Nils Petter Gleditsch

Armed Conflict 1946-2001: A New Dataset

In the period 1946-2001, there were 225 armed conflicts and 34 of them were active in all of or part of 2001. Armed conflict remains a serious problem in the post-Cold War period. For three decades, the Correlates of War project has served as the main supplier of reliable data used in longitudinal studies of external and internal armed conflict. The COW datasets on war use the relatively high threshold of 1,000 battle-deaths. The Uppsala dataset on armed conflict has a lower threshold, 25 annual battle-deaths, but has so far been available for only the post-Cold War period. This dataset has now been backdated to the end of World War II. This article presents a report on armed conflict based on this backdate as well as another annual update. It presents the procedures for the backdating, as well as trends over time and breakdowns for the type of conflict. It assesses the criteria for measuring armed conflict and discusses some directions for future data collection in this area.

A Diamond Curse? Civil War and a Lootable Resource

While territory, oil, and water are frequently mentioned as resources likely to promote interstate conflict, diamonds have emerged as a prominent factor in explanations of civil war. In this article, the authors report on a new database on diamond deposits and production and analyze the relationship between diamonds and armed conflict incidence. They find a strong bivariate relationship between diamonds (particularly secondary diamonds) and the onset of civil war. Adding diamond dummies to standard models of civil war, the results are more mixed. The production of secondary diamonds increases the risk of onset of ethnic war, but not other types of war. The authors find evidence that secondary diamonds are positively related to the incidence of civil war, especially in countries divided along ethnic lines. Primary diamonds, on the other hand, make ethnic war onset and incidence less likely. The authors also find that the impact of diamonds has been substantially stronger in the post-cold war era.

Peace and Democracy Three Levels of Analysis

Peace and regime type can be examined at the dyadic, nation, and system levels. At the dyadic level, it is well established that democracies rarely if ever fight each other. At the national level, the broad consensus is that there is no significant relationship between democracy and war participation, but this conclusion remains controversial. At the system level, there has been little research; most scholars have taken for granted that the answer can be inferred from the findings at the dyadic or national levels. The authors show that, if the conventional wisdom holds at the dyadic and national levels, the probability of war in a politically mixed dyad must be higher than the probability of war between two nondemocracies, and the relationship between democracy and war at the system level must be parabolic. Thus increasing democratization initially produces more war, and the reduction of war starts only at a higher level of democratization.

Shared Rivers and Interstate Conflict

Abstract “The previous war in the Middle East was about oil, the next war will be about water.” Such predictions have been made regularly, and particularly with reference to the possibility of upstream–downstream conflicts in major rivers which cross interstate boundaries. A good case can be made that competition over water resources may exacerbate conflict and contribute to interstate violence. More than 200 river systems are shared by two or more countries. Many rivers run between countries with a history of conflict, where water plays an important part in the economic life of the country. The dramatic statements about ‘water wars’, however, have a weaker foundation. As resource optimists have pointed out, there is an abundance of water where it is not subject to wasteful uses, human ingenuity can overcome water shortages, and nations can cooperate rather than fight to resolve international water issues. This study is built on newly generated data on boundary-crossing rivers, which have been added to the Correlates of War contiguity dataset. Our results indicate that a joint river does indeed increase the probability of militarized disputes and armed conflict over and above mere contiguity. This risk factor is comparable in size to standard control variables, but much smaller than the effect of contiguity itself. Water scarcity is also associated with conflict, and the upstream/downstream relationship appears to be the form of shared river most frequently associated with conflict. But these results are not very strong and we do not have any systematic data on the issues involved in the shared-river conflicts.

Whither the weather? Climate change and conflict

Until recently, most writings on the relationship between climate change and security were highly speculative. The IPCC assessment reports to date offer little if any guidance on this issue and occasionally pay excessive attention to questionable sources. The articles published in this special issue form the largest collection of peer-reviewed writings on the topic to date. The number of such studies remains small compared to those that make up the natural science base of the climate issue, and there is some confusion whether it is the effect of ‘climate’ or ‘weather’ that is being tested. The results of the studies vary, and firm conclusions cannot always be drawn. Nevertheless, research in this area has made considerable progress. More attention is being paid to the specific causal mechanisms linking climate change to conflict, such as changes in rainfall and temperature, natural disasters, and economic growth. Systematic climate data are used in most of the articles and climate projections in some. Several studies are going beyond state-based conflict to look at possible implications for other kinds of violence, such as intercommunal conflict. Overall, the research reported here offers only limited support for viewing climate change as an important influence on armed conflict. However, framing the climate issue as a security problem could possibly influence the perceptions of the actors and contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Democracy and Peace

The observation that democracies rarely if ever fight each other was made by Dean Babst nearly three decades ago, but has had little impact on the literature on peace research and international relations until recently. But now every volume of the leading journals contains articles on minor and major aspects of this theme. Professional jealousy and confusion of levels of analysis are possible explanations for the late acceptance of the idea of a democratic peace, but above all it seems to have been hampered by the Cold War. Erich Weede has taken a bold step in reconsidering his own previous view and other should follow. The Cold War has ended in the real world, and it should end in peace research, too.

Military Spending and Economic Growth in the OECD Countries

Cross-national comparisons of industrialized countries indicate that countries with a high defense burden (military spending as a share of GDP) tend to have lower rates of economic growth than do countries with a low defense burden. On the other hand, longitudinal data for several industrial countries indicate that economic growth is higher in periods with a high defense burden. This study attempts to overcome this apparent contradiction by pooling cross-sectional and longitudinal data within the framework of a model of economic growth. The data are for 17 OECD countries for the period 1960-1980. A simple mathematical model based on economic theory is used to analyze the interrelationships between economic growth, manufacturing output, investment, and military spending, both for the whole sample and for three relatively homogeneous subgroups of countries. Confronting the model with data, military spending was generally found to have a positive impact on manufacturing output, but a negative effect on investment. These two effects have an opposite impact on economic growth. The net effect is that military spending has an overall negative effect on economic growth for the whole sample of countries and for the subgroups, except for the Mediterranean countries.

Conflict Diamonds: A New Dataset

Natural resources, and diamonds especially, are commonly believed to play a significant role in the onset and duration of armed civil conflict. Although there is ample case study evidence that diamonds and similar resources have been used by rebel groups to finance fighting, there are few systematic empirical studies assessing the role of lootable resources in civil conflict. This is largely due to lack of reliable data on production and location. In this article we discuss priorities for the collection of data on conflict-relevant resources and introduce a new dataset, DIADATA, that provides a comprehensive list of diamond deposits accompanied by geographic coordinates throughout the world. The dataset includes characteristics relevant to conflict such as production status and geological form of the deposit. Particularly important is the distinction between primary and secondary diamonds, because the latter are more easily lootable. The dataset incorporates a spatial as well as a temporal dimension.

Geography, democracy, and peace

Several decades of systematic empirical work on the causes of war have generated a great many findings but few solid regularities. This article argues that there are two strong, known regularities: nations primarily fight proximate nations, and democracies rarely fight one another. The theoretical arguments and previous empirical evidence for each proposition are reviewed. Using the Correlates of War data on international war, data on democracy from Polity II, and inter‐capital distances generated from geographical coordinates, extensive empirical evidence for both propositions is given for the period 1816–1986. A hypothesis advanced by Small and Singer—that the lack of war between democracies might be accounted for by their proximity—is tested and rejected. While distance is a clear and pervasive influence on war during the entire period under study, double democracy has had lower explanatory power because of the low number of democracies. The importance of democracy lies in it being a near‐perfect suffi...

Is climate change a driver of armed conflict

The world is generally becoming less violent, but the debate on climate change raises the specter of a new source of instability and conflict. In this field, the policy debate is running well ahead of its academic foundation—and sometimes even contrary to the best evidence. Although comparative research on security implications of climate change is rapidly expanding, major gaps in knowledge still exist. Taken together, extant studies provide mostly inconclusive insights, with contradictory or weak demonstrated effects of climate variability and change on armed conflict. This article reviews the empirical literature on short-term climate/environmental change and intrastate conflict, with special attention to possible insecurity consequences of precipitation and temperature anomalies and weather-related natural disasters. Based on this assessment, it outlines priorities for future research in this area.