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Civil Violence ProjectSummary: The Civil Violence Project is working to develop more sophisticated tools for analyzing the microdynamics of civil conflicts and to stimulate new thinking for policymakers on how to address their root causes, when to initiate crisis response measures, and what to do in their aftermath to assure reconstruction. Description: In recent decades, civil conflict has been the principal source of global violence in the world. It is now the arena where U.S. concerns about terrorism intersect most directly with the broader security agenda of the rest of the international community. The key question concerns the relationships among legal order, social equity, and civil violence. Available evidence indicates that the outbreak of civil conflict is inversely correlated with economic growth and - except for a special case associated with a specific degree of dependence on natural resource exports - also correlated with general participation in international trade. Virtually no significant statistical relationship has been found between measures of equity and the outbreak of conflict. We do not believe, however, that the absence so far of a demonstrated statistical relationship between equity and conflict conclusively indicates that the two are unrelated. The measures of conflict being used are not refined enough to record some of the more important determining dynamics, in particular distributional trends at sub-national levels, and norms and perceptions of fairness. Moreover, the aggregate incidence of conflict is not the only measure of concern. There are reasons to believe that the incidence of conflict is a manifestation of legal degeneration and that, under circumstances of globalization, legal degeneration in one location can readily spread. If so, then any area of sustained conflict is potentially dangerous as a reservoir for contagion. With the defense of legal order emerging as a truly vital matter for the international community, there are strong reasons for being involved in any serious instance. The need for sustained global engagement in civil conflict, by the United States in particular but not exclusively, is one of the enduring lessons of the Afghanistan and Iraq episodes - one that is not yet fully absorbed but is ultimately bound to be. If it is accepted that civil conflict is a serious international security concern, then more systematic efforts at prevention, intervention, and reconstruction should replace the current ad hoc approach. The Civil Violence Project, part of CISSM’s Advanced Methods of Cooperative Security Program, is working to stimulate new approaches to the analysis of conflict and, in particular, to the development of more sophisticated diagnostic tools that can help policymakers decide more quickly and authoritatively how to address the root causes of civil conflict, when to initiate crisis response measures, and what to do in the aftermath of a conflict to assure reconstruction. These tools include the development of novel, computation-based methods of analysis and new survey methods which aim to capture non-income as well as income based determinants of well being. As the problem of civil violence forces security policies to expand beyond military operations to include broader questions of social and economic interventions, it will be just as important to strike the right balance between prevention and reaction as it is to find the appropriate balance between power and equity. Reconstruction is perhaps the most glaring deficiency in international security practice at the moment, and the predictable consequences of that fact will undoubtedly force efforts to improve. It will be especially important to establish sufficient political legitimacy to manage the reconstruction process and to provide adequate economic resources to finance it. Both requirements will almost certainly entail substantially more advanced forms of international collaboration and thereby create pressures for constructive transformation of legacy policies. Given the entanglements in Afghanistan and Iraq that have developed in the past few years, it now appears that the problem of post-conflict reconstruction will be a much more salient and more powerful incentive than had been imagined. Successful reconstruction, however, as well as successful prevention or intervention, requires at minimum a sophisticated understanding of the microdynamics both of conflict in general and of the conflict at hand. Higher-resolution data and more-refined conceptualizations of power, equity, and legitimacy will be critical to this end. Articles and Op-Eds John Steinbruner and Tim Gulden, "Violence in Iraq is Beyond Our Control", (The Baltimore Sun, 09/10/2007) Tim Gulden and John Steinbruner, "Comprehending Violence in Iraq", (Submitted version of Baltimore Sun Op-Ed, 09/10/2007) Daniel Levine, "Organizational Disruption and Change in Mozambique's Peace Process", (International Peacekeeping, 14, No. 3, June 2007) Fiona Hill and Kevin Jones, "Fear of Democracy or Revolution: The Reaction to Andijon", (The Washington Quarterly, Summer, 2006) Robert D. Lamb, Bill Varettoni, and Chunli Shen, "Participatory Development and the World Bank", (International Affairs Review, Vol. XIV, No. 2, Fall/Winter, 2005) Dissertations Kevin DeWitt Jones, The Dynamics of Political Protests: A Case Study of the Kyrgyz Republic, (UMD Dissertation, August 2007) Working Papers John Steinbruner, "Potentially Constructive Implications of Disaster in Iraq", (CISSM Working Paper, 08/31/2007) Tim Gulden and John Steinbruner, "The Localized Nature of Violence in Iraq", (CISSM Working Paper and Op-Ed Draft, 08/24/2007) Daniel Levine, "Is Being 'Partial to the Peace Agreement' the Same as 'Protecting the People'?", (CISSM Working Paper, November 2006) Milton Leitenberg, "Deaths in Wars and Conflicts Between 1945 and 2000", (Cornell University Peace Studies Program, Occasional paper # 29, June 2006) Robert D. Lamb, "Measuring Legitimacy in Weak States", (Working paper submitted to the Graduate Student Conference on Security, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 03/18/2005) Conference Reports, Presentations and Other Documents Robert D. Lamb, "Ungoverned Areas and Threats from Safe Havens", (Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, January 2008) |
Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland