A comprehensive study on civil war: models and real cases

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A comprehensive study on civil war: models and real cases
The history of ethnic civil war consists of ethnic fragmentation appeared along the societal path to globalization. Over time, human enabled a comprehensive study of variables and motives in attempt to theorize a historical pattern of civil war. Two important models, one constructed by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, and the other by James Fearon and David Laitin, provided hypothesis of the causes of civil war based on social, economic and political measurements. However, as Horowitz states, “a bloody phenomenon cannot be explained by a bloodless theory”, civil conflict can never be concluded to a certain pattern; despite the general trend, chance events such as natural disasters and regional factors such as corruption would also diversify the scale of war in an idiosyncratic manner.
War models are essential in demonstrating correlations between theory-associated variables and the risk of war. The econometric model built by Collier and Hoeffler, for instance, provides a fair war measurement by demonstrating opportunity as a source of conflict. It includes predominant variables such as Primary commodity exports, GDP per capita, GDP per growth and population. In most cases, low GDP per capita and slow growth rate increase the risk of war because they provided a low opportunity cost for rebellion. This corresponds to the phenomenon in which many countries that underwent civil war over the period 1960-1999 were poor developing countries such as Congo, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Yugoslavia likewise underwent an economic breakdown in 1989, shortly before the outbreak of wars in 1992. A poor overall economy generates social tensions, leading to war. Meanwhile, a high dependency on Pr...

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Fearon, James D., and David D. Laitin. "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War." American Political Science Review 97, no. 01 (2003): 75. doi:10.1017/S0003055403000534.
Horowitz, Donald L. "Chapter 3." In Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 140. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
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