1. INTRODUCTION
In the interest of time, we cannot review here the excellent and outstanding recent work
on civil conflict by Bates et al. (2002), Collier and Hoeffler (1998, 2001, 2002), Elbadawi and
Sambanis (2000, 2003), Fearon and Laitin (2003), Regan and Norton (2005), and many others.
Suffice to say that while there are major debates within this literature, dominant theme involve
the role of state weakness in the onset of civil conflict, and the argument that different kinds of
conflict have different causal character. There is also an assertion, originally by Collier and
Hoeffler (1998), that internal wars may be motivated more by opportunity (or ‘greed’) than
grievance, and thus substantially affected by the availability of lootable resources, such as
diamonds or other high-value minerals. This would create a major difference between the causes
of conflicts in Africa and less resource-rich areas, such as Eastern Europe or Latin America.
Our results challenge or modify all of these tenets, and, in our view, are based on a
method that gives sounder results.
2. DATA AND METHODS
The Data
This paper presents the findings of research conducted by the Political Instability Task
Force (formerly known as the State Failure Task Force), a panel of scholars and methodologists
who have collaborated since 1994 to collect and analyze data on political regimes and conflict
around the world.
1
All data used by the Task Force were drawn from open sources (e.g. the U.S.
Census Bureau, the World Bank, the U.N. and other similar agencies) or developed by Task
1
The research described in this paper was funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of
Intelligence through a contract with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). The views expressed in
this paper are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the U.S. government,
the intelligence community, or the CIA. Dr. Goldstone’s work on this paper was also supported by a Peace and
Security Writing Grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
Convention