Ethnicization of Civil Wars as a Problem for an International Gendarmerie
Research proposal to Carnegie Corporation of New York
Program on “The Contending Norms of Self-Determination and the Sanctity
of Existing International Borders”
James D. Fearon
David D. Laitin
Department of Political Science
Stanford University
Four trends in the post World War II era frame this proposal. First,
there has been a clear trend of a decreasing number of inter-state and an
increasing number of intra-state wars as a percentage of all wars being
fought in any given year. Second, an increasing percentage of intra-state
wars have been fought in the name of ethnic as opposed to class-based social
groups. Of the 106 intra-state wars documented in the “State Failures”
project, our analysis reveals that about two-thirds have been “ethnic” in
organization or goals. Third, as illustrated by Figure 1, the increase in the
percentage of intra-state wars is due to the difficulty of ending them rather
than a sudden increase in their outbreak with the end of the Cold War. The
data show that civil wars have broken out at a rate of about 2.3 per year in
the period since the end of World War II, but they have ended at a rate of
only about 1.7 per year. These wars fester and have devastating implications
for human rights, political order, and future economic growth. In part
because of these terrible consequences but more because of the end of the
Cold War, there has been a slow but now clear trend toward intervention in
these conflicts by an international gendarmerie interested in peaceful
settlement rather than victory by one side or the other.
Fearon and Laitin, Carnegie Grant Proposal, February 12, 2016, p. 2
In seeking to ameliorate the humanitarian tragedies associated with
this new modal form of warfare, success for these international gendarmeries
has been elusive. Why is this so? Are there principles of intervention that
might do better? The principal goal of our research under a Carnegie grant
would be to develop criteria for intervention that would be humanitarian in
purpose and efficient in operation. Equally important, such interventions
must be strategically sensitive. That is to say, the principles of intervention
must contain strategies of exit. Furthermore, as we shall elaborate later on,
the principles of intervention should not in themselves contain incentives for
people in peaceful countries to become rebels themselves.
Our present research, funded by the National Science Foundation,
demonstrates that conventional interpretations of ethnicized civil wars are
inadequate. Most of today’s interpretations are built on what is best called a
“grievance” model. Minority groups are seen here to resent a range of
humiliating policies, such as language laws that require them to learn the
language of the dominant group in the society, economic discrimination, and
rights to local governance. The problem with this superficially plausible
approach is that once we add to our sample the very large number of
minority groups who are not engaged in an ethnicized rebellion against the
state, the data show no correlation between the degree of grievance and the
likelihood of an ethnic rebellion. Most minority groups harbor grievances;
very few are engaged in civil wars against state authority.
In fact, once subjected to statistical analysis with the Minorities at
Risk (hereafter, MAR) data set that includes hundreds of minorities on all
continents, the grievance model performs quite poorly. On a whole range of
statistical models, controlling for country wealth, economic growth of the
country from 1960-80, and the geographic position of the minority, we relied
Fearon and Laitin, Carnegie Grant Proposal, February 12, 2016, p. 3
on the MAR and the State Failure data to test for factors that explain
outbreaks of ethnic civil wars since 1980. In contrast to the expectations of
the grievance model, we have found that:
(1) Measures of the degree of religious and cultural difference between
minorities and dominant groups do not help predict whether the minority
will be involved in significant violence with the state.
(2) A measure of the economic disparity between members of the minority
and members of the dominant groups is only weakly related to the
probability that the minority will be engaged in significant violence.
(3) Countries with significant religious minorities are no more likely to have
civil wars than those without. It does not matter if we consider only
minority-majority divisions along the “civilization” lines of the world
religions, as suggested by the theses of Samuel Huntington, or if we include
sectarian differences within world religions as well.
(4) Linguistically diverse countries are marginally, and not at all in some
model specifications, more likely to have significant civil wars.
(5) Democracies or federal governments, both thought to reduce grievances,
are no more or less likely to have civil wars.
(6) Discrimination and group grievances are more difficult to operationalize
and measure than are aspects of cultural difference. Nonetheless, the coding
for language grievances in the MAR data set are weakly but negatively
related to ethnic rebellion.
More consistent with the empirical data that we have analyzed is an
“insurgency” model. Rebellion is more likely in regions of poor countries in
which economic growth is slow, where there is a high concentration of the
ethnic population in a single region, and in which the region is in a relatively
inaccessible part of the country. In this model, we picture rebels as young
Fearon and Laitin, Carnegie Grant Proposal, February 12, 2016, p. 4
men who can derive far more rewards by joining an insurgency (and stealing
from the state and from ordinary people) than by joining the legitimate work
force. Rebels increasingly are able to procure military materiel and social
support for their insurgencies to the extent that they frame their goals in
ethnic terms. This is what we mean by the ethnicization of civil war. The
rebels’ initial strategy is to draw in the armies of the central state who will
seek to crush their rebellion. If the central state is drawn in, it is likely –
given the low information central authorities have concerning their
peripheral citizens and the limited training provided to soldiers in the armies
of poor countries – that its army will kill innocent bystanders. The more the
collateral damage, the easier it will be for rebel leaders to recruit new
members, and the probability of a spiral of violence increases. This, by the
way, is the time when grievances are persuasively articulated. They are
taken by outsiders as the cause of the rebellion, when in fact they are a
rhetoric for recruitment, often most vigorously articulated after the violence
has spiraled.
Our examination of the MAR and State Failure data show that the
conditions that favor insurgency much more reliably discriminate the
countries and groups that have seen significant civil violence from those that
have avoided such violence than the grievance model. Among the many
observable implications of the insurgency model for which we have
empirical support, we shall in this proposal highlight several.
(1) Poor countries have ineffective police forces, and should therefore, in an
insurgency model, face more insurgencies. In support of this reasoning, our
data show that per capita income in 1960 is a powerful predictor of which
countries have civil wars after 1980, as is growth in per capita income from
1960 to 1980.
Fearon and Laitin, Carnegie Grant Proposal, February 12, 2016, p. 5
(2) Surveillance of people in countries that have large populations is more
difficult than those that have smaller populations. Countries with large
populations should therefore, in an insurgency model, more likely face civil
war, and our data support this relationship.
(3) Political transitions weaken central states, and when transitions occur,
insurgencies are more likely to follow. Our data give ambiguous results here,
and further research is needed to evaluate this observable implication.
(4) Access to foreign financial, arms, and training support is a key resource
for insurgents. Our data show a strong relationship between the active
involvement of a foreign power in an ethnic group’s cause and the likelihood
of an insurgency.
In sum, the cross-national and cross-group evidence support the view
that ethnic civil wars are not “ethnic” in the sense of being driven by cultural
differences between ethnic minorities and majorities, or grievances held by
mistreated ethnic minorities (even though many minorities are indeed badly
mistreated). There are simply too many culturally distinct and aggrieved
ethnic minorities that are not and have not fought. Instead, “ethnic” civil
wars appear to be driven more by a form of military conflict that can be
harnessed to diverse political agendas, and happens at present to be
harnessed in two-thirds of our cases to ethnic autonomy.
An insurgency model allows us to focus on two aspects of ethnicized
rebellion missed in the grievance model, both of which have profound
implications for an international gendarmerie. First, we focus on the
variation in support within the ethnic group in whose name the rebellion is
being fought. We thus reject the view that once an aggrieved group has an
opportunity to fight for its autonomy, that there is a natural solidarity within
that group in support for the rebellion. The conventional wisdom has it that
Fearon and Laitin, Carnegie Grant Proposal, February 12, 2016, p. 6
rebels face a collective action problem, in getting all members of the group
who have latent support for rebellion (but are afraid to be the first rebels, in
the rational fear that no one else will follow) to join in. Our counterargument
suggests that it is the members of the ethnic group opposed to a rebellion
who face the real collective action problem. Anyone who seeks an
agreement with the state that would avoid the collateral damage associated
with counter insurgency is likely to be branded a traitor by the rebels, and
face sanctions. Under such conditions it will be quite difficult for moderates
to organize successfully.
Second, a perspective that highlights grievances ignores state actions
that are most responsible for the escalation of civil wars. States give lists of
minority members to extremists in the dominant ethnic group, encouraging
them to burn down the homes and businesses of minorities. States bomb
civilian populations in response to provocations of miniscule rebel bands.
Their security apparatuses torture innocent civilians seeking to extract
information from them about rebels. It is egregiously ineffective counterinsurgency rather than inappropriate policy that translates grievance into
civil war. By the time an international gendarmerie enters into a civil war, in
large part due to these ugly approaches by governments to put down
rebellions, antagonisms can be as irreconcilable as theorists who had posited
“ancient hatreds” as the cause of these wars would have predicted from the
outset.
It follows from our perspective that civil wars can be avoided by more
intelligent counterinsurgency coupled with economic policies to make the
life of the insurgent relatively less attractive. By this, we do not mean
giving states the technology of suppression that would allow them to
marginalize their peripheral populations without limits. Rather, we mean the
Fearon and Laitin, Carnegie Grant Proposal, February 12, 2016, p. 7
development of internationally monitored criteria for limiting states in their
strategies of responding to protest and demands for autonomy and secession.
We have not yet identified how a set of international norms for the
suppression of insurgencies can meet the twin goals of effectiveness in
dousing the insurgency and responsiveness to the rights and goals of the
people in whose name the insurrection is being fought. Working out such
criteria would be the first goal of our research.
It also follows from our perspective that international gendarmeries all
too quickly adopt the interests of the insurgents over the interests of the
people in whose name the insurgents are fighting. The gendarmerie finds
itself at war with the state that is organizing the counter-insurgency and
exacerbating the situation of the people who faced the humanitarian disaster
that caught the conscience of the world. The questions raised here are
numerous: What are the conditions that demand international military
action? Under what organizational umbrella should such a military action be
organized? How is it best to trade off solving the humanitarian disaster and
planting the seeds for a post-war situation that solves the problem that
caused the war? How can an international gendarmerie organize its
withdrawal, without compromising the security of those people in whose
name they entered? Answering this set of questions would be the second
goal of our research.
To fulfill these two research goals will require us to develop in four
ways the theoretical and empirical work we have done up till now in new
directions. First, we need to continue our work to improve the MAR and
State Failure data sets. Although we have spent the past year, supported by a
grant from the National Science Foundation and the hospitality of the Center
for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, in doing just
Fearon and Laitin, Carnegie Grant Proposal, February 12, 2016, p. 8
that, much more work needs to be done. Once we recognized that the
grievance model was inadequate and moved toward an insurgency model,
systematic coding of new variables became necessary. For example, the
MAR data set has very impressionistic values for group dispersion within a
country. Once we recognized the importance of this variable for the
insurgency model, we began (and still haven’t finished) a recoding of all
groups based on their population patterns in the countries in which they live,
and in neighboring countries as well. The insurgency model also requires us
to know something about the terrain in the group’s home area, if in fact it
has one. The harsher the terrain and the easier to hide in it (e.g. in mountains
or jungles), the insurgency model would predict the more likely the group
would be involved in a violent conflict with the state. Our insurgency model
also demands that we know whether the home area of the group has valuable
resources that are easy to carry (diamonds or drugs, for example). The more
such exportable resources are available to the group, the more likely, our
model predicts, young men will become insurgents. Since the MAR project
was constructed with a grievance model in mind, variables consequential for
an insurgency model were omitted, or coded casually. We are therefore
asking the Carnegie Corporation for continued data gathering support.
Second, and now getting on to the crucial issues of public policy, we
will need to think more systematically about the strategic dilemmas of
international intervention. For example, if an international military force
comes in automatically to protect the citizens of a region in which states
have killed insurgents, this would give incentives to potential rebels in other
countries to become martyrs in order to procure international support. Such
an intervention regime might have the unintentional consequence of
inducing new rebellions. We need to develop a simple model of external
Fearon and Laitin, Carnegie Grant Proposal, February 12, 2016, p. 9
intervention that makes predictions about the likely strategies of a range of
relevant actors such that we do not advocate policies with perverse
incentives.
Third, we need to consolidate the literature on a set of international
interventions so that we can isolate the factors that ameliorated and
exacerbated the violence. We plan to look at international intervention (and
its absence) in Bosnia, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, Sri Lanka,
Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Haiti. One of us (Laitin) has
already done this in his research on the international intervention in Somalia.
In a paper he wrote on that intervention, he showed (a) the incentives in the
fulfillment of the short term humanitarian goal to subvert the long term goal
of ending the violent conflict, (b) the strength of the U.N. in highlighting
human rights abuses, but its weakness in fulfilling chapter 7 (operational)
assignments, and (c) the inadvertent role played by many international
human rights NGOs in exacerbating the violence. Laitin has also done
extensive interviewing in Azerbaijan on the Nagorno-Karabakh insurgency,
and has emphasized in a recently published paper the cultivation of a future
insurgency that is now taking place in the refugee camps. From the work
already done on Somalia and Nagorno-Karabakh, supplemented by
additional case studies, we will go back to our theories to see if international
intervention had the consequences we predicted, and also whether nonintervention had the consequences the model predicted as well.
Fourth, we plan on doing four weeks of extensive interviewing, one
week at each of four institutions that have played a crucial role in the
organization of international gendarmeries: New York and the U. N.;
Washington D.C. and the American Department of State; Brussels and
NATO; and Moscow and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here we
Fearon and Laitin, Carnegie Grant Proposal, February 12, 2016, p. 10
plan to interview both policy-makers (at the time of the interventions) and
policy-planners (who are developing criteria for intervention) in order to
expand our vision of what is feasible and what has been tried in past
endeavors. This will be a new element for us in our collaboration; yet we are
convinced that recommendations for international intervention without an
insiders knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, and what is feasible in
the realm of international military/police intervention, will have little value.
For the past five years, our work on ethnic violence has been
principally basic research. We have not ventured into the world of policy or
prescription. We are applying for a grant from Carnegie not only because we
wish to complete successfully the data sets we have been nurturing, but also
because we notice an absence of systematic thinking in policy communities
about military intervention in civil wars that is based on realistic assessments
of the expected returns from such intervention. We are convinced that our
insurgency approach is more realistic than the grievance approach toward
the causes of civil war, and that there are important implications for policy
once civil wars are interpreted according to our model’s mechanics. Drawing
out those implications through a series of articles written for the wider
policy community will be the planned product of our grant.