New Paradigms in the Study of the Civil War Essay Example for Free

New Paradigms in the Study of the elegant struggle EssayA courtly fight is a struggle surrounded by organized groups at bottom the same nation state or republic, or, less comm scarce, between two countries created from a formerly unify nation state. The forecast of one incline may be to take misrepresent of the country or a region, to achieve liberty for a region, or to change g everyplacenment policies. well-be submitd wars since the end of instauration contend II take hold lasted on average just everywhere four years, a outstanding rise from the one-and-a-half year average of the 1900-1944 period. While the set of emergence of new elegant wars has been relatively lull since the mid-19th speed of light, the increasing length of those wars resulted in increasing spells of wars ongoing at every one time.For example, at that place were no more(prenominal) than five cultivated wars at a lower placeway simultaneously in the first half of the twentieth ce ntury, sequence over 20 concurrent well-behaved wars were breathering at the end of the frigidity War, before a significant decrease as conflicts strongly associated with the superpower rivalry came to an end. Since 1945, civil wars have resulted in the deaths of over 25 million people, as well as the forced displacement of millions more. Civil wars have set ahead resulted in economic collapse Somalia, Burma, Uganda and Angola ar examples of nations that were considered to have promising futures before being engulfed in civil wars. Formal classificationJames Fearon, a scholar of civil wars at Stanford University, defines a civil war as a violent conflict within a country fought by organized groups that aim to take power at the center or in a region, or to change presidency policies. The Correlates of War, a dataset widely use by scholars of conflict, classifies civil wars as having over 1000 war-related casualties per year of conflict. This rate is a small fraction of the mil lions killed in the Second Sudanese Civil War and Cambodian Civil War, for example, but excludes several(prenominal) highly publicized conflicts, such as The Troubles of Northern Ireland and the struggle of the African study relative in Apartheid-era South Africa. That the Party in revolt against the de jure organisation possesses an organized military force, an spot responsible for its acts, acting within a determinate territory and having the means of respecting and ensuring respect for the Convention.That the legal Government is obliged to have recourse to the regular military forces against insurgents organized as military and in self-denial of a part of the national territory. That the de jure Government has recognized the insurgents as belligerents or That it has claimed for itself the rights of a belligerent or That it has accorded the insurgents recognition as belligerents for the purposes only of the present Convention or That the dispute has been admitted to the agend a of the Security Council or the General Assembly of the United Nations as being a threat to global peace, a pique of the peace, or an act of aggression.That the insurgents have an organization purporting to have the characteristics of a State.That the insurgent civil assurance exercises de facto eventiveness over the population within a determinate portion of the national territory.That the armed forces act under the direction of an organized authority and are prepared to observe the ordinary laws of war. That the insurgent civil authority agrees to be bound by the provisions of the Convention.Causes of civil war in the Collier-Hoeffler ModelScholars investigating the reach of civil war are draw ined by two opposing theories, greed versus grievance. Roughly stated are conflicts caused by who people are, whether that be defined in terms of ethnicity, religion or other genial affiliation, or do conflicts begin because it is in the economic best interests of individuals and gr oups to start them? Scholarly analysis accepts the remnant that economic and structural factors are more important than those of identity in predicting occurrences of civil war. A comprehensive examination studies of civil war was carried out by a team from the World Bank in the advance(prenominal) 21st century.The study framework, which came to be called the Collier-Hoeffler Model, examined 78 five-year increments when civil war occurred from 1960 to 1999, as well as 1,167 five-year increments of no civil war for comparison, and subjected the data set to regression analysis to see the found of various factors. The factors that were shown to have a statistically significant effect on the chance that a civil war would occur in any given five-year period were Availability of financeA high proportion of prime commodities in national exports significantly increases the risk of a conflict. A country at peak danger, with commodities comprising 32% of gross domestic product, has a 22 % risk of falling into civil war in a given five-year period, while a country with no immemorial commodity exports has a 1% risk. When disaggregated, only petroleum and non-petroleum groupings showed different results a country with relatively low levels of dependence on petroleum exports is at slightly less risk, while a high-level of dependence on oil as an export results in slightly more risk of a civil war than national dependence on another primary commodity.The authors of the study interpreted this as being the result of the ease by which primary commodities may be extorted or captured compared to other forms of wealth, for example, it is easy to capture and control the output of a specie mine or oil field compared to a sector of garment manufacturing or hospitality services. A second source of finance is national diasporas, which can fund rebellions and insurgencies from abroad.The study found that statistically shift the sizing of a countrys diaspora from the smallest fou nd in the study to the largest resulted in a sixfold increase in the chance of a civil war. Low per capita income has been proposed as a cause for grievance, prompting armed rebellion. However, for this to be true, one would expect economic in fittedity to also be a significant factor in rebellions, which it is not. The study thitherfore concluded that the economic model of opportunity cost better explained the findings. Population sizeThe various factors contributing to the risk of civil war rise increase with population size. The risk of a civil war rises approximately proportionately with the size of a countrys population. Gleditsch et al. did not find a consanguinity between ethnic groups with polygyny and increase frequency of civil wars but nations having legal polygamy may have more civil wars. They argued that misogyny is a better explanation than polygyny. They found that increased womens rights were are associated with less civil wars and that legal polygamy had no effect after womens rights were controlled for. Duration of civil warsAnn Hironaka, author of Neverending Wars, divides the modern account statement of civil wars into the pre-19th century, 19th century to early 20th century, and late 20th century. In 19th-century Europe, the length of civil wars fell significantly, largely due to the nature of the conflicts as battles for the power center of the state, the strength of centralized organisations, and the normally quick and fatal interference by other states to support the government. Following World War II the duration of civil wars grew past the norm of the pre-19th century, largely due to weakness of the many post colonial states and the intervention by major powers on both sides of conflict. The most obvious commonality to civil wars are that they occur in fragile states. Civil wars in the 19th and early 20th centuriesCivil wars by the 19th century to early 20th century tended to be short the average length of a civil war between 1 900 and 1944 was one and half years. The state itself was the obvious center of authority in the majority of cases, and the civil wars were thus fought for control of the state. This meant that whoever had control of the capital and the military could normally crush resistance. If a rebellion failed to promptly seize the capital and control of the military for itself, it was normally doomed to a quick destruction.For example, the fighting associated with the 1871 genus Paris Commune occurred almost entirely in Paris, and ended quickly once the military sided with the government. The power of non-state actors resulted in a lower value placed on sovereignty in the 18th and 19th centuries, which however reduced the number of civil wars. For example, the pirates of the Barbary Coast were recognized as de facto states because of their military power. The Barbary pirates thus had no compulsion to rebel against the Ottoman Empire, who were their nominal state government, to gain recogni tion for their sovereignty. Conversely, states such as Virginia and Massachusetts in the United States of America did not have sovereign status, but had significant semipolitical and economic independence coupled with weak federal control, reducing the incentive to secede.The two major global ideologies, monarchism and democracy, led to several civil wars. However, a bi-polar world, divided between the two ideologies, did not develop, largely due the dominance of monarchists through most of the period. The monarchists would thus normally intervene in other countries to stop democratic movements taking control and forming democratic governments, which were seen by monarchists as being both dangerous and unpredictable. The Great Powers, defined in the 1815 Congress of Vienna as the United Kingdom, Habsburg Austria, Prussia, France, and Russia, would frequently coordinate interventions in other nations civil wars, nearly of all time on the side of the incumbent government. Given the m ilitary strength of the Great Powers, these interventions were nearly always decisive and quickly ended the civil wars. There were several exceptions from the general rule of quick civil wars during this period.The American Civil War was unusual for at least two reasons it was fought around regional identities, rather than political ideologies, and it was ended through a war of attrition, rather than over a decisive battle over control of the capital, as was the norm. The Spanish Civil War was exceptional because both sides of the war received support from intervening great powers Germany, Italy, and Portugal supported impedance leader Francisco Franco, while France and the Soviet Union supported the government . Civil wars since 1945In the 1990s, almost twenty civil wars were occurring concurrently during an average year, a rate about ten times the historical average since the 19th century. However, the rate of new civil wars had not increased appreciably the drastic rise in the number of ongoing wars after World War II was a result of the tripling of the average duration of civil wars to over four years. This increase was a result of the increased number of states, the fragility of states formed after 1945, the decline in interstate war, and the ice-cold War rivalry. Following World War II, the major European powers divested themselves of their colonies at an increasing rate the number of ex-colonial states jumped from about 30 to almost 120 after the war. The rate of state formation leveled off in the 1980s, at which point few colonies remained. More states also meant more states in which to have long civil wars.Hironaka statistically measures the impact of the increased number of ex-colonial states as increasing the post-WWII incidence of civil wars by +clxv% over the pre-1945 number. While the new ex-colonial states appeared to follow the blueprint of the idealized state centralized government, territory envelop by defined borders, and citizenry with defined rights -, as well as accessories such as a national flag, an anthem, a seat at the United Nations and an official economic policy, they were in actuality far weaker than the Hesperian states they were modeled after. In Western states, the structure of governments tight matched states actual capabilities, which had been arduously developed over centuries. The phylogenesis of strong administrative structures, in particular those related to extraction of taxes, is closely associated with the intense warfare between predatory European states in the 17th and 18th centuries, or in Charles Tillys famous formulation War made the state and the state made war.For example, the formation of the modern states of Germany and Italy in the 19th century is closely associated with the wars of expansion and consolidation led by Prussia and Sardinia, respectively. Such states are considered weak or fragile. The strong-weak categorization is not the same as Western-non-Western, as some Latin American states like Argentina and Brazil and midriff Eastern states like Egypt and Israel are considered to have strong administrative structures and economic infrastructure. Historically, the multinational community would have targeted weak states for territorial reserve absorption or colonial domination or, alternatively, such states would fragment into pieces small nice to be effectively administered and secured by a local power. However, international norms towards sovereignty changed in the wake of WWII in ways that support and maintain the existence of weak states.Weak states are given de jure sovereignty equal to that of other states, even when they do not have de facto sovereignty or control of their own territory, including the privileges of international diplomatic recognition and an equal vote in the United Nations. Further, the international community offers development help to weak states, which helps maintain the facade of a functioning modern state by giving the coming into court that the state is capable of fulfilling its implied responsibilities of control and order. The formation of a strong international law regime and norms against territorial aggression is strongly associated with the dramatic drop in the number of interstate wars, though it has also been attributed to the effect of the chilliness War or to the changing nature of economic development.Consequently, military aggression that results in territorial annexation became increasingly likely to prompt international condemnation, diplomatic censure, a reduction in international aid or the introduction of economic sanction, or, as in the case of 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, international military intervention to reverse the territorial aggression. Similarly, the international community haslargely refused to recognize secessionist regions, while keeping some secessionist self-declared states such as Taiwan in diplomatic recognition limbo. While there is not a large body of a cademic work examining the relationship, Hironakas statistical study found a correlation that suggests that every major international anti-secessionist declaration increased the number of ongoing civil wars by +10%, or a total +114% from 1945 to 1997. The diplomatic and legal protection given by the international community, as well as economic support to weak governments and discouragement of secession, thus had the unintended effect of encouraging civil wars.There has been an enormous amount of international intervention in civil wars since 1945 that served to transcend wars. While intervention has been practiced since the international system has existed, its nature changed substantially. It became common for both the state and opposition group to receive extraneous support, allowing wars to continue well past the point when domestic resources had been exhausted. Superpowers, such as the European great powers, had always felt no compunction in intervening in civil wars that affec ted their interests, while distant regional powers such as the United States could declare the interventionist Monroe Doctrine of 1821 for events in its Central American backyard.However, the large population of weak states after 1945 allowed intervention by former colonial powers, regional powers and neighboring states who themselves often had scarce resources. On average, a civil war with interstate intervention was 300% longer than those without. When disaggregated, a civil war with intervention on only one side is 156% longer, while intervention on both sides lengthens the average civil war by an addition 92%. If one of the intervening states was a superpower, a civil war is extended a further 72% a conflict such as the Angolan Civil War, in which there is two-sided foreign intervention, including by a superpower, would be 538% longer on average than a civil war without any international intervention. Effect of the Cold WarThe Cold War provided a global network of strong and id eological support that perpetuated civil wars, which were mainly fought in weak ex-colonial states, rather than the relatively strong states that were line up with the Warsaw Pact and North Atlantic Treaty Organization.In some cases, superpowers would superimpose Cold War ideology onto local conflicts, while in others local actors using Cold War ideology would attract the attention of a superpower to obtain support. Using a separate statistical evaluation than used above for interventions, civil wars that taked pro- or anti-communist forces lasted 141% longer than the average non-Cold War conflict, while a Cold War civil war that attracted superpower intervention resulted in wars typically lasting over ternary times as long as other civil wars. Conversely, the end of the Cold War marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 resulted in a reduction in the duration of Cold War civil wars of 92% or, phrased another way, a roughly ten-fold increase in the rate of gag law of Cold W ar civil wars. Lengthy Cold War-associated civil conflicts that ground to a halt include the wars of Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua . See alsoThe Logic of Violence in Civil WarWar of licenseWars of national liberationReferences