Goods and Violence: DoesTrade Influence Civil War?
Shahdad Naghshpour
The University of SouthernMississippi
INTRODUCTION
Civil war and ethnic conflict tend to be mirror images ofeach other. In recent history most ethnic conflicts haveescalated into civil war, while most civil wars have somesort of ethnic component.
In this paper we explore how trade, globalization andpolitical violence tend to create conditions where ethnicconflict and civil war becomes feasible. Conflict initiationis a phenomenon dependent upon multiple factors, witheach anchored in the economic feasibility of conflict.
THE ARGUMENT
Some assert that the rate of growth and structure of trade mattersfor the initiation of civil war, these arguments are limited andunconvincing.
We investigate trade, globalization, and their influence on civil war.
The “greed” based explanation of civil war is based upon the“feasibility hypotheses,” which asserts that rebellion against thecentral government occurs when feasible—that is economicallyfeasible.
We explore how trade raises income and how it can be amechanism for civil war financing. We test this by examiningimports, exports, the level of globalization, and the type ofglobalization. The magnitude of rebellion is used as dependentvariable signaling the breakdown of government control.
DATA
The data for this study consists of three parts. One set ofdata deals with globalization, which is obtained fromKOF globalization data, which includes variables oneconomic, social, cultural, and political globalization(Derher 2006).
The other set of data deals with trade. Import and exportdata are obtained from World Trade Organization.Finally, rebellion data are obtained from Minorities atRisk dataset (see references). Rebellion data are dividedinto categories from zero, no rebellion, to high of 7. Eachrebellion represents an incident by a specific ethnicgroup. The classes of rebellion can bee seen in Table 1.
Table 1: Average Level of Rebellion
Response
Frequency
Percent
Valid Percent
CumulativePercent
None Reported
2007
61.3
62.9
62.9
Political Banditry
637
19.5
20.
82.9
Campaigns of Terrorism
177
5.4
5.6
88.5
Local Rebellion
164
5.0
5.1
93.6
Small-scale Guerilla Activity
101
3.1
3.2
96.8
Intermediate Guerilla Activity
53
1.6
1.7
98.4
Large-scale Guerrilla Activity
34
1.0
1.1
99.5
Protracted Civil War
16
.5
.5
100.0
Totals
3189
97.5
100.0
Missing
83
2.5
Totals
3272
100.0
MODEL
This work utilizes an ordinal model to analyze therelationship between trade and civil war. We findevidence that the feasibility hypothesis is supported bythe data. The model is of the general form:
Y = α + β X + ε
Where Y is a vector of dependent variable, which is acategorical data with eight classes. The matrix X is acollection of trade, globalization, and relatedsocioeconomic explanatory factors. Since the responsevariable is ordinal the assumed underlying distributionfunction for error is a logistic function with variance π2/3.
EMPIRICAL RESULTS
Factor
Model I
Model II
Export
Import
Economic Globalization
Political Globalization
Gross Capital Formation
Population
1.89 (1.91)*
----------
- 0.57 (-13.38)***
0.12 (2.50)**
- 0.92 (-1.62)
- 4.69 (1.62)
----------
2.25 (1.96)*
-0.57 (13.38)***
0.11 (2.07) **
-0.88 (-1.56)
-5.52 (-2.01)**
Levels of significance corresponds to *** less than 0.01, ** less than 0.05, and * less than 0.10.
Table 2. Trade Influence on Rebellion with Eight Levels of Rebellion
Results
• The two models are identical except for the tradevariable. One includes exports while the other includesimports. The signs for exports and imports are positivesupporting the claim of increased rebellion when eitherone increases.
•This supports the feasibly hypothesis as there are thenecessary economic resources to fund a rebellion.
•Attempts to include both exports and imports in the samemodel were not successful. Similarly, net trade (exports– imports) or total trade (exports + imports) failed thetests of significance.
Results
•Economic globalization and political globalization bothare significant and have the expected sign, negative andpositive, respectively.
•Gross capital formation is not significant in either model.The level significance is 11.8% in both model I and II.
•The only surprise comes from population variable.Although the hypothesized relation with rebellion ispositive, the observed coefficient is negative in bothmodels, albeit significant only in the second model. Thiscould be due to the fact that some of the most populouscountries such as China and US do not have anyrebellion during the study period.
CONCLUSIONS
•The feasibility hypothesis asserts that rebellion will onlyoccur when and where it is economically and materiallyfeasible to do so.
•Our findings support the feasibility hypothesis. We findthat increased imports as well as exports increaserebellion.
•While economic globalization tends to lower rebellion wesee this as a function of trade openness as opposed toactual trade flows.
•The result that political globalization increases rebellioncan be seen in the fact that more politically integratednations may have more rebellion since rebel groups willwant to have their cause publicized by the media or bringit to the attention of other governments.