Left Flank

Earlier I was selecting sample data for that paper on civil wars and resources I wrote about earlier. Here's a trivia question: what was the bloodiest civil war in the world during the 19th Century?

A hint...

(The following is a proposal for a research paper)

Introduction: I will examine how natural resources affect political instability. Since civil war is the most dramatic expression of instability short of partition or secession, I will define instability as “civil war”, using the Correlates of War Project, Intra-State War Data, 1816-1997 (v3.0) database. I intentionally chose such a long historical period, to reduce the the influence of cyclical factors, such as the late 19th-Century nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe or the Cold War. This period also roughly corresponds with the rise of capitalist production on a global scale, which accelerated the extraction and consumption of natural resources. Two other factors recognized in the literature are geography and third parties. Overall, I am concerned about the possibility that civil wars can generate interstate wars.

Literature Review: My interest in the American Civil War (1851-1865) prompted my first acquaintance with the dependent variable and another reason to broaden its historical scope. In The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War, David J. Eicher mentions the role of cotton in the development of the animosity between Union and Confederacy and the role that third-party diplomatic recognition, both by border states and European states, like Great Britain and France, played in Confederate strategy.1

Michael T. Klare's Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (2001) inspired the choice of the independent variable. Klare's central thesis (p. 213) provides a warning for this examination, because his central thesis, that “resource wars will become, in the years ahead, the most distinctive feature of the global security environment” replaces fact with prognostication. Of a list of reasons for this prediction, Klare includes political instability as a factor in his “new geography of conflict.” Klare boldly declares that a new map colored with the geographical sources of resource deposits, including oil and coal, water, gems, timber, and minerals will replace boundaries in the new cartography. More helpfully, Klare provides an appendix (p. 221), “Territorial Disputes in Areas Containing Oil and/or Natural Gas”.

Michael L. Ross, in “How Do Natural Resources Influence Civil War? Evidence from Thirteen Cases” conducts a small-N comparative case study of 13 civil wars that occurred between 1990 and 2000 selected on a “most-likely” basis, to ascertain if natural resources are related to civil wars. Ross applies seven hypotheses, divided into three categories, onset, duration, and intensity, and in the process finds evidence for four further hypotheses. Ross concludes that there is a causal connection between natural resources and civil war, but that he can not rule out reverse causality or a spurious connection. For his sample, Ross also finds that oil, minerals and gems, and illicit drugs are related to civil wars. Furthermore, natural resources have multiple, indeed sometimes even beneficial effects upon civil wars. Ross argues that natural resources play a weightier role in civil wars involving separatist conflicts, but not non-separatist ones. Finally, Ross suggests as a guide for future research testing one hypothesis against the entire civil war dataset, not just a subset.2

In “What Do We Know about Natural Resources and Civil War? ”, Michael L. Ross conducts a qualitative review of 14 comparative case studies based on econometric data, namely the correlation of natural resource extraction to GDP. He notes four regularities in those conclusions. Firstly, oil affects the onset of civil war positively. Secondly, “lootable” commodities, like gems and illicit drugs, affect the duration of civil wars, but not the onset. Thirdly, there is no relationship between legal agricultural commodities and civil war. Fourthly, the relationship between natural resources and civil war is unclear. Ross ascribes four reasons for the inconsistencies he finds in his analysis of the 14 studies, including differences in databases, definitions of civil war separatist vs. non-separatist), procedures for determining the end of a civil war, and different procedures for handling missing data.3

James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, in “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War” conduct a quantitative analysis of 161 states with a population over 500,000 experiencing civil wars between 1945 and 1999. They conclude that the occurrence of civil war was not related to the end of the Cold War. Also, ethnic or ethnicity does not cause civil wars. Finally, political grievances also do not relate to civil wars. The authors related civil wars to insurgent activity, and the propensity of governments to conduct inept or corrupt counter-insurgency operations. insurgencies. “Insurgency is a technology of military conflict characterized by small, lightly armed bands practicing guerrilla warfare from rural base areas.” Positive correlates of civil wars include newness, large populations, and mountainous terrain, but not natural resources.4

David E. Cunningham, in “Veto Players and Civil War Duration”, argues that third-parties affect the duration of civil wars. Cunningham redefines civil war duration from units of “year” to “month” generating a dataset of 288 states involved in civil wars without a pause of a maximum of 24 months since 1945. Cunningham also argues that civil wars have three main types of participants: government, rebels, and third-parties, or veto players. Cunningham concludes that civil wars with more veto players last longer and are harder to resolve.5

Nicolas Sambanis, in “What Is Civil War? Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of an Operational Definition ” tackles the issue of competing definitions of civil war with a qualitative analysis of the COW project and prominent definitions offered by most of the authors above.. Sambanis offers 11 conditions by which an armed conflict can be defined as a civil war, including internationally recognized states with at least 500,000 people and well-defined political statements from both the government and insurgents. Sambanis also recognizes the possibility of third-party participation. Onset occurs in the first year when 500 to 1000 deaths occur, or if 500 deaths occur within a 3-year period. Sambanis defines duration as “sustained violence”, with at least 500 deaths in a 3-year period, but not decreasing below 100 deaths for either side. Finally, an end is declared by either a peace treaty lasting six months or an insurgent victory.6

Research design/methods: Following cues from the literature above, and my reading of the American Civil War, I have decided to pursue Ross' hypothesis, that “Resource wealth increases the likelihood of civil war by increasing the probability of foreign intervention to support a rebel movement.”7 I will also extend the scope of the examination to cover the 1816-1997 period covered by the Correlates of War Project, Intra-State War Data, restrict my examination to the question of onset, and adjust for Sampanis' definitional qualifications. One implication of this hypothesis is, to recognize Cunningham's insight, that civil wars have three types of parties. For the dependent variable, I will select a sample of ten civil wars, five from the 18th-century and five from the 20th-Century, with both the highest aggregate deaths and longest duration, but distributed as evenly as possible continent-wise. For the independent variable, I will select the ten natural resources I will examine fit into five categories: carbon-based products, including oil, natural gas, and coal; mined resources, including copper, and gemstones; legal agricultural commodities, namely timber, cotton, and sugar, and illicit drugs, such as opium and coca. Because I am drawing anecdotally upon one case, the American Civil War, a small-N quantitative comparative analysis is possible.

Discussion/Findings: I expect primary agricultural commodities will correlate more positively with civil war in the 19th-Century than in the last century. I also suspect that coal and civil war will be similar for both centuries.

Conclusion: Pro-Secessionist Southern planters banked on King Cotton to attract British and French support, West and Central African conflicts seemingly defied political boundaries, attracting broad regional participation. Finding which natural resources have ensured longer, bitterer civil wars would guide international and national policy-makers how to establish the international organizations Klare advocates to distribute natural resources wisely, if at all.

1. See Eicher (2001), Chapter One, “The War Begins at Sumter” and Chapter Two, “Organizing the Struggle”. [↩]
2. Michael L. Ross, “How Do Natural Resources Influence Civil War? Evidence from Thirteen Cases”, International Organization, Vol. 58, No. 1, (Winter, 2004), pp. 35-67. [↩]
3. Michael L. Ross, “What Do We Know about Natural Resources and Civil War?” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 3, (May, 2004), pp. 337-356 [↩]
4. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War”, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1, (Feb., 2003), pp. 75-90 [↩]
5. David E. Cunningham, “Veto Players and Civil War Duration”, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, No. 4, (Oct., 2006), pp. 875-892. [↩]
6. Nicholas Sambanis, “What Is Civil War? Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of an Operational Definition”, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 48, No. 6, (Dec., 2004), pp. 814-858 [↩]
7. Ross, “How Do Natural Resources Influence Civil War? Evidence from Thirteen Cases”, p. 57. [↩]