IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/jocore/v59y2015i7p1242-1272.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Why Bad Governance Leads to Repeat Civil War

Author

Listed:
  • Barbara F. Walter

Abstract

Most contemporary civil wars are now recurrences of earlier civil wars. In contrast to classic theories of grievance and opportunity, this article advances a theory of civil war recurrence that highlights the critical role political and legal institutions play in constraining elites in post–civil war states. Such constraints serve as a check on executive power, help incumbent elites credibly commit to political reform, and create a situation where rebels need not maintain militias as a supplementary mechanism to hold political elites in line. All of this reduces the odds of repeat civil war. Using a statistical analysis of post-conflict years, this article demonstrates that strong political institutions are not only significantly and negatively related to repeat civil war but are the primary determinants of whether countries get caught in the conflict trap.

Suggested Citation

  • Barbara F. Walter, 2015. "Why Bad Governance Leads to Repeat Civil War," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 59(7), pages 1242-1272, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:jocore:v:59:y:2015:i:7:p:1242-1272
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jcr.sagepub.com/content/59/7/1242.abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dominic Rohner, 2018. "Success Factors for Peace Treaties: A Review of Theory and Evidence," Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie 18.08, Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie.
    2. Haaß, Felix & Kurtenbach, Sabine & Strasheim, Julia, 2016. "Fleeing the Peace? Determinants of Outward Migration after Civil War," GIGA Working Papers 289, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:jocore:v:59:y:2015:i:7:p:1242-1272. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://pss.la.psu.edu/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.