Cite. Seer. X — Ethnicity, Insurgency, And Civil War. Abstract. An influential conventional wisdom holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic nationalism. We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 5. Cold War international system. David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and an. He is currently working on a project in collaboration with James Fearon on civil wars in the past. We also find that after controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence in this period. We argue for understanding civil war in this period in terms of insurgency or rural guerrilla warfare, a particular form of military practice that can be harnessed to diverse political agendas, including but not limited to ethnic nationalism. The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war are not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgency. These include poverty, which marks financially and bureaucratically weak states and also favors rebel recruitment, political instability, rough terrain, and large populations. Theory Talks: Theory Talk #1. James Fearon. James Fearon on Conflict- Prone Societies, Defining Ethnicity and Reforming the United Nations Security Council. ![]() James D. Fearon is known for his research on ethnic conflict, but has published on issues varying from the external validity of concepts in IR to reforming international institutions to IR- methodology. In this Talk, Fearon explains how one can work with concepts as vague as . What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate? Cambridge University Press International Organization Foundation. Cambridge University Press, International Organization. Violence and the social construction of ethnic identity - James D. Niveau Grand public Etude suivie sciences. Watkins IV and Elise V. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political. He is currently working on a project in collaboration with James Fearon on civil wars in the. Directory; Leadership. Replication data for James D. Laitin, 'Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,' American Political Science Review 97, 1 (March 2003): 75-90. We assess the degree of persistence in armed conflict in particular places over the. Laitin, David and Fearon, James D., How Persistent is. David Laitin (Contact Author) Stanford University. I don’t know that I would say that IR is in a post- big- debate phase, but attention certainly has shifted from the grand debates between all kinds of . I say this because I never saw it to be productive to compare and debate the merits of realism versus liberalism or rationalism versus constructivism, and so on. These isms debates have tended to be at best secondarily about international politics, and set up in a such a way that little empirical or theoretical progress can be made in them, almost by design. My feeling is that it doesn’t make sense to argue what is the best all- purpose explanatory variable for international politics (if one could even pose such a project in a meaningful way). I would rather work from the things we would like to explain, and from the real- world problems we would like to identify and try to solve. I spent a year in East Africa in time away from college, and returned to do research for an honors thesis, so I also developed an interest in African politics and questions about economic development. I never took an IR course in college. This was very interesting and made me wonder if I should I give it another chance. When I started a Ph. D program in Political Science at Berkeley, I quickly discovered that Political Science was nothing like writing short briefs on Max Weber and the like, which I had done in college. I was kind of horrified by the social science- y- ness of it, even at Berkeley. James Fearon And David LaitinenBut in order to be able to defeat the devil, you have to know the devil – so I decided I needed to have a more informed approach to the evil, and I decided to take some economics and quantitative methodology courses. During a course on microeconomic theory, I encountered what I thought were very interesting arguments being made in that devilish field. I was also really struck by how microeconomic theory “moved,” in the sense of repeatedly figuring out new tools and arguments that could make sense of things that the prior state of microeconomic theory could not. I was also impressed not by the science- y- ness of it, but by how relentlessly normative economic theory is, in a manner largely lacking in IR and comparative politics traditions. I liked the bigger picture questions and views you could get in IR, and I started to get interested in international conflict. An early influence here was reading Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s (Theory Talk #3. The War Trap, which made me think that there might be interesting and useful ways to use ideas from microeconomic theory to better understand international politics. I got a similar impression from Kenneth Waltz’s (Theory Talk# 4. I should also mention Bob Powell, who was just arriving at Berkeley when I was leaving, but who gave me the most detailed and direct feedback on the modeling work in my dissertation. These three were big influences on me in graduate school, along with a bunch of economists in the Economy Department at Berkeley. For the rest, if you work hard and manage to get into a Ph. D- program, you’re well along the way. But make sure you get into a program that trains you well in the methodologies needed to tackle the questions you care about. But the ideas have to be applied and developed in particular empirical contexts, and even then you are only getting a certain “cut” at what’s going on. You cannot just take a course on game theory and think you understand IR. How would you define ? For social science concepts that have a strong base in ordinary language, like this one, I think it makes the most sense to start not by trying to stipulate a definition, but to ask about what we must already think it means based on how we use it. For example, what is the implicit rule that tells us that a baseball team, or “Southerners”, is not an ethnic group? After working through a lot of questions like these, I ended up with the following: as it is typically used, “ethnic group” is applied to groups larger than a family, membership in which is primarily reckoned by a descent rule. This doesn’t cover all cases where ordinary language may designate a group “ethnic” or not “ethnic” (e. British classes, or Indian castes in some views), but it is a pretty good start. What’s slightly different is the formulation in terms of what are the implicit group membership rules for individuals, which I think makes better sense of the meaning of the concept (as we already have it in our heads) than these other formulations. Also, it makes it clear that a lot of things that we associate with prototypical “ethnic groups,” like a common language or religion, are nonetheless contingent features. There are plenty of groups referred to as “ethnic” that don’t have these, but are nonetheless so called because membership in the group is typically reckoned by a descent rule. In terms of empirical regularities, we find that for the period after 1. It is more likely to erupt after independence, elections or other blows to the capabilities of the central state; when there have been recent changes in the degree of democracy of the regime; and when a state is partly autocratic and partly democratic. For instance, there are numerous examples of conflicts in which people redefine the content of their ethnicity during a conflict. Would- be leaders try to polarize a conflict along ethnic lines, because they want to redraw a map, like, for example, in the Balkans, and because they want to develop a political following. And frequently, ethnic violence hardens the self- conception of conflicting ethnic groups. Once such conflicts get going and become violent, as in Iraq, a common misperception of outsiders is that the intensity of the ethnic animosities observed during the fighting must have been fully present before and must explain why they are fighting. Furthermore, according to some (see this articleor this one) the Security Council reflects an outdated balance of power: Japan and Germany want in, as do the BRICs. There’s a really good article by Erik Voeten in International Organization (read abstract here) arguing that the UN and the Security Council (UNSC) are actually more legitimate then ever – simply because there’s a greater expectation by a large number of countries that states will take their disputes to the Security Council or that countries should ask the UN for permission before military intervention. Furthermore, many countries would like to use the UN as a constraint on the U. S., and the U. S. In terms of output, and especially peacekeeping operations, the UNSC has been far more productive than it ever was during the Cold War. This isn’t going to happen anytime soon though. It would take a real shock to the system or a major U. S. Where does the responsibility of the UN to intervene in humanitarian crises end and where do regional organizations have to pick up and clean their own . There are voices saying that the UN, for example, should go into Sudan full force. But look at similar missions to Iraq, Afghanistan, or a good number of UN PKOs, it is very likely that any such intervention would not be swift and clean, but rather turn into yet another permanent police force that you couldn’t figure out how to bring to a close. The international system is accumulating a set of places that look like a sort of new model protectorate where third party forces can’t leave without a probable return to civil war. I think that an intervention in Sudan would likely mean another one of these long- term, new model protectorates. Whether this would still be warranted, or is the best approach in this case, I don’t know. He has published on issues varying from civil war to humanitarian aid and from weak states to methodology.
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