Civil war: is it all about disease and xenophobia? A comment on Letendre, Fincher & Thornhill

Letendre, Fincher & Thornhill (2010) argue that pathogen intensity provides the ultimate explanation for why some countries are more prone to civil war than others. They argue that the economic and political factors highlighted in previous research on civil war are largely caused by underlying differences in pathogen intensity, and contend that disease proneness increases the risk of civil war through its effects on resource competition and xenophobia. They present empirical evidence that they interpret as consistent with their argument: a statistically significant correlation between pathogen intensity and civil war onset. In this comment, we raise concerns over their interpretation of the empirical evidence and their proposed causal mechanisms. We find that the data provide stronger evidence for the reverse causal relationship, namely that civil war causes disease to become more prevalent. This finding is consistent with the literatures on the public health effects of civil war as well as research on state capacity and public health

Houston, We Have a Problem: Enhancing Academic Freedom and Transparency in Publishing Through Post-Publication Debate

Debates over controversial articles often highlight important issues regarding academic freedom, transparency, and how to handle disagreements in publishing. I argue that a response outlining criticism is generally a more productive course of action than calling for retraction. However, there are a number of constraints that impede meaningful debates, and a problematic divergence between our common ideals of open research and free debate and the actual practices that we see in academic publishing, where our current practices often undermine transparency, replication, and scientific debate. I argue that research can benefit from more explicit recognition of politics and preferences in how we evaluate research as well greater opportunities for post-publication debate. The successful initiatives to promote data replicability over the past decade provide useful lessons for what improved post-publication transparency may look like

Explaining External Support for Insurgent Groups

AbstractMany rebel organizations receive significant assistance from external governments, yet the reasons why some rebels attract foreign support while others do not is poorly understood. We analyze factors determining external support for insurgent groups from a principal-agent perspective. We focus on both the supply side, that is, when states are willing to support insurgent groups in other states, and the demand side, that is, when groups are willing to accept such support, with the conditions that this may entail. We test our hypotheses using new disaggregated data on insurgent groups and foreign support. Our results indicate that external rebel support is influenced by characteristics of the rebel group as well as linkages between rebel groups and actors in other countries. More specifically, we find that external support is more likely for moderately strong groups where support is more likely to be offered and accepted, in the presence of transnational constituencies, international rivalries, and when the government receives foreign support.</jats:p

A Two-Stage Approach to Civil Conflict: Contested Incompatibilities and Armed Violence

We present a two-stage approach to civil conflict analysis. Unlike conventional approaches that focus only on armed conflict and treat all other cases as “at peace”, we first distinguish cases with and without contested incompatibilities (Stage 1) and then whether or not contested incompatibilities escalate to armed conflict (Stage 2). This allows us to isolate factors that contribute to conflict origination (onset of incompatibilities) and factors that promote conflict militarization (onset of armed violence). Using new data on incompatibilities and armed conflict, we replicate and extend three prior studies of violent civil conflict, reformulated as a two-stage process, considering a number of different estimation procedures and potential selection problems. We find that the group-based horizontal political inequalities highlighted in research on violent civil conflict clearly influence conflict origination but have no clear effect on militarization, whereas other features emphasized as shaping the risk of civil war, such as refugee flows and soft state power, strongly influence militarization but not incompatibilities. We posit that a two-stage approach to conflict analysis can help advance theories of civil conflict, assess alternative mechanisms through which explanatory variables are thought to influence conflict, and guide new data collection efforts

Ethnonationalist Triads: Assessing the Influence of Kin Groups on Civil Wars

Although the case-based literature suggests that kin groups are prominent in ethnonationalist conflicts, quantitative studies of civil war onset have both overaggregated and underaggregated the role of ethnicity, by looking at civil war at the country level instead of among specific groups and by treating individual countries as closed units, ignoring groups' transnational links. In this article the authors integrate transnational links into a dyadic perspective on conflict between marginalized ethnic groups and governments. They argue that transnational links can increase the risk of conflict as transnational kin support can facilitate insurgencies and are difficult for governments to target or deter. The empirical analysis, using new geocoded data on ethnic groups on a transnational basis, indicates that the risk of conflict is high when large, excluded ethnic groups have transnational kin in neighboring countries, and it provides strong support for the authors' propositions on the importance of transnational ties in ethnonationalist conflict.</jats:p

Civil war: is it all about disease and xenophobia? A comment on Letendre, Fincher &amp; Thornhill

Letendre, Fincher &amp; Thornhill (2010) argue that pathogen intensity provides the ultimate explanation for why some countries are more prone to civil war than others. They argue that the economic and political factors highlighted in previous research on civil war are largely caused by underlying differences in pathogen intensity, and contend that disease proneness increases the risk of civil war through its effects on resource competition and xenophobia. They present empirical evidence that they interpret as consistent with their argument: a statistically significant correlation between pathogen intensity and civil war onset. In this comment, we raise concerns over their interpretation of the empirical evidence and their proposed causal mechanisms. We find that the data provide stronger evidence for the reverse causal relationship, namely that civil war causes disease to become more prevalent. This finding is consistent with the literatures on the public health effects of civil war as well as research on state capacity and public health.</jats:p

Ethnic inclusion, democracy, and terrorism

Previous research has shown that ethnic exclusion and restricted political access can motivate ethnic groups to resort to violence. Although these links are better established for civil wars or conventional conflict, we believe that the same logic should be applicable to ethnic terrorism as well. If so, can reforms towards greater ethnic inclusion also reduce terrorist risks? We argue that reform and changes towards greater ethnic inclusion and democratization should induce substitution and reduce the volume of terrorist violence, even if attacks by splinter groups may persist. We develop propositions on terrorist attack frequency, given group characteristics and accommodation. We take advantage of the large changes towards democratization, decreased discrimination, and increased ethnic accommodation since the third wave of democratization and the end of the Cold War, as well as new data linking domestic terrorist organization in the Global Terrorism Data to specific ethnic groups in the Ethnic Power Relations data. Our group-level analyses suggest considerable support for a decline in terrorism following accommodation

Location, Location, Location: An MCMC Approach to Modeling the Spatial Context of War and Peace

This article demonstrates how spatially dependent data with a categorical response variable can be addressed in a statistical model. We introduce the idea of an autologistic model where the response for one observation is dependent on the value of the response among adjacent observations. The autologistic model has likelihood function that is mathematically intractable, since the observations are conditionally dependent upon one another. We review alternative techniques for estimating this model, with special emphasis on recent advances using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques. We evaluate a highly simplified autologistic model of conflict where the likelihood of war involvement for each nation is conditional on the war involvement of proximate states. We estimate this autologistic model for a single year (1988) via maximum pseudolikelihood and MCMC maximum likelihood methods. Our results indicate that the autologistic model fits the data much better than an unconditional model and that the MCMC estimates generally dominate the pseudolikelihood estimates. The autologistic model generates predicted probabilities greater than 0.5 and has relatively good predictive abilities in an out-of-sample forecast for the subsequent decade (1989 to 1998), correctly identifying not only ongoing conflicts, but also new ones.</jats:p

Fighting at Home, Fighting Abroad

Although research on conflict has tended to separately study interstate conflict and civil war, states experiencing civil wars are substantially more likely to become involved in militarized disputes with other states. Scholars have typically focused on opportunistic attacks or diversionary wars to explain this domestic–international conflict nexus. The authors argue that international disputes that coincide with civil wars are more often directly tied to the issues surrounding the civil war and emphasize intervention, externalization, and unintended spillover effects from internal conflict as important sources of international friction. They empirically demonstrate that civil wars substantially increase the probability of disputes between states. An analysis of conflict narratives shows that the increased risk of interstate conflict associated with civil wars is primarily driven by states' efforts to affect the outcome of the civil war through strategies of intervention and externalization and not by an increase in conflicts over unrelated issues. </jats:p