitions structure the bargaining environment in the present. In the immediate aftermath of a civil war, the bargaining environment will be characterized by the information revealed in the previous conflict regarding the distribution of power, either high or low. From this negative form of peace, a conflict may transition to a more consolidated form of peace, characterized by the presence of democratic institutions and economic recovery, or back to war again. The nature of the post-conflict environment exerts dual effects on the future trajectory of the conflict process; on the one hand directly determining the underlying rates of conflict recidivism or recovery, and on the other hand, moderating the effect of contemporaneous sources of civil war---economic incentives, social grievances and commitment problems---, with high information environments and consolidated peace suppressing the effect of these sources of conflict, and low information environments enabling them. To test the implications of the dynamic theory of civil war, the dissertation first introduces a novel statistical method, a multi-state event history model, which is specifically designed to empirically capture longitudinal processes that unfold across multiple sequential, and potentially recurrent, stages. This statistical model is applied to a dataset of all civil wars during the period 1950-2004. The findings of this analysis largely support the expectations of the dynamic theory of civil war. Notably, previous transitions moderate the effect of contemporaneous sources of civil war. When a conflict is in a low information environment, economic incentives and commitment problems increase the risk of civil war, whereas these same factors have no effect in high information environments or when peace is consolidated. Unexpectedly, these findings reveal the opposite pattern for conflicts rooted in social grievances, as such motivations increase the risk of recurrence in high information environments, and have little effect elsewhere. To further test the implications of the dynamic theory of civil war, the dissertation employs two in-depth case studies of civil wars in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo using a process tracing method to examine the causal mechanisms leading to the recurrence of civil war in greater detail. This analysis provides additional evidence that low information environments act as permissive conditions that allow economic incentives to increase the willingness of combatants to return to war. Moreover, this analysis also traces the mechanisms through which ethnic tensions lead to civil war in high information environments.
Bear Braumoeller (Advisor)
Irfan Nooruddin (Committee Member)
Janet Box-Steffensmeier (Committee Member)
Randall Schweller (Committee Member)
242 p.
Political Science
civil war; civil war recurrence; conflict processes; bargaining; information; natural resources; commitment problems; ethnic conflict; event history; the Democratic Republic of Congo; Angola

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Jones, B. T. (2013). The Past is Ever-Present: Civil War as a Dynamic Process [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374173688

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Jones, Benjamin. The Past is Ever-Present: Civil War as a Dynamic Process. 2013. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374173688.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Jones, Benjamin. "The Past is Ever-Present: Civil War as a Dynamic Process." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374173688

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1374173688
402
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.