What Is Civil War? Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of an Operational Definition

The empirical literature on civil war has seen tremendous growth because of the compilation of quantitative data sets, but there is no consensus on the measurement of civil war. This increases the risk of making inferences from unstable empirical results. Without ad hoc rules to code its start and e...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of conflict resolution Vol. 48; no. 6; pp. 814 - 858
Main Author Sambanis, Nicholas
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Thousand Oaks, CA Sage Publications 01.12.2004
SAGE Publications
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Armed conflict
Civil War
Civil wars
Coding
Coding standards
Conflict
Data analysis
Datasets
Death
Definitions
Government (Administrative Body)
Gross domestic product
Inferences
Insurgency
International relations
Measurement
Methodological Problems
Militia groups
Operational Definitions
Political violence
Politics
Population growth
Studies
Terrorism
Variable coefficients
Violence
War
data sets
coding rules
civil war
Correlates of War
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Summary:The empirical literature on civil war has seen tremendous growth because of the compilation of quantitative data sets, but there is no consensus on the measurement of civil war. This increases the risk of making inferences from unstable empirical results. Without ad hoc rules to code its start and end and differentiate it from other violence, it is difficult, if not impossible, to define and measure civil war. A wide range of variation in parameter estimates makes accurate predictions of war onset difficult, and differences in empirical results are greater with respect to war continuation.
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ISSN:0022-0027
1552-8766
DOI:10.1177/0022002704269355