Publication: Introduction : The Aftermath of Civil War
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Date
2008
ISSN
00223433
Published
2008
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This article introduces the special issue on 'The Aftermath of Civil War' and presents the research project from which the articles in this issue originate. The article presents a few empirical observations that demonstrate the increasing importance of the post-conflict situation for actors that engage to reduce the global incidence of armed conflict. The global incidence of conflict was reduced from 1992 to 2002, since there were more terminations than onsets. Although this trend seems to have halted, a scrutiny of the onsets shows that they increasingly are recurrences of conflicts that have been inactive for a period. In 2005 and 2006, there were no new conflicts. The article then briefly introduces the six contributions to the special issue. The articles investigate the importance of peacekeeping troops, elections, aid, capital flight, and exclusion of parties from peace agreements in post-conflict situations. The articles are also applicable to countries that have not had armed conflicts, as the authors investigate the relationship between ethnic diversity and military spending and the determinants of youths' decisions to participate in rebel groups.
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Publication Globalization, Economic Shocks, and Internal Armed Conflict(2008)Critics of trade liberalization argue that globalization increases countries' vulnerability to economic shocks and hence may exacerbate domestic social conflict. Such social conflict may also be transformed into armed conflict. Others argue that globalization promotes economic growth and reduces poverty, which leads to a reduction in the risk of internal conflict. Several studies find trade to reduce the risk of interstate conflict. This article investigates the impact of trade and trade shocks on the risk of intrastate conflict. A set of operationalizations of economic shock is developed and used to analyze the risk of conflicts that involve at least 25 battle deaths per year. The analysis finds no robust evidence for a direct relationship between trade openness, trade shocks, and the risk of armed conflict. 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Panel estimations drawn from a sample of 39 conflict and 44 nonconflict countries between 1970 and 2004 indicate that although postconflict countries receive larger aid flows and exhibit moderate RER overvaluation after peace is attained, overvaluation cannot be traced to aid. Yet foreign aid is among the significant determinants of the equilibrium RER. Aid is also an important determinant of economic growth, particularly after peace is reached. Aid exhibits decreasing returns, however, and interacts negatively with RER overvaluation. RER overvaluation reduces growth, but this effect is ameliorated by financial development. Postconflict policies should therefore aim to use aid prudently, avoid RER misalignment, and support financial and capital market development to achieve high and stable growth in the aftermath of war and beyond.Publication Consequences of Civil Conflict(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010-10-26)This paper reviews the literature on the development consequences of internal armed conflict and state fragility and analyzes the relationship using data from World Development Indicators, Ukraine Corporate Development Project UCDP/Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO) Armed Conflict Data (ACD), and World Bank state fragility assessments. Our main focus is on a set of development indicators that capture seven of the Millennium Development Goals, but the author also look briefly into the effect of conflict and fragility on growth, human rights abuses, and democratization. The author analyze these relationships using a variety of methods, averages by conflict and fragility status; cross-sectional regression analyses of change in each indicator over the time frame for which we have data; fixed-effects regression analyses of the impact on each indicator for each five-year period 1965-2009; as well as occasional panel time series models and matching techniques. In section two, the author summarizes the methodological choices and presents our conflict data. Section three summarizes the results of our analysis. Finally, section four analyzes the effects of internal armed conflict on the attainment of the individual Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).Publication Consequences of Civil Conflict(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011)Uses data from World Development Indicators, UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Data, and World Bank state fragility assessments to study the development consequences and relationship of internal armed conflict and state fragility in terms of seven of the Millennium Development Goals. Methods used to analyze these relationships include averages by conflict and fragility status; cross-sectional regression analyses of change in each indicator; fixed-effects regression analyses of the impact on each indicator for each five-year period 1965-2009; as well as occasional panel time series models and matching techniques. These analyses leave no doubt that conflict, fragility, and poor development outcomes are closely related, especially in the developing countries of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the difficulty of analyzing the effect of conflict on a set of indicators that are also causally related to the onset of conflict, conflict and fragility are found at least to exacerbate these pre-existing conditions.
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