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JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING
ISSN: 1750-2977 (Print) 1750-2985 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/risb20
Do the Root Causes of Civil War Matter? On
Using Knowledge to Improve Peacebuilding
Interventions
Susan L. Woodward
To cite this article: Susan L. Woodward (2007) Do the Root Causes of Civil War Matter? On
Using Knowledge to Improve Peacebuilding Interventions, JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND
STATEBUILDING, 1:2, 143-170, DOI: 10.1080/17502970701302789
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17502970701302789
Published online: 24 Apr 2007.
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Do the Root Causes of Civil War Matter?
On Using Knowledge to Improve
Peacebuilding Interventions
Susan L. Woodward
The normative and practical success of the 1990s campaign on the right and
responsibility to intervene to stop civil wars should be acknowledged so that
policy and research can move on to the more pressing question of how we
intervene and improve on currently inadequate results. This essay confronts a
standard explanation, the failure to address the root causes of a conflict. It
argues from academic research on three aspects Á/ the knowledge on causes
shaping current policies, the interests of those who matter in intervention, and
the new research on civil war Á/ that a focus on root causes would not improve
outcomes and could even be counterproductive.
Keywords civil war; intervention; peacebuilding; root causes; violence
Introduction
The public debate over whether and how to intervene to aid the people of Darfur,
Sudan, throughout 2004, 2005 and 2006 has once again pitted humanitarians and
constructivists against the realists. Did the failures of Somalia, Rwanda and
Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1993Á/95 and the political movement in the 1990s to
persuade governments and their international organizations, first, that there was
a right to intervene and, later, even a responsibility to intervene to end the
violence of internal war, create a new normative consensus (International
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2001; Woodward 2002)? Did
states as a result begin to calculate their interests differently, so that such wars
were perceived to pose a very real threat to their own national interest and to
international peace and security in general (United Nations 2005)? Did the
evidence that intervention makes a positive difference (Human Security Centre
2005; Fortna 2003, 2004b; Walter 2002; Doyle and Sambanis 2000) strengthen
that normative consensus and make intervention more likely? Or, are the realists
correct that Darfur, Congo and Afghanistan in 2005Á/06 demonstrate that little has
changed in states’ perception of interests and continuing selectivity of action
and resources (Zartman 2005)? Is the assumption correct that where strategic
interests are absent, so, too, is political will?
ISSN 1750-2977 print/1750-2985 online/07/020143-28
– 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17502970701302789
JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING VOLUME 1 NUMBER 2 (JUNE 2007)
Behind this very public debate on intervention, however, a very different
debate is now taking place among scholars, especially policy-oriented ones, over
the outcome of interventions in the 1990s. Did they succeed or fail? Data-based,
this debate could only be taking place if the interventionists had won, at least for
a certain period of time. Led by Andrew Mack and his Human-Security Centre
team in the first annual Human Security Yearbook, published in October 2005,
the success position is based primarily on improved datasets on armed conflict
coming from the joint Uppsala/PRIO research team (Gleditsch et al 2002)1
which
show that civil wars may not be the rising threat in the post-cold war era that
activist-analysts portrayed. The incidence of civil war did rise after 1989, but it
was driven largely by the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and the
numbers peak already in 1992. By 2002, there were 40 per cent fewer armed
conflicts than in 1990. Although there was a slight increase in 1998, the
probability that any particular country will be involved in armed conflict has
been declining since the late 1950s or earlier. However, the best explanation for
this secular decline, Mack argues and seeks to demonstrate, is the very success of
the interventionist movement, namely, a growing willingness to act internationally,
especially through UN peacekeeping operations.
Mack’s argument gains further support from the recent research by Page
Fortna (2004b) identifying a decisive shift away from wars, both interstate and
intrastate, that end in military victory to those ending in a draw. This shift occurs
for civil wars in the 1990s: 38 of the 54 cases for which she has data, or 70 per
cent, ended in a tie. In a careful and thorough test of possible explanations, she
also finds the best fit to the data to be the development of peacekeeping. And
indeed, the number of UN peacekeeping missions rose from five in the 1980s to
an additional 35 in the 1990s, and then, with their success in ending the violence,
the number falls to 15 in 1999 and only seven in 2000Á/05.2
There is then a sharp
jump again in peacekeeping missions in 2005: by June, the number had surged
from seven to 17, and by October 2006, to 18, including substantial enhancements
of existing missions. Calculated by number of troops in UN peacekeeping
operations worldwide, commitments by summer 2006 were at an all-time high
from the previous high in August 1995 of 68,894 for military and police, to 77,768
deployed in August 2006 and 140,304 committed on 1 October 2006.3
There does
not seem to be a reluctance to act.
The recent rise in peacekeeping (and more often, peacebuilding) missions can,
however, be read as evidence for the other side of the debate: that the problem is
no longer the failure to intervene but the failure to intervene successfully. While
the Uppsala/PRIO data show a decline in new civil wars, the total armed conflict
worldwide has not declined but grown. The reason, James Fearon and David Laitin
argue, is the failure to end long-running wars, so-called ‘protracted conflicts’
(Fearon 2004; Fearon and Laitin 2003). Many of the recent deployments, indeed,
are second-tour peacebuilding operations, that is, ones returning to countries of
earlier missions which had failed to leave a stable state and end the violence
144 WOODWARD
definitively, such as Haiti, Liberia and Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). In
2006, the list of recidivist deployments grew longer with UNSCR 1701 to expand
and alter UNIFIL in southern Lebanon, the Secretary-General’s call for a new
mission in Timor-Leste, and the ongoing battle with the government of Sudan to
replace the African Union mission in Darfur with a United Nations force. Then there
are cases such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Cyprus and, until the summer of
2006, southern Lebanon, which are treated as a success and no longer coded as
armed conflict, but where peace and political stability appear to be held only by
long-term peacekeeping deployments. These data and a comparative analysis of
African cases have led Jeremy Weinstein (2005) to suggest that the willingness to
intervene may have become too automatic. Citing multiple examples of
‘autonomous recovery’ which did succeed alongside the many interventions that
fail to achieve their goals, he is now seen as leading the other side of the debate,
urging caution on the impulse to intervene and greater attention to countries that
have ended the violence and restored political order without international
assistance (see also Luttwak 1999).
This essay begins from the position that this is a false debate; both sides are
correct. A normative consensus on intervention does now exist, and the
increased willingness to intervene requires a change in research and policy focus
to its consequences and the variation in outcomes. The current problem is not
whether to intervene but how: what outsiders do to create a stable peace.
Should we not be asking instead whether international mediation and peace
operations, because of the greater willingness to act earlier to stop the violence,
are creating a world that is less stable rather than more? Does the emerging
research interest in ‘post-conflict violence’ and in fragile or crisis states, by
disguising outcomes in new concepts, prevent asking that question directly? Is
the success of the 1990s campaign placing greater requirements on peacekeepers
and peacebuilding missions? A major obstacle to addressing these questions, I
propose, is the conventional explanation held nearly universally by people in the
target country, operational organizations, and the research community: that the
cause of failure, or less than adequate outcomes, is the failure to address the
‘root causes’ of the conflict.
There are two difficulties with this conventional explanation. One is that it is
so widely shared and so impervious to variation in outcomes that it prevents
careful research on the specific relation between policies and practices of
intervention and specific consequences in a case, research which could produce
theoretically-based knowledge. The second is that it is probably wrong. This
essay proposes three sets of reasons why a focus on the ‘root causes’ of a conflict
will not improve the outcomes and effectiveness of peacemaking interventions:
what we know and can know about ‘root causes’, the transformative nature of
civil wars and the motivations and interests of intervening parties. It begins with
a short discussion of current explanations for outcomes before elaborating on
these three reasons.
DO THE ROOT CAUSES OF CIVIL WAR MATTER? 145
Current Explanations for Inadequate Results
The research community has, in fact, been devoting greater attention to
explaining variation in the outcome of international intervention to stop internal
violence since 1990 (Doyle and Sambanis 2000; Stedman, Rothchild and Cousens
(eds) 2002). They have appeared to settle on three explanations for inadequate
results: (1) the mismatch between committed resources and the complexity of a
specific conflict (Doyle and Sambanis 2000) Á/ the problem of ‘incentive
incompatibility’ analyzed by George Downs and Stephen Stedman (2002); (2)
the lack of donor coordination on strategy, programme and projects once
resources are committed (Jones 2002); and (3) insufficient attention to
statebuilding alongside relief and reconstruction (Chesterman 2004, Paris 2004,
Woodward 2002a,b).
At the same time, policy practitioners and agencies engaged in the ‘conflict
business’ have also begun to focus actively on ways to be more effective, such as
through greater use of lessons learned units, evaluation and monitoring
contracts, ongoing consultancy arrangements with policy institutions, and
outreach to academics. This includes taking on board the three explanations
emerging from research and arguing: (1) for a selectivity of their own, to
counteract that of the major powers and donors, such as the proposals in the
Brahimi Report on peacekeeping operations (Brahimi 2000) which urged the
United Nations Secretary-General to recommend a ‘no’ to any intervention being
contemplated by the Security Council for which the resources necessary to
succeed were not going to be forthcoming; (2) for greater policy coherence and
donor coordination, such as the institutional reforms recommended for the
United Nations by the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and,
in turn, by the Secretary-General, and adopted by the General Assembly in
2005 Á/ the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission, a peacebuilding support
office, and a Peacebuilding Fund; and (3) for more attention in post-conflict
reconstruction programmes to statebuilding.
The difficulty with the first two explanations, however, is that the policy
recommendations do not take us much beyond the advocacy framework of a
droit d’inge´rence and the ‘responsibility to protect’. Certainly the empirical
research behind the first explanation of an appropriate level of resources is far
more precise and, thus, helpful to policy, but it says what the advocates argued:
resources are not committed in relation to the normative claim or the
measurable difficulty of the case, but selectively in terms of the specific
interests of major powers. The authors even choose a minimalist definition of
success, that the fighting stop and not resume in five years, admitting that a
higher standard was desirable but that there was no point in using a measure that
few interventions could meet (for example, Stedman, Rothchild and Cousens
2002; Edelstein 2004). The second explanation for poor outcomes Á/ lack of
coordination Á/ has received the greatest attention in the policy literature and in
current reforms at both national and international, field and headquarters levels,
146 WOODWARD
but it presumes that what is to be done is known, or can easily be known if
coordination among donors and other international actors were present, not that
there may be very real reasons for, and interests in, a lack of coordination.
Indeed, its goal of greater policy coherence through coordination, among
national agencies and within international organizations and missions, is also
based on a discouraged, minimalistic conclusion that external actors cannot
agree on post-war strategy, which is what is actually needed, and one must settle
instead for operational coordination.
The third explanation, that the precondition of stable peace and economic
growth is a functioning government or Á/ in the language of Roland Paris Á/ the
institutions necessary to a liberal peace, does move beyond the paradigm of
legitimated intervention to the subsequent question of what is done once one
intervenes. It engages directly with debates in both policy and academic circles
on electoralism (is the essence of democracy really elections, and what are the
costs and benefits of holding elections early after the fighting ceases?), the call
in the Brahimi Report on peacekeeping for a doctrinal shift to civilian policing,
and the growing emphasis in post-conflict reconstruction on the ‘rule of law’
(Carothers 2006). Nonetheless, this emphasis on statebuilding has also narrowed,
in the face of less than successful results in the two transitional administrations
of Kosovo and Timor Leste and the explicit statebuilding operations in Afghanistan
and Iraq, to a question of ownership. Who should be in the driving seat, the
outsiders or the locals, and how assertive should outsiders be, if a stable peace is
to result (Chesterman 2004, 2007)? The question of ownership, moreover, comes
close to suggesting that the problem may be intervention itself because any
externally designed programme based on generalized templates will be insufficiently
tailored to local circumstances, and, in the end, will fail to address the
‘root causes’ of that conflict.
It would be wrong to say that these three dominant explanations for
inadequate outcomes in peacebuilding are the only ones. The case study
literature, in particular, whether in policy and programme evaluations or by
academic researchers, provides a wide range of lessons in specific cases of the
external actions and policies that would have been more successful. The
difficulty, however, is its very particularity and its tendency to reinforce an
emerging cleavage within the policy community between those who insist on
developing best practice manuals and frameworks to benefit from this new
knowledge and to be prepared in the face of this growing demand for
international action, on the one hand, and those who insist on the importance
of context to successful assistance and the neglect by external actors of that
context and the characteristics of a specific case (Ahmed 2005). Scholars are
beginning to address this problem as well by arguing that, indeed, civil wars
differ and these differences matter, and thus to identify patterns of variation
and to develop policy-useful classifications of civil wars. This is an extremely
important development in the research community, but it is at the early
stages.
DO THE ROOT CAUSES OF CIVIL WAR MATTER? 147
Do ‘Root Causes’ of Civil War Matter?
Against this ongoing tension between particularity and policy-usable generalizations
stands the view that the actual problem with results is the failure to deal
with the ‘root causes’ of the conflict. This widely shared conviction appears to
resolve this tension, since it is both general and case-based simultaneously.
Take conflict-resolution theorists, for example. Third parties can assist
parties’ move from war to peace, they argue, by helping them listen to each
other, to their particular concerns, and, above all, to their explanations for the
conflict. By thus showing respect for each others’ point of view, in a safe
environment reinforced by confidence-building measures to get them to the
point of seeing that their concerns may not be zero-sum if framed differently or
that a compromise is acceptable, peace will be nearly self-implementing. Thus,
external actors must take grievances seriously, and thus at least the parties’
identification of causes, and the moment to confront the causes of the conflict is
early, at the point of mediation and negotiation. Policy-oriented analysts of the
post-conflict stage of international peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions
who insist on the importance of taking ‘context’ seriously, adapting templates
and best practice documents to the particular conflict and seeking out reliable
sources of local knowledge, have something similar in mind. Judging by the
extent to which the term ‘root causes’ appears in the grey literature of field
agencies, such as humanitarian organizations, one might argue that operations
practitioners are the most wedded to this explanation and its label. Although the
failure of donors to provide these agencies with sufficient resources comes first,
the failure to take ‘root causes’ into account regularly follows as explanation for
why a large proportion of their projects and programmes suffer from unsustain-
ability.
But is this true? If we took the causes of a civil war into account more directly
in what we do to end a civil war, would we have a higher success rate?
Unfortunately, its status as a nearly universal convention among policy, local
and research communities has made the argument more a policy given than a
proposition in need of empirical demonstration. This default character also
makes it available for whatever political position one wants to promote,
including an excuse not to intervene to stop violence at all, as illustrated by
its use by US President George W. Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleeza
Rice, in the summer of 2006, to prevent immediate intervention in Lebanon to
stop the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah on the grounds that no ceasefire
would last if it did not address the root causes of the conflict, despite the
overwhelming international opinion on the other side. Three sets of reasons warn
that the causes of a civil war do not matter to successful peacebuilding and that
the focus of both policy and research should be elsewhere. In the remainder of
this essay, I will address these reasons by posing three questions. First, what do
we know about the causes of civil war? Second, what does the newest research on
the dynamics of civil war itself tell us about the role that its causes should play in
148 WOODWARD
bringing the violence to an end? And, third, how do the policymakers and
practitioners who decide whether and how we intervene address those causes
once we learn what they are?
Knowledge on the Causes of Civil War
Academic study of civil war, political violence and the breakdown of social order
addresses one of the oldest questions of social science, but the increased public
attention to civil war in the 1990s gave it a new impetus. The primary research
question was the causes of civil war, particularly what causes the onset of civil
war. Most important, and also problematic as I will discuss later, the normal
disconnect between academic research and the policy community which often
prevents the application of such knowledge was less of a problem in this
particular round of research on the subject because much of it was financed and
even commissioned by those with policy concerns. Most prominent was the World
Bank, which grew increasingly concerned during the 1990s, particularly under the
presidency of James Wolfensohn, about the costs to development of civil war,
including the destruction of World-Bank infrastructure projects and the preponderance
of conflict-affected countries among the most highly indebted
countries. The World Bank set up a research unit, led by the British Africanist
economist, Paul Collier, on the ‘Economics of Crime, Violence, and Civil War’.
Second was the Carnegie Corporation of New York, under the presidency of David
Hamburg. He sought to place prevention on the policy agenda for largely ethical
and humanitarian concerns but also pragmatic and cost-benefit ones; prevention
being less costly. Hamburg created the Carnegie Commission on Preventing
Deadly Conflict, which issued a massive series of studies and overall report (1997)
on conflict prevention. Third was the US government, through the office of the
Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., which was persuaded by academic researchers
that early warning was both possible and less costly than intervention to stop the
fighting. Through funding and authorization by the Central Intelligence Agency’s
Directorate of Intelligence, a task force to study State Failure (later changed to
Political Instability) was created to mobilize US academic analysis on the causes
of civil war as a means of early warning; it is currently in its fifth panel of data
collection and analysis.4
At the same time, the two UN Secretaries-General in this period (Boutros
Boutros-Ghali [1992] and Kofi Annan) gave substantial emphasis to the problem of
conflict prevention in speeches and UN documents. By the late 1990s, official
development agencies, such as the UK Department of International Development
(DFID) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), also turned
their attention to what they called ‘conflict’ in general, with separate bureaus
and the development of conflict assessment tools, in particular. In their case,
however, the reason was the huge impact of Mary Anderson’s critical analysis of
foreign developmental and humanitarian assistance, Do No Harm (1999). Like the
World Bank, Carnegie Corporation and CIA Directorate sponsorship, the result
DO THE ROOT CAUSES OF CIVIL WAR MATTER? 149
was to promote research on and causal analysis of armed conflict and the role of
external actors.
The result of this policy-interested research in the 1990s was not, however,
the kind of usable knowledge one might want to address the ‘root causes’ of a
civil war. Instead, it generated a debate between two competing interpretations,
which had such a great influence on public understanding of civil war and on
policies adopted to address the violence that neither criticisms of these
explanations nor alternative knowledge could get a hearing. Before addressing
the consequences, I briefly discuss those two schools, which I will label the
cultural and the economic, and a third, a political-regime explanation, which is
also probably now part of the conventional wisdom but has had less prominence.5
1. The cultural argument. For proponents of this position, the root cause of civil
war is cultural difference and especially political discrimination against
minorities defined in cultural terms (leading some to adopt the general term
‘grievances’ for this cause). It is often summarized, however, as ‘ethnic conflict’.
By this argument, culturally pluralistic or divided societies (the two terms are
used interchangeably) are violence-prone due to long-standing primordial
identities (sometimes called ‘ancient hatreds’) and recurring conflicts over
status, treatment and rights between groups so identified (Petersen 2002;
Kaufman 2001; Kaufmann 1996; Gurr 1993, 2000).
For some analysts, these identities are not given but socially or politically
constructed, and thus the source of the conflict is not difference per se but
political leaders (called ethnic entrepreneurs) who ‘manipulate’ identities and
feelings of discrimination by appeals to nationalism in ethnically heterogeneous
societies for political (primarily electoral) gain (Gagnon 1994/95; Mansfield and
Snyder 1995; Snyder and Mansfield 1995; Snyder 2000). A substantial literature on
post-colonial states and the kinds of political conflicts and resulting lines of
cleavage created by colonial strategies of rule has been particularly useful in
analysis of African conflicts (Mamdani 2001; Young 2002). An internationalsecurity
version argues that internal wars reflect international conflict; with the
end of the Cold War, ideological conflicts have disappeared (Fukuyama 1992) and
been replaced by conflicts over ‘identity’ and ‘civilization’, defined by religious
beliefs and cultures (Huntington 1993, 1997; Kaufmann 1996). In all versions,
however, wars are fought over the political consequences of cultural differences.
2. The economic argument. This perspective is identified with a particular
formulation by the World-Bank research team led by Paul Collier (1998; 2001;
2000). Civil war is caused by rebels seeking economic gain. Finding no
statistically significant correlation between civil war and the level of income
inequality in a country, despite the robust, positive correlation between poverty
(also measured by country) and civil war and the economic grievances central to
older, class-based or relative-deprivation (‘J-curve’) theories of rebellion, Collier
et al proposed an explanation in the high positive correlations they did find in the
aggregate data: between civil-war onset and declining economic growth rates,
150 WOODWARD
low overall GDP per capita, dependence of a country on primary commodity
exports, and a large pool of unemployed young men. Their analysis began with
motivations Á/ why rebel? Á/ but moved later to opportunities because they only
had structural data. In both versions, however, the problem was defined in
Olsonian, collective-action terms: under what conditions could rebels finance
and sustain a rebellion against a government, or, in their rational-choice
language, what explains the strategic choice to rebel and what would solve
their collective action problem (Oson 1965)? The answer was standard to that
approach, the selective incentives of economic gain for both leaders and
recruits. But in contrast to the ‘grievance’ assumption of the ethnic-conflict
school, civil war was caused by ‘greed’ and the opportunity provided by war ‘to
loot’, especially where huge profits could be made from natural resources like
diamonds or timber, called ‘resource predation’.
3. The political-regime argument. In this framework, civil war is caused by
authoritarian rule, or the absence of democracy. The particular formulation of
this argument that dominates the policy discussion, however, is largely a
refinement of the cultural argument, in which aggrieved minorities defined
culturally remain the main players, but the problem lies in the absence of
mechanisms for redress. At the same time, like the economic argument, its
support comes from aggregate statistical analysis of patterns relating political
instability (including violence) to regime-type done by the Political Instability
Task Force (Goldstone et al. 2005). Public attention to this argument may well
have more to do with its strong affinity to an equally public argument during the
1990s, that of democratic-peace theory in international relations, but its
empirical base is the minorities-at-risk and Polity datasets developed at the
University of Maryland by Ted Robert Gurr and associates (1993; 2000) and the
political problems of culturally fragmented or polarized societies.
More recent refinements by the task force, moreover, have much in common
with the branch of the ethnic-conflict school that focuses on the dangers of
violence-provoking nationalism in the course of democratization; for the task
force, the predictive power in their model of ‘factionalism’ was very strong
(Goldstone et al. 2005: 17). They take the argument further, arguing that it is
‘partial democracies’ and a particular sequence of democratization, not the
process of democratic transition in general, that is most prone to political
instability and even violence (Goldstone et al. 2005).
The significance of these research findings on the causes of civil war in the
1990s is their influence on public perceptions and policies. In the hands of
decision-makers, for example, the cultural (ethnic-conflict) argument has often
been used against intervention, or at least to limit it to humanitarian mandates
and organizations, on the view that such conflicts have been going on for so long
and are so emotional Á/ ‘ancient hatreds’ Á/ that no outsider can do much about
them; the ‘intractable problem from hell’ in Secretary of State Warren
Christopher’s infamous statement about Bosnia in 1993 and the less explicit
DO THE ROOT CAUSES OF CIVIL WAR MATTER? 151
innuendo in public discussion about the futility of intervention in African
conflicts. The shift in the characterization of violence in Iraq during 2006 from
insurgency to ‘sectarian’, as the violence worsened and US debate about
‘quagmire’ and withdrawal intensified, is part of this same pattern. Similarly,
the economic-gain argument has also been used against intervention and in
favour of distant policies such as economic sanctions by the public portrait of
rebels as criminals who deserve punishment and deterrence, not engagement.
Policies to end the violence and create a peace when intervention does take
place have also, however, been largely shaped by one or all of these three causal
arguments.
The ethnic-conflict argument has so strongly influenced diplomats who act as
third-party negotiators that peace agreements and constitutions (whether
contained in the peace agreement or navigated in the early stages of staterebuilding
after the agreement) now routinely focus on power-sharing arrangements
in the executive branch of government, consociational principles of
decision-making, and protections and subventions for minority rights defined
culturally (Sisk 1996; Roeder and Rothchild 2005). Regional and municipal
autonomy, decentralization, and in some cases even federalism are increasingly
common, universal prescriptions. Although existing sovereign borders remain
sacrosanct in principle, proposals to end violence always now include territorial
administration (from autonomy to partition) on ethnic/cultural lines to facilitate
more ethnically homogeneous communities which are said to be necessary to
stable democracy.
Policies based on the economic argument have been more influential in the
earlier stages of war termination, perhaps because the view has been applied
most frequently to Africa where major-power interest in intervention is more
dubious. Economic sanctions targeted at governments identified as the predators,
or military and economic aid to help governments defeat rebels; targeted
financial sanctions to reduce rebel access to finance from illegal trafficking in
natural resources and trade regulations on primary commodities such as the
Kimberley Process Certification Scheme to regulate trade in rough diamonds; and
other financial regulations aimed at interrupting the flow of diaspora funding,
money laundering and so-called ‘terrorist financing’, or at least to gain
transparency on the financial transactions of long-distance trade, are now
widely employed to make it more difficult to finance war (Ballentine and
Nitzschke 2005).6
Policies at the stage of implementing a peace agreement have
also been designed to reduce the financial assets for war, based on the ‘economic
causes’ argument Á/ reducing military expenditures, developing state capacity for
managing natural resources, and security sector reform (Pugh et al. 2004).
More recently, the Collier team has focused directly on post-conflict aid aimed
primarily at interrupting what they label the ‘conflict trap’ of low or nonexistent
economic growth after war, that is, that the original causes of a civil war will still
operate when a peacebuilding intervention is on the ground to provoke its
renewal. Arguing that the growth potential of post-war economic aid is even
higher than in an average poor country, they urge military peacekeepers be sent
152 WOODWARD
in the first three years after a peace agreement is signed and then to front-load
development aid in years four to seven Á/ not when the governments’ absorption
capacity for foreign aid is too low, but not so late as to condemn the country to
another downward economic spiral. Such aid must foster policy reforms based on
neoliberal growth theory, to attract foreign direct investment as the basis for the
economic turnaround and generally be market-friendly, efficient and transparent
in the use of economic resources.
Perhaps the most striking contrast among the policy implications of these
competing causal arguments is the position taken on democracy. The economicconflict
school warns against premature promotion of democracy and urges delay
until the end of the ten-year period they analyze. For the political-regime school,
democracy promotion is essential from the beginning, although they also insist on
the correct sequencing of the different components of democracy. If elections
come first, the outcome will be the most unstable type of political regime; and
any set of institutional arrangements that increase the risk of factionalism will be
counterproductive (Goldstone et al. 2005).
The difficulty with these research findings for those who argue that peacebuilding
policy must address the ‘root causes’ of a war goes beyond the fact that
scholars disagree and that the policy implications of each differ and in some
cases even conflict. A third problem is that all three explanations have been
subject to substantial criticism and disproof, but these criticisms do not seem to
have had the same hearing in the policy world, let alone had any influence on
revisions in policy in response to this new knowledge.
Thus, new research demonstrates that ethnic diversity does not incline a
country to violence. Quite the contrary, ethnically heterogeneous societies are
less inclined to civil war than homogeneous ones (Fearon and Laitin 2003;
Sambanis 2000). Nor has there, in fact, been any decline since the end of the Cold
War in wars that scholars code as based on ‘ideological’ conflict in favour of those
coded as ‘ethnic’ (Fortna 2004b). The quality of the data on ethnicity, and
particularly the index of ethnic fractionalization so crucial to analysis of ethnicconflict
as a cause, is so poor and subject to coding errors, in fact, that much new
scholarship has focused on improving the measurement of ethnicity and related
datasets.7
Nonetheless, the newest research shows clearly that ethnic identity
and conflicts related to cultural difference are so situation-specific that large-N
aggregate statistical analysis showing a strong correlation between ethnicity and
civil war can have little meaning (Posner 2005; Habyarimana et al. 2004a,b).
The problem of poor data and methodology is even greater in the work of the
economic school of Collier et al, including coding errors, missing data that
reduce the number of cases to very few, highly contestable proxy measures, and
the civil war data set (Suhrke, Villanger and Woodward 2005). This research, too,
has provoked other scholars to revise or develop new datasets on civil war.
Substantively, new research shows that there is no statistical relation between
dependence on primary commodities and rebellion (Ron 2005; Fearon 2005), and
that there is great variation in political consequences (including type of civil war
if that is one outcome) according to the type of primary commodity a country
DO THE ROOT CAUSES OF CIVIL WAR MATTER? 153
sells (Ross 2006, 2004a,b; Ballentine and Nitzschke 2005). Scholars who study the
microdynamics of insurgency, which is necessary to identify a collective-action
problem and its solution, demonstrate persuasively that neither selective
incentives such as access to finance nor ethnic loyalty solves the collective
problem of rebellion (Gutierrez Sanin 2004) or tells us very much at all about the
microfoundations of violence (Kalyvas 2006; Lacina 2006; Wood 2003).
Similarly for the political-regime argument, highly aggregated, statistical
analysis of political instability does not provide the reason Á/ the causal
mechanism Á/ that partial democracies are most vulnerable to violence (Gandhi
and Vreeland 2004). For that, one needs to go to the case study literature, and its
overriding lesson is that regime type (authoritarian or democratic, or a mixed,
partial type) does not provide enough information about the specific dynamic of
politics that do, in fact, explain the onset and trajectories of civil war. Such
politics may be provoked by governmental policies, for example, the introduction
of decentralizing reforms, a radical structural adjustment programme, or
land privatization that leads to large-scale landlessness, but the process is part of
the cause (Collier and Sambanis 2005; Murshed and Gates 2005; Sanchez and
Chacon 2005; Sambanis 2004; Ballentine and Sherman 2003). Indeed, as the
Political Instability Task Force now argues, on the basis of their newest findings
that both consolidated democracies and authoritarian governments are least
prone to civil war and political instability, it might be more fruitful not to ask
about causes of war but causes of system stability or instability. Causes, or at
least triggers, of destabilization often lie, according to the case-study literature,
moreover, in a state’s external environment. The causes of civil war are almost
never solely domestic.
In sum, the policy interest in stopping the violence of civil wars has led to
substantial advances in what we know about their causes, but current policies
tend to be based on research that has been superseded and that, in any case,
proposed competing arguments. If effective peacebuilding depends on addressing
‘root causes’ and the knowledge on which those policies are based is wrong, then
our interventions may do more harm than we would by ignoring causes altogether.
Furthermore, if the root causes of any civil war lie in international factors,
even partially Á/ for example, the changing global economic context, the
instability of a neighbourhood, the strategic policies of major powers, the
economic policies supported by donors and banks, the conditions for aid or
trade Á/ then the focus of peacebuilding must include those international
conditions or actions, not just domestic transformation. While the regional
security context of a country in conflict has been incorporated into some
peacebuilding strategies, such as the regional stabilization annex (1B) of the
Dayton peace accord for Bosnia-Herzegovina and its implementation by the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and further regional arms
control negotiations in Vienna, or the agreement on cooperation between
Afghanistan and its neighbours facilitated by Lakhdar Brahimi in 2002, for the
most part the international conditions and policies that figure most prominently
in analyses of root causes are beyond the reach of a peace operation or worse,
154 WOODWARD
the external actors who would have to make changes will not and insist that local
actors bear full responsibility for the violence.
Most important, the parties themselves will not agree about the ‘root causes’
of their war. That is the nature of civil war. Not only is civil war a highly complex
phenomenon, such that there is no single cause in the sense promoted by the
three influential schools of explanation, but the fuel that provokes and prolongs
a war includes fundamental disagreements over its cause (and thus respective
responsibilities for its start and resolution). Crucial to the way a conflict ends are
the parties’ campaigns to win external support (including intervention) for their
side by shaping outsiders’ perceptions of the cause of the war. Academic experts
often lend their support to these campaigns without full disclosure that they
have taken on an advocacy role. One reason that military victories tend to be
more stable than negotiated or assisted endings (Licklider 1993) may be that
victors impose their explanation and can, thus, terminate the competition over
cause and responsibility. Otherwise, the politics of the immediate post-war
period is suffused with (if not actually driven by) a continuing contest over
interpretations, relative responsibilities and guilt, and search for external
support for one origin and cause over others. While policy makers tend
(impatiently, one must acknowledge) to dismiss academic research on grounds
that ‘experts do not agree’, these disagreements pale in intensity and
consequence in the face of the inevitable disagreements among the parties.
Causes vs. Outcomes: Our Emerging Knowledge on Civil War
Academic research provides a second set of reasons why effective peacemaking
does not depend on knowing and addressing the ‘root causes’ of a conflict,
indeed, reasons why such a focus would be counterproductive. These arise from
the newest academic research on the nature of civil war and its dynamics.
Wars are transformative, even if the greater willingness to intervene makes
them less decisive than in the past. Creating a sustainable peace requires
addressing the reality created by that war Á/ the outcomes, not the causes. While
aggregate-level studies demonstrate that the longer a civil war lasts, the more
intractable to resolution it becomes (Hartzell et al. 2001), Fearon (2004) argues
that this varies with the type of civil war. Case studies go further in
demonstrating that it is not in the causes of the war but the changes wreaked
by war that one can find bases for its successful termination. I will limit myself
here to three major trends in the current research.
Causes of Violence versus Causes of Civil War
One of the problems of two of the 1990s arguments on causes (the cultural and
the economic) was that their causes were individual motivations, but their data
were aggregate and structural. A primary criticism of that research, therefore,
DO THE ROOT CAUSES OF CIVIL WAR MATTER? 155
was its neglect of the microfoundations of war. The newer research focuses on
microfoundations, and one of the consequences is a very important distinction,
promoted most explicitly by Stathis Kalyvas (2006), between the causes of
violence in civil war and the causes of civil war. They are not the same. To explain
violence, he and others argue, one must look to fundamentally personal and local
(as opposed to national) causes, not to the causal narratives of macropolitics
which are adopted by outsiders and the research on causes discussed above. The
focus on local politics is not a particularistic explanation, as some might think;
Kalyvas, for example, has proposed a general theory based on research on the
Greek civil war which can be tested on other cases and eventually used by
practitioners. The policy implication, however, is that to stop the violence, the
primary concern of interventions, and to establish a set of conditions and
institutions that prevent a reversion to violence after the international presence
leaves, practitioners must understand these local (village, town, community) and
personal dynamics.8
The distinction does help explain the persistence of the cultural and economic
arguments on causes of civil war, despite massive contrary evidence. After all,
the propaganda of civil war often uses the language of ethnic or religious
difference, and much of what many would call looting and criminal behaviour do
occur. Case studies on the dynamics of civil-war violence show clearly, however,
that the cultural and economic arguments more often have the direction of
causality reversed. The experience of violence has consequences, one of which is
to cause ethnic conflict. That is, Kalyvas’ metanarratives, what Crawford Young
(2002) calls ‘discourses of difference’, are necessary to civil war because
behaviour that most people would abhor in peacetime must be justified.9
Another consequence of violence is to make choices for individuals. All three
earlier arguments presumed that violence and war were a consequence of
individual or collective choice. It is not identities per se, whether ethnic, racial
or religious, or even the perception of discrimination and lack of avenues for
redress on that basis, that cause people to use violence and commit atrocities
against people of other identities, but the reverse. Once violence begins, people
are forced to take sides which have been defined by others. Just as those broad
cultural labels hide actual wartime distinctions more closely related to roles on
the ground (for example, soldier, enemy, war widow, war profiteer), so post-war
identities and distinctions should be free to develop in response to new roles and
the requirements of peace.
A third consequence of violence itself relates to its mobilizing effect. Neither
pre-war ‘grievances’ nor the prospect of loot can explain the decision to use
violence, whereas the experience of violence itself can, such as the high levels of
women’s participation in the Maoist insurgency in Nepal provoked by the rape of
women by internal security forces (Murshed and Gates 2005; on El Salvador, Wood
2003). Lacina’s study of the severity of civil war violence argues that ‘knowing
why wars start does not necessarily reveal when they will be most devastating’
(2006: 287). Similarly, the experience of violence can help explain how
programmes aimed at ending the war and preventing post-war violence can
156 WOODWARD
have a demobilizing effect. Research by Jeremy Weinstein and Macartan
Humphreys (2005) on the demobilization of ex-combatants in Sierra Leone shows
the importance of taking the effects of violence during the war directly into
account, quite independently of its causes. Demobilization requires reintegration,
as standard approaches to disarmament, demobilization and reintegration
(DDR) of the UN Development Programme and companion policies understand,
but the extent to which ex-combatants were accepted by family and neighbours,
and thus were successfully reintegrated after the conflict, could not be
explained by either age, gender, ethnicity of their fighting units, or participation
in an organized DDR programme. What mattered was the ‘combatant’s
experience of the war, in particular, the extent to which he or she engaged in
abusive practices’. The affected population, including families, know what units
did during the war, and this affects their willingness to allow them back into the
community. Indeed, there is frequently a rise in violence after the ceasefire or
peace agreement which may even be more deadly than the war, a fact first given
attention by the research of Charles Call and William Stanley (2002) on El
Salvador and Guatemala. This violence is not a product of unresolved pre-war
grievances but of new, post-war hardships (such as huge unemployment) and warcreated
resources, such as the proliferation of small arms, the wartime bonding
among fighters, or the criminal gangs willing to take the risks to provide supplies
during the war and their smuggling routes and networks.
Socio-economic Change
Society, economy and interests are all transformed by war, and especially by a
civil war (Cramer 2006; Keen 1997, 1998, 2005). Contrary to the ‘new war’
argument (Kaldor 1999), moreover, the historical research on civil wars on this
subject is vast (Kalyvas 2001). War transforms society. Rural populations move to
the cities and stay. Women take on roles that had formerly been male-dominant,
including military roles that make it nearly impossible for them to return to their
pre-war communities and status. The demographic balance changes as disease
more than bullets kills off the most vulnerable (as Les Roberts has documented in
DR Congo [2004]), or as middle-class professionals (the core of ‘civil society’) are
able to escape and refugees do not return. ‘Warriors’, writes Gutierrez Sanin
(2004) about Colombia, ‘are transformed by the very experience of war Á/ they
create social ties, and develop a specific know-how that teaches them that
survival depends on the precision and adequacy of collective tasks’ (2004: 5).
Leadership potential may be created by war, but many leaders and potential
leaders are also killed off prematurely.
War also transforms the economy. Strategic infrastructure, even if it is
destroyed, becomes more salient in the national psyche. Foreign investment is
delayed or diverted, and foreign markets may be lost forever. Long-distance
smuggling routes shift, depriving some and opening other areas to global
networks. New social groups gain opportunities to enter business and succeed.
DO THE ROOT CAUSES OF CIVIL WAR MATTER? 157
While much attention has focused on the negative aspects of a war economy,
such as its criminalization, some scholars like Roland Marchal on Somalia or
Christopher Cramer (2006) on Angola and Mozambique emphasize the positive
side, in the sense of opportunities for social groups previously excluded Á/ thus
part of what might have been catalogued as a grievance leading to war Á/ whose
economic agility, entrepreneurship, and new wealth should be seen as a potent
resource of post-war stability.
War transforms interests. Elisabeth Wood (2000) argues that the influence of
war on dominant economic interests in El Salvador and South Africa made peace
possible. In El Salvador, the shift of investments to export production and
services by landowners responding to the costs of war on the land also changed
their attitudes toward the kind of political regime that would best protect their
class power and a resulting willingness to compromise with the Farabundo Martı´
National Liberation Front (FMLN) insurgents on establishing a democratic regime.
In Lebanon and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Marie-Joelle Zahar (2000) argues, the
interests of militias, particularly its leaders, changed fundamentally in the
course of having to organize for war, mobilize resources, administer territories
they control, and keep their fighters fighting. Those who would help end the war,
she concludes, should take these changed interests seriously. Post-war prospects
will be shaped substantially as well by whether outsiders overcome their initial
assessment of causes and acknowledge these new interests and skills, for
example, as the basis of a peacetime political party and potential government or
simply as a force they originally viewed as one to be demobilized, downgraded
and perhaps even punished.
The Political Process
The critique of the 1990s literature on the causes of civil war for not taking
sufficient account of the political dynamics that lead to war and, equally, those
that can bring it to an end, does connect causes to endings, but only if one
understands the nature of civil war. Unlike interstate war, where there
are declarations of war and casus belli, civil wars are the outcome of longdeveloping
processes of decay in the socio-cultural and official institutional
mechanisms that normally keep limits on the use of violence in a particular
locality or country (Marshall 2004; Ellis 1999). The moment of breakdown into
high-intensity or large-scale violence, the moment normally coded as war and
noticed by outsiders, is most frequently due to some ‘trigger’ that is a contingent
event unrelated to the issues at stake and parties’ goals (see Kalyvas 1999 on the
distinction). Some recognition of this long process of breakdown may be what is
meant by the adjective ‘root’, but the research suggests, instead, that the focus
for both prevention and peace should not be on causes as conventionally
understood but on how mechanisms that keep limits on the use of violence as a
means to political ends are destabilized or restored.
158 WOODWARD
The essence of civil war, regardless of substantive goals, is a contest for power Á/
over who rules, who gets to define policies for their group or goals, and above all,
the very rules over who rules. This abnormal level of power uncertainty
(sometimes called the collapse of civil authority or state failure) and its bases
in a society must be restabilized to end the violence. The issue at stake in ending a
civil war and its violence is not who wins (for example, ‘moderates’ vs. ‘radicals’)
but what rules will reduce that power uncertainty and gain sufficient legitimacy
over alternatives to end the ongoing contest (Stinchcombe 1999). These rules will,
by definition, favour some groups over others, but it is not the persons or groups
emphasized in the conventional literature on causes that is at issue, but the rules
that facilitate a return to non-violent methods of political competition. The
political mechanisms that can restabilize in such conditions have not been studied
as much as we need.
The debate about causes has promoted the view that some types of conflicts
are more amenable to solution than others (for example, that ‘ideological’
conflicts are less ‘zero-sum’ and thus more amenable to solution than ‘ethnic’
conflicts). Aside from the contrary empirical evidence (Fortna 2004b), this
argument appears to ignore the element of power involved: (1) that the
constitutional solution that ends a civil war is always an imposition by whoever
has the power sufficient to gain legitimacy over alternatives, (2) that whatever
institutions to regulate political competition emerge, they will only last if they
persuade losers who still control arms that they gain by these new rules, or that
they have no alternative but to hope thus, and (3) that most causes of civil war
are never truly solved but redefined by creative leadership willing and able to
change the political agenda (Uyangoda 2005). As a result, historically, the
particular causes or projects which end the war often have little to do with those
with which the war began. The role of external actors in helping to stabilize this
power uncertainty or the reverse, actually prolonging or increasing the
uncertainty that causes violence, must also be addressed (Woodward 2006).
Motivations for Intervention: What Matters to those who Matter?
If the ‘root causes’ matter to more effective outcomes, to whom do they matter?
A third consideration in the proposition that success requires taking causes
seriously is their compatibility, or lack of conflict, with the interests and
motivations of those policymakers, practitioners and organizations who intervene,
provide assistance and design the approaches to ending civil wars.
A dispassionate analysis of the effect of interveners’ motivations on peacebuilding
outcomes is remarkably rare because of the principle, and thus
presumption, of neutrality in humanitarian operations, United Nations peacekeeping
and conflict-resolution theory. Though increasingly debated and under
attack from many sides, the presumption interferes with asking the question.
There is consensus now in the policy and evaluations literature that assistance
programmes are donor-driven (Woodward 2002a,b). Some discussion of the
DO THE ROOT CAUSES OF CIVIL WAR MATTER? 159
varying consequences of that fact occurs in the literature on ownership. Some
analyses of peacebuilding operations also acknowledge what insiders have long
recognized, that all such operations are highly political. Yet systematic analysis
of its consequences is scarce. Instead, I discuss four types of motivations and
interests guiding the decision of external actors to intervene and the decision of
operations and assistance to argue that there is little or no room for taking ‘root
causes’ into account.
1. Ideology. Peacebuilding operations occur in a larger context. Whether one
takes the world-polity interpretation of Roland Paris (2004), the critical-theory
version of Mark Duffield (2001), or the realist interpretation acknowledged by US
Secretary of State Rice’s policy agenda of ‘transformational diplomacy’ (Center
for Global Development 2006), post-conflict policy is guided by a particular
model of the state, economy and society, an ideology of ‘liberal internationalism’,
which interveners aim to achieve. Liberal democracy, a market economy
and market-friendly state, economic policy defined by neoclassical growth
theory and the new institutionalist economists, community participation in
development, and a strong role for civil society and the private sector form the
template of all peacebuilding programmes. Some elements of this model do
conform to the prescriptions of two of the causes-of-civil-war schools from the
1990s, but the initial World-Bank sponsorship of the economic-school research
and US government sponsorship of the political-regime research suggest that the
source of this alignment is not policy responsiveness to research but shared
theoretical frameworks between the two.
The difficulty comes when this ideological template, or some of its elements,
is shown to conflict with the outcome of a sustainable peace and post-war
growth. Most frequently analyzed is the conflict between the policies required by
the International Monetary Fund for settling a country’s debt arrears first and to
that end, immediate macroeconomic stabilization, and the resulting effect of
these restrictive policies on the public expenditures necessary to implement the
peace agreement (such as power-sharing, security sector reform and rule-of-law
institutions), or to generate the economic preconditions, such as jobs and
reconstruction, for a decline in violence and a sustainable peace (deSoto and
Castillo 1994; Woodward 2002b). Even the Collier and Hoeffler (2004) proposals
for post-conflict aid, criticized above, do urge a change from this IMF template in
the sequencing of economic policies to one that starts with the goal of social
equity and certain economic reforms and delays macroeconomic stabilization.
Another example common in the literature is the negative consequences for
peace of the early emphasis on privatization, particularly promoted by USAID,
which has been shown to increase the very landlessness that is so prominent a
factor in the case-study literature on the causes of war and to legalize the
economic gains from illegal and criminal activity during the war of those very
persons (so-called warlords) whose power is a target of demilitarization and
democratization policies. Similar, too, is the extent to which this ideological
template ignores the sequencing recommendations from the causes literature
160 WOODWARD
such that the elements of democratization, liberalization and privatization that
are most destabilizing, such as early elections and large aid infusions without the
necessary institutional context to make them work as intended, are nonetheless
promoted first.
2. National Security Interest. This essay began by asserting that the normative
consensus sought by the political campaign in support of intervention during the
1990s had been won. Even where the strategic interests of major powers may not
dictate intervention in specific cases, it is now agreed (even by formerly die-hard
non-interventionists such as China) that internal armed conflict has externalities
that threaten international security and, by extension, the national security of
all countries. The direct threat to US national security of ‘fragile states’ and the
violence of civil war is prominently argued in its 2002 (and again 2005) national
security doctrine (Woodward 2005c). European states and the European Union
followed rapidly, and the argument is prominent in the Report of the High-Level
Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004) presented to the SecretaryGeneral
of the United Nations in December 2003. Moreover, all documents accept
the foundational principle of this new consensus, the responsibility of the
international community to act when a government has failed. The goal of
intervention is to restore a regime that is accountable to international norms or,
in the original formulation by the team of Deng, Zartman and colleagues (1996),
a government that earns its recognition of sovereignty.
Nonetheless, here, too, the assistance policies of donors to peacebuilding
operations give priority to those aspects of a state’s capacity and political will
seen necessary to implement the rules and norms of the current international
economic and security order Á/ such as foreign-debt repayment, enforcement of
contracts with foreign parties (especially private investors), border control (over
illegal trafficking, organized crime, unregulated population movements, customs),
arms control and non-proliferation regimes, and accountability for war
crimes Á/ not to those aspects of domestic governance seen critical to the
protection of human rights and citizen security at home (Woodward 2005b). Even
elections are rushed for the purpose of creating partners for international actors.
Where domestic needs are funded, they tend to be physical infrastructure (for
example, a school but not the teachers) which can fly the donor’s flag, or choices
made to satisfy the donor’s legislators or domestic pressure groups. These
externally defined criteria, such as required quotas for the political representation
of women and minorities, or limits on public expenditures for education or
health, are increasingly the target of local protests on the grounds of cultural
insensitivity or imposing higher standards than those found in wealthy democracies.
Because responsible sovereignty in practice often means a search for
political leaders who will sign and implement international agreements,
including through domestic legislation, the crucial relationship in the causesof-war
argument Á/ the ties of political responsibility between a government and
its citizens Á/ gets lost. A stark illustration of this is the contrast between external
assessments of failure, so frequently assigned to leaders’ lack of ‘political will’
DO THE ROOT CAUSES OF CIVIL WAR MATTER? 161
or the presence of ‘spoilers’, and the assessments from the local populations
themselves (as revealed in post-war public opinion surveys and focus groups),
which universally and repeatedly emphasize their government’s failure to reduce
unemployment and related aspects of human insecurity.
3. Strategic interest. Alongside the normative consensus that the national
interest of all states lies in stopping the violence and creating responsible states,
there remain specific strategic interests of those states that take an active role
in a particular intervention. States do not risk money, troops or political capital
without their own specific interests as well. The reasons that states intervene in
the internal affairs of another state have not, it appears, been changed by the
new consensus on the obligation to intervene, that is, to support or create
clients, buttress or build alliances, and respond to domestic constituencies
(Owen 2002; Finnemore 2003). These partisan political objectives will vary
among intervening countries and among recipient countries, but they will always
be critical to choices on the ground. Some will aim at shaping the post-war
domestic political balance decisively in favour of particular leaders or groups and
against those they identify as enemies of the new state or perpetrators during
the war. Others may view the country as a critical piece of its national defence
policy, such as a location for military bases from which to project power or as a
strategic ally. Some may be focused simply on sending refugees home to reduce
the fiscal burden and political backlash they generate. While this strategic
motivation may produce specific peacebuilding programmes and projects that
address root causes, it does so largely by coincidence, not intention. In some
cases, in fact, these interests have been shown to prolong the conflicts that led
to war though in the guise of a peacebuilding operation.
4. Bureaucratic Interest. Those who design and organize peacebuilding missions,
strategies, programmes, and projects belong to bureaus, agencies and organizations
that also have interests separate from the specific country emerging from
war. Many have global mandates that limit what they can do in a specific case.
Most depend on financing from others and for which there is steep competition.
Protecting their operational autonomy, their budget, their status as lead agency
in a sector, their lawyers’ interpretation of their charters, their donors’
conditions, and the rules and politics of individual promotion or contract renewal
all must take precedence in operations.
The literature on humanitarian, development and peacekeeping operations is
rich on the priority of these bureaucratic interests and constraints over actions,
which research on the country, including the particular character and causes of
its war, might recommend. Prominent is the sharp division within such
organizations between the analytical and operational people and the tendency
of the latter to resist knowledge coming from the former (Bebbington et al. 2004;
Levine 2006). Also constraining are the formula and criteria of accountability by
which logistical frameworks (logframes) and accountants govern what is done
and how it is measured and assessed (Crawford 2003; Woodward 2001, 2002a,
162 WOODWARD
2006a). The sectoral organization of bureaus, expertise and project design and
implementation creates a ‘silo’ mentality that is in conflict with the interdependent
social, cultural and political processes that cause and end war. In a
2005 study to prepare overall guidelines on peacebuilding, for example, the Best
Practices Unit of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations alone identified
642 separate activity lines in their current programming.10
Like all bureaucracies,
innovation to alter long-standing technical expertise, operating procedures,
and crucial tacit knowledge carries high costs and risks (Pierson 2000).
Individual practitioners do learn, but their knowledge is most often based on
personal experience which tends, necessarily, to be ad hoc and usually tied to the
country or locality of their most recent assignment.
Peace operations have a specific temporal component, moreover, which is
particularly counterproductive for attention to root causes. The international
focus on crisis response, the strict political limits from member states on UN
contingency planning, the requirement of a UN Security Council resolution before
budgets and their accompanying plans are created (whether by a coalition of the
willing or the UN itself), and the emphasis in all peace operations on speed Á/ rapid
reaction, rapid deployment, peace dividends to the population in the first six
months Á/ have two bureaucratic consequences for taking the causes of a specific
war into account. Organizations must rely on pre-set templates to be able to act
quickly, and time pressures inevitably crowd out efforts to obtain local input and
analysis in the design of a mission, strategy, plan, programmes or projects. Even
those who are most open to learning about the particular case and the knowledge
that academic research provides plead the overriding pressures of time.
Conclusion
Political activists in the 1990s transformed the normative environment in relation
to civil war and associated gross violations of human rights and human security.
The resulting consensus on the international right and, later, responsibility, to
intervene has led to major innovations in the institutional capacity of governments
and international organizations to implement these norms. Although issues
of political will and strategic interest remain, such that action in some cases is
more rapid and resourced than in others, the genuine success of this political
movement on the issue of intervention has not been matched at the level of
outcomes. A large number of interventions were failures and new interventions
had to be mounted, or were longer-term engagements than intended for fear of
the conflict resuming once troops withdrew, or created a frozen stalemate that
stopped the killing but did not make life much better for the people at stake. The
key policy question, therefore, is no longer whether to intervene, but how?
The primary answers in the 1990s for more effective outcomes of intervention
focused on the lack of coordination among external actors who intervened and
the failure to match resources to the complexity and needs of a particular
conflict. This essay has addressed a different answer, one that hovers as a default
DO THE ROOT CAUSES OF CIVIL WAR MATTER? 163
position to explain all ills of intervention, both for many in the target countries
and among practitioners on the international side: the failure to address the
‘root causes’ of the conflict. This assertion is particularly amenable to
examination with the substantial increase in our knowledge, through academic
research, on the causes of civil war, the politics of intervention, and the
consequences of currently designed policies of post-war reconstruction and
stabilization. The result, this essay argues, is that this conventional explanation
is wrong: addressing the ‘root causes’ of a conflict is not the way to think about
greater success in ending civil wars.
First, policies currently designed to address the root causes are based on
research in the 1990s that has largely been discredited or superseded, but the
policy world has not adjusted to the criticisms and newer scholarship. If the
analysis is wrong, it may be better not to address ‘causes’ at all. Moreover, a civil
war is fundamentally a conflict over causes which does not end once the fighting
stops, while key elements of a party’s war strategy are aimed at persuading
outsiders to support their interpretation of the war over those of their opponents.
Second, the newer academic literature on the causes of civil war, which is
partly a reaction to the literature of the 1990s, argues on the basis of careful
empirical research, case studies and theory that two other aspects are more
important than ‘root causes’ in achieving a definitive end to the war: (1) the
changes wrought by the war itself (the transformation of society, economy and
interests, and the effect of violence itself regardless of initial motivation on lines
of political cleavage and patterns of behaviour), and thus the conditions that exist
at the time of a ceasefire or peace agreement, and (2) the political arrangements
that can reduce the extreme uncertainty over power Á/ who has it, who has a right
to it, how access to it is regulated Á/ that is the primary characteristic of civil war
and thus restore local capacity, whether social, cultural, or governmental, to
impose socially tolerable limits on the use of violence.
Third, the motivations for intervention by those who make the decision on
intervention, provide resources and organize the field operations have nothing to
do with the causes of a particular conflict and will always take priority. Where
analysts would identify ‘root causes’ in external conditions and actors over which
domestic actors have little or no influence, the prospects for addressing them are
even smaller. One might still be able to argue that addressing ‘root causes’ (in
those rare cases where agreement about them can be reached) will matter to
success, but they will be ignored. That is, they do not matter to those who matter.
In sum, there are some very good reasons and some not so good why the ‘root
causes’ do not matter in successfully ending a civil war. Those who use the
concept and the underlying argument should specify more clearly why they
matter and how outsiders can help address them productively. Others will find
many ways that outside assistance can be productive, without confronting the
invariably contested causes of the war, and try to meet the need for much more
research on the causes of peace and the policy implications that should be
pursued.
164 WOODWARD
Acknowledgements
An early version of this essay was presented at the School of Advanced
International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC, on
31 October 2005, and is based on a larger project on the knowledge base for
post-conflict statebuilding funded by The Carnegie Corporation of New York and
a second on state failure and the international security agenda funded by The
Ford Foundation.
Notes
1 Continuing developments of this dataset are discussed regularly in the Journal of
Peace Research.
2 Data are available on the website of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations
(http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko).
3 Data and details are available from: http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/
home.htm.
4 Early warning research in Europe tended to be done instead by non-governmental
organizations, such as the Forum for Early Warning and Response (FEWER) and International
Alert.
5 This argument is developed in more detail in Woodward 2005a.
6 Those who form the far larger part of the commodity chain are then reminded of
their ‘corporate social responsibility’.
7 See the website of papers and conferences organized by the Laboratory in
Comparative Ethnic Processes (LiCEP) at: http://www.yale.edu/ycias/ocvprogram/LiCEP.
8 Research by Se´verine Autessere (2006) on eastern Congo demonstrates a direct link
between an understanding of local sources of conflict and policies necessary to end a war,
in contrast with the insistence of international actors on a national (or more accurately,
capital-city) frame.
9 I argue this strongly on the Yugoslav cases in Woodward 1995.
10 I am grateful to Ed Rees for this information.
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