Economic decline, ethnonationalism and civil war onset

Abstract

Within the scholarship on the causes of civil wars, GDP per capita represents a strong and robust variable. Less attention, however, is paid to the role of economic decline. When it is included at all, scholars tend to consider it only in the period just prior to the onset of war. This paper argues that the impact of economic decline has been underestimated, for in addition to its short-term effects, evidence from case studies reveals that a particular pattern is often evident during periods of sharp economic decline, in which ethnonationalist actors ascend in political power while scapegoating minority populations. The resulting increase in interethnic tensions raises the risk of large-scale civil violence even many years after a major recession. The cases of Yugoslavia, Ivory Coast and India show the long-term effects of a common exogenous shock- the global recession of the late 1970s- in the form of rising ethnonationalist political actors, setting the stage for large-scale interethnic civil violence long after the initial economic shock.