Conclusion

There can be no human well-being and development without peace. This is as logical as un-achievable. Compared to inter-wars (war among States), civil wars have a more severe destructive power for current and future generations. This implies that there are not only material damages (as in war) but also relational damages, because people lose faith in their neighbours. Civil wars can have crucial repercussions also for other countries and they may inuence the stability of entire regions. Such important externalities call not only for attention from scholars and policy makers, but also call for more critical and interdisciplinary reasoning about civil war.

Since long time, many of the world's great philosophers and pubic social intellectuals have been reecting on peace and wars. Nowadays, scholars should devote themselves to this eld for helping policy makers to design policies such as anti-terrorist, conict prevention, social protection, conict recovery, political stabilisation and economic development. In today's Era of international terrorism, these policies are fundamental both for the well-being of critical countries

and for the security of western countries.

For this reason, a large body of literature has examined the eect of some elements which are supposed to aect civil war onset. In this chapter we have focused on the civil war determinants by reviewing the economic literature. The positions taken by each researcher varies considerably, by creating a variegated literature of economics of conict.

Since the end of the Cold War, violent political conict has increasingly been seen as a major obstacle to the economic development of many low and middle-income countries (Fearon, 2010).

Thus, it is clear the reason why there is a growing economic literature about civil wars.

This literature reviews the theory under which empirical studies rely on. We have showed that main civil war theories are based on game-theory models where rebels are assumed to be actors who want to maximize their gains. Few theoretical models have been developed so far and all of them come from the baseline game theory of bargaining of Hirshleifer (1989).

Most papers present the nding that civil wars are not caused by political grievances, but only by the opportunity cost for the organization of rebellion or insurgency. Therefore, economic growth is the ultimate remedy to conict.

However, in literature other determinants have proven to aect the likelihood of civil war. For example, many researchers agree in the geographical condition of a country favouring conicts.

The geographical condition includes both the the share of mountains in a country and its natural resources endowment; unemployment, which is related to the economic condition, intensify the frustration and the willing to take the arms. Institutions (especially weak States) are considered as crucial determinants of conict but scholars nd diculties on understanding its impacts on civil war. As we have seen, this is due to the fact that we have data-reliability problems:

although several databases provide us indicators of social, cultural and institutional conditions, both the methodology to collect those data and the reliability of data is a concern. Since data are often missed or biased, we need to combine our analysis with qualitative information, such as historical, anthropological and political science resources.

In this chapter we have suggested that economic determinants are related to social and political conditions so that marginalised and frustrated people are pushed to start a rebellion or to join a civil war. At the same time, other actors, engaged in international relations, can prot from this unstable situation to gain prots and fuel the conict until they obtain the highest power or gains. Hence, civil war might break out with real social reason(s) while others with economic interests take advantage. Greedy people exist and establish conditions to get richer but probably they are not the main determinant of civil wars. They are parallel actors which prot from poor people reclaiming their dignity. In light of this, when we study civil wars, we should take into account also historical, anthropological, political and psychological elements which might steer people behaviours. With these ingredients, maybe we can reach a durable and lasting peace which will ensure that the broad mass of the people achieve a measure of material and psychic well-being and control over the political processes which guide and order their lives (Hansen, 1987).

In addition, we have underlined the change of ongoing civil war, where actors, determinants and instruments are internationally interrelated with a mixture of public-private organizations.

Hence, civil wars cannot be seen no more as a matter of poor countries. We are all at risk, both from external threats and from inside.

Several economic, political and historical ingredients inuence civil wars, especially in the African Continent. We, as researchers, must develop models and tools able to predict and prevent those turbulent events. In order to succeed in this aim, we need more and new eorts that can allow us to really understand actors and determinants of civil wars. New statistical instruments are continually provided by the scientic community and we still have a long way in front of us.

Economic Shock and Civil War in Africa: Reassessing the Nexus

35

Abstract

This chapter revisits the relationship between economic shocks and civil conict. We establish that the empirical literature identies two dierent patterns. First, poor countries have a higher propensity to live a civil war. Second, civil war occurs when countries suer negative income shocks. We replicated a very important study of Edward Miguel, Shanker Satyanath and Ernest Sergenti (2004) covering the African continent during 1981 to 2009. The probability of civil war is estimated by using an instrumental variable two stage leasts squares approach: rainfall variation as instrument for economic growth. Our results conrm Miguel et al.' results and show a strong and negative relationship between economic growth and civil war. We tested the robustness of the instrument with Stock and Yogo (2005) Test and we nd out that the instrument is weak, therefore estimates are biased. We showed that the estimates are biased also because of the coding rule of the dependent variable, namely civil war, a dichotomous variable assuming 1 when 25 battle-deaths per year are reached. Further, we adopted the Zero-inated approach to deal with the abundance of zero (peaceful countries) in the dependent variable. Our ndings tell that economic growth increases the likelihood of civil war but, at the same time, also oil exports, population growth, mountainous countries, and bad institutions increase the likelihood of civil war.

keywordCivil War; Africa; Endogeneity; Instrumental Variables; Coding Rule.