Group Grievances, Opportunity, and the Onset of Civil War: Some Theory and Tests of Competing Mechanisms, 1990

de Soysa, IndraIndrade SoysaFinseraas, HenningHenningFinseraasVadlamannati, Krishna ChaitanyaKrishna ChaitanyaVadlamannati2024-08-122024-08-122024-04-01Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy1079-2457http://hdl.handle.net/10197/26513Recent scholarship claims that group grievances due to political exclusion and discrimination drive civil wars. The grievance perspective suggests that socio-psychological factors allow groups to overcome collective action problems. We argue that the grievance perspective (over)focuses on the ends and not means, which are critical to explain how groups survive state sanction, allowing contention to escalate to civil war. We suggest that inclusive economic governance reduces investment in state-evading infrastructures for quotidian economic reasons, leading to the buildup of rebellion-specific capital. Physical and human infrastructures of state evasion form the logistical bases for survival against state sanction. Our analyses show that group-grievance-generating political factors are poorer predictors of civil war compared with economic freedoms measured as free-market friendly policies and the private ownership of economies, which should reduce economic rents accruing to state-evading shadow markets. Our results are robust to several alternative models, data, and estimating method. Theory that ignores the means explain the main causes of costly violence only partially, or mistake symptom for cause. Freedom and inclusiveness, which should reduce grievances, are intrinsically valuable, but they are hard to obtain when violence is waged successfully for more narrower ends.enThis is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by De Gruyter in Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy on 1 April 2024, available at http://wwww.degruyter.com/10.1515/peps-2023-0053. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. If you wish to use this manuscript for commercial purposes, please contact rights@degruyter.com.Civil WarGrievancesOpportunityEconomic freedomParralel marketsGroup Grievances, Opportunity, and the Onset of Civil War: Some Theory and Tests of Competing Mechanisms, 1990–2017Group Grievances & Civil War: Some Theory and Empirics on Competing Mechanisms, 1990-2017Journal Article30217120510.1515/peps-2023-00532024-04-11https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ie/