Bringing Back the State: The Role of Government in Civil Conflict

Abstract

Intra-state Conflict, Governments and Security: Dilemmas of Deterrence and Assurance. Edited by Stephen M. Saideman, Marie-Joelle Zahar. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. 252 pp., $140 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-46050-7). Much of the current literature on civil conflicts assigns little agency to state governments. The most popular debate surrounding the onset of civil war, Greed versus Grievance, focuses almost exclusively on rebel motivations. Either rebels are spurred to violent action due to economic or cultural grievances such as income inequality (Besancon 2005), land inequality (Muller and Seligson 1987), demographic concerns (Urdal 2005), or discrimination based on cultural characteristics (Ellingsen 2000), or rebel leaders are motivated by the riches to be gained by capturing the state for avaricious purposes (Collier and Hoeffler 2004) or to finance the rebellion (Ross 2004; Regan and Norton 2005). Indeed, the most common explanation for the role of the state in facilitating civil conflict is state weakness (Fearon and Laitin 2003) or state failure (Bates 2008), statuses implying a lack of state action. Even Walter's (2006) study of the strategic use of information uses as motivation the rebels’ desire to learn what type of government they face before staging a rebellion, not why a government is resolved against or permissive in granting concessions in the first place. The literature on civil war duration, prosecution, and resolution similarly neglects the role of the state in favor of rebel motivations to extend or inability to conclude the war (Fearon 2004; Cunningham 2006), selectively or indiscriminately kill civilians (Kalyvas 2006; Weinstein 2007), or spoil the peace (Stedman 1997; Kydd and Walter 2002). Indeed, Cunningham's (2006) adoption of the popular veto player framework to explain civil war duration treats the government as a single veto …