Natural Disasters: Triggers of Political Instability?

Abstract

This study engages with the question: Do different types of natural disasters—droughts, earthquakes, floods, storms, and others—trigger political instability? It revisits an ongoing debate over the nature of association between disasters and conflict and reassesses this relationship using the model of conflict developed by the Political Instability Task Force as well as its data, measures of political instability, and methods of assessment. The study finds only marginal support for the impact of certain types of disasters on the onsets of political instability. The preexisting country-specific conditions, including the resilience of a state's institutions to crisis, account for most of the variance in the dependent variable. Once the characteristics of a state's political regime are taken into account, the effect of disasters weakens or disappears completely, suggesting that natural disasters become catalysts of political instability in only those states which are already prone to conflict.

Keywords:

• conflict
• natural disasters

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Political Instability Task Force (PITF). The PITF is funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The views expressed herein are the author's alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the Task Force or the United States Government. The study was also made possible by a generous contribution of EM-DAT data by the Université Catholique de Louvain: EM-DAT: The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database—www.emdat.be—Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium. I thank the reviewers as well as my colleagues Michael S. Lynch, Argun Saatcioglu, Jay Ulfelder, and Donald P. Haider-Markel for their assistance and advice on this study.

Notes

¹The EM-DAT Emergency Events Database is considered to be the most comprehensive and reputable open source dataset on global natural disasters. This database contains extensive coverage of different types of natural and technological disasters from 1900 to present for nearly all countries included into the PITF dataset (EM-DAT 2010).

²In the interest of time and space I cannot review all of the exceptional quality work that examined different causal models of strife (for further discussion, see, for example, Gurr 2000; Gurr and Moore 1997).

³PITF Problem Set and Codebook. http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/pitfcode.htm

⁴The raw data on natural disasters was gratefully received via email in February 2009. The criteria for registering events in the database as well as the definitions of different types of natural disasters and other coding rules are retrieved from the explanatory notes accompanying the CRED EM-DAT.

⁵These variables have been singled out from an initial roster of 75 conflict-inducing independent variables suggested by experts. They were selected on the basis of thousands of tests of different statistical models with various functional indicators and interactive specifications.