Insurgency formation and civil war onset
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Why do civil wars begin? Since the end of the Cold War, civil conflict has become the most prevalent formed of armed conflict, but too little is known about the causes and evolution of these conflicts. Extant scholarship focuses on country-level conditions to explain variation in conflict onset, but this often misses pre-war mobilization and within-state variation in armed group campaigns. To address these gaps, I develop an original dataset on 1,582 armed groups operating around the world between 1970 and 2012. I collect new data on organizational characteristics and the timing of three distinct campaign stages. The dataset establishes several new sources of variation in the organization and evolution of armed groups to guide future research. I argue that existing explanations for civil war are relatively time-invariant and so poorly explain the timing of different campaign stages. As a result, I argue scholars must consider the strategic interactions between the state and an armed group to better understand the causes and evolution of these conflicts. I develop and test two separate explanations for rebel group formation and civil war onset using a combination of fieldwork interviews, supervised learning algorithms, and regression analysis. The first theory focuses on how poor economic conditions and ongoing conflict affect the probability of rebel group formation by lowering opportunity costs and shifting the state's relative capacity to detect emerging threats. The second theory focuses on how states condition their responses to emerging threats based and under what conditions miscalculations are more likely to lead to civil war. The results advance theoretical understanding about why civil wars erupt and provide a new dataset on armed groups for future terrorism and insurgency research.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Malone, Iris Elizabeth | |
|---|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Fearon, James D | |
| Thesis advisor | Fearon, James D | |
| Thesis advisor | Crenshaw, Martha | |
| Thesis advisor | Schultz, Kenneth A | |
| Thesis advisor | Tomz, Michael | |
| Degree committee member | Crenshaw, Martha | |
| Degree committee member | Schultz, Kenneth A | |
| Degree committee member | Tomz, Michael | |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Political Science. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Iris Malone. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Political Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Iris Elizabeth Malone
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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