Explaining Variation in Civil Wars: An Ecology Approach

• In Event: 172 - Section on Peace, War and Social Conflict Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Peace and Peacebuilding
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Theorizing Peace, War and Social Conflict

Abstract

This paper relies on ecology school in organizational sociology to shed new light on variation of civil wars. It shows why civil wars lead to different outcomes and how space and time evolve differently under each typology. First, following ecology school, I treat combatants as generalists or specialists and classify civil wars based on ties of combatants with their environments. Second, I discuss the strong generalist-specialist typology which leads to political deadlock. Political deadlock occurs when civil war sides fail to consolidate resources, the target territory and people. Strong generalist-specialist typology creates this outcome by sustaining path-dependent decisions and contested zones, both of which favor resource partitioning. The paper concludes by a plea for understanding time and space in civil wars with reference to organizational dynamics.

Author

• Cem Emrence, State University of New York-Binghamton