Behavioral and Psychological Legacies of Civil Wars

• In Event: Patterns of Violence And The Legacies of Internal Conflict

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been explosive growth in the literature looking at the legacies of internal conflict. While there had been previous agenda setting work, Wood’s 2008 review article “The Social Processes of Civil War”, laid out a research agenda for where internal conflict could act as a catalyst for social change. Empirical work, particularly from 2009 with articles such as Blattman’s “From Violence to Voting” and Bellows and Miguel’s “War and Local Collective Action in Sierra Leone” were part of a new wave of articles which paired both strong empirical designs with the surprising finding that under some conditions, internal warfare could have pro-social effects.

In the decade since these works, there has been a significant increase in the number of works in this agenda, looking at how the processes of internal conflict affect post-war trust, political participation, social identity, and both criminal and politically motivated violence. While these works have reaffirmed originally surprising findings, a 2016 review article by Bauer et al. in notes that there are still a number of gaps in the literature.

Not all internal violence is the same; even constricting the definition of internal conflict to Civil War still finds variation in armed groups organization, goals, and methods in carrying out their violent activities. Using this variation, this paper reviews the literature to find out how different types of civil conflict affect canonical variables of interest, including pro-social behavior, group identity, political participation, and social capital. This approach is the next step in trying to answer some of the otherwise contradictory findings from the first wave of research, and builds off recent conceptual advances in the study of sub-national political violence.

Author

• Chris Price, University of Wisconsin-Madison