Preventing Violent Civil Conflict: The Scope and Limits of Government Action

The purpose of the paper is to synthesize available knowledge on the topic of organized political violence, focusing on the World Bank's work in the area of conflict analysis and conflict prevention and linking that work with the literature on secession, decentralization, and international intervention in civil wars. Several topics addressed in this paper are the subject of the author's ongoing research and interested readers are welcome to contact the author for updated versions of relevant papers. I thank Gunnar Eskeland, Ken Chomitz, and Zmarak Shalizi for useful comments on an earlier draft. 1 ABSTRACT In this paper, I provide a review of the scope and limits for government and international action to prevent the outbreak of civil war. I begin with a brief review of the literature on violent conflict indicators and identify the most significant predictors of civil war outbreak. I explicitly focus on models and empirical approaches used by World Bank-related research on conflict. By applying commonly used indicators of civil violence to a recently compiled database of civil war, I provide simple predictions of the risk of civil war onset in more than 150 countries. I then review the literature on strategies that can be used by governments and/or international organizations (the United Nations and the World Bank in particular) to prevent the outbreak of civil war. I focus on four strategies: redistribution to reduce prevailing inequities; political decentralization; secession or partition; and multidimensional peacebuilding. I review l essons learned on the usefulness of these strategies in preventing war and also consider risks associated with each of these strategies: moral hazard problems; norm-changing problems; and resource constraint problems. The paper is intended to provide a synthesis of available knowledge on the topic of organized political violence, focusing on the World Bank's work in the area of conflict analysis and conflict prevention and linking that work with the literature on secession, decentralization, and international intervention in civil wars.