The Indivisible Hand of Peace? Consumption Opportunities and Civil War

ABSTRACT

GDP is one of the most robust indicators of civil war onset. As debate continues over the mechanisms underlying the relationship between economic development and civil war, this paper scrutinizes the indicator of GDP directly, disaggregating it into its constituent components to examine whether their distinct associations with conflict onset can shed some light into the black box. Analysis of the individual correlations allows for identification of the driving force behind the aggregate statistical relationship. With this information to hand, consistency checks can be made with existing theories and a new theory presented in this paper, which draws attention to a critical structural factor that drives the supply of civil war labor, namely the lack of consumption opportunities. This factor increases the likelihood of civil war in less economically developed countries as individuals with low consumption opportunities have little to lose from reordering the economic and political system. Analysis of the correlations between components of GDP and the onset of civil war shows that this new theory is most consistent with the key drivers of the aggregate relationship. The examination also highlights a new indicator, which is arguably preferable to GDP as a measure of this relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil war
• consumption opportunities
• economic development
• opportunity cost
• conflict trap
• peace

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for comments from Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Han Dorussen and an anonymous referee. The paper has previously been presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference 2017 and the Network of European Peace Scientists Jan Tinbergen Conference 2017.

The author acknowledges the support of the Economic and Social Research Council under grant number ES/J500045/1.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. See figures A1–3, which show how the proportion of each component can change year on year within one country. On the other hand, it is still likely that countries with low levels of income will have low levels of each component, whilst high income countries will have high levels of each.

2. Updated version 6.0 beta of this database is available at http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~ksg/exptradegdp.html.

3. See Vreeland (2008) for discussion of origins of this theory.

4. See appendix for tables reporting all results discussed in this section.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/J500045/1].