Economic shocks and militant formation

Abstract

A prominent debate in the civil war literature asks whether commodity price shocks incentivize fighting, but existing analyses find inconsistent results. This paper shows these results arise, in part, because research conflates the decision to form a militant campaign with the start of civil conflict. Using original data on 973 militant groups, I sequentially disaggregate between civil conflict onset and the earlier stage of militant mobilization. I use fixed effect regression methods to test for indirect and interaction effects that could obscure the shock-civil conflict relationship. First, I estimate the effect of export commodity price shocks on mobilization onset. Second, I re-examine the shock-civil conflict relationship conditioning on the number of militant groups mobilizing at the time of the shock. The results show economic shocks indirectly increase the risk of civil conflict by driving militant formation. Disaggregating these stages of militant activity advances research about two-stage conflict processes as well as the indirect causes of violence.