Introduction
In 1993, the political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote a controversial article titled “The Clash of Civilizations” for the magazine Foreign Affairs (Huntington, 1993). In the article, he argued that the end of the Cold War would lead to a decline in the amount of conflicts over economic ideology. In the future, globalization and American hegemonic dominance would foster a new age in which domestic and international conflicts would be driven by a clash of civilizations. He argued that certain cultures in the developing world were very different ideologically from the Protestant political cultures found in the West. Non-Western civilizations would be less accepting of democratic norms and values, so the clash between these different civilizations would lead to violence. Huntington was particularly critical of Islam, which he characterized as being more prone to violence than other religions. Cultural differences between regions of the world would become the basis of conflict in the future. Needless to say, Huntington’s theory has been challenged vigorously on a number of fronts by scholars. Are certain ethnic and religious groups more prone to conflict than others? Furthermore, are countries with greater degrees of ethnic and religious diversity more susceptible to civil war?
In this paper, I will test Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory through a large-n multi-regression analysis of civil war. This will include testing whether Muslim majority countries and ethnically diverse countries are more prone to conflict. The results of this paper will show that the correlation between Islam and civil war will disappear once relevant control variables are added to the regression analysis. Variables such as economic underdevelopment, oil dependency, and foreign military intervention are far better predictors of Civil War than the degree of ethnic diversity or a country’s majority religion.
Literature Review: Comparing Theories on Civil War
During the early days of the Cold War in the 1950’s and 1960’s, political scientists paid far more attention to international conflicts than they did to civil wars. At the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were attempting to spread capitalism and communism throughout the world (Newman and DeRouen, 2014). The majority of civil wars in this era were framed by political entrepreneurs as a global ideological struggle over economic development. Far less common were conflicts between ethnic or religious groups. In fact, modernization theorists such as Gabriel Almond and James Coleman believed that conflicts over race, religion, and ethnicity would become relics of a more primitive past as economies grew (Almond and Coleman, 1960). Secularization theorists thought religion would become increasingly irrelevant as education and healthcare systems continued to improve. From this perspective, all states were inevitably headed along the same lines of political and economic development. Nevertheless, this simplistic theory of development proved to be wrong. As the Cold War calmed down in the 1970’s and 1980’s before finally ending in 1989, the number of international conflicts over economic ideology declined and the number of ethnic based civil wars actually increased (Fearon and Laitin, 2003). This was all taking place in spite of the fact that economies in the developing world were growing and democracy was spreading rapidly to different regions of the globe. Many countries in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East experienced a large number of long and protracted civil wars often fought between different ethnic and religious groups. In particular, the Middle East experienced problems with a transnational network of Islamist movements that engaged in frequent conflict with states in the region. Why was this happening?
By the 1980’s, some scholars such as Donald Horowitz began to take a harder look at ethnic diversity and its potential effects on conflict (Horowitz, 1985). From this research emerged two schools of thought: primordialism and constructivism. Primordialists argue that ethnicity is something that is concrete, salient, and has its roots in the premodern past (Van Evera, 2001). Since ethnicity is resistant to change, diversity might form an obstacle to national unity and make conflict more likely. Scholars have suggested several mechanisms for what drives conflict between groups. Rational choice theorists argue that ethnic groups may have different economic, social, and political preferences, which may lead to conflict over control of the state. Social identity theorists have argued that individuals have a psychological attachment to their group, so if people feel that outside groups are threatening the existence of their own identity they are more likely to engage in conflict. Another group of scholars called instrumentalists claim that rapacious political entrepreneurs may use these ethnic cleavages to obtain political power through what is known as ethnic outbidding (Horowitz, 1985). By playing off the fears and psychological anxieties of an ethnic group, they can mobilize supporters to obtain power through elections or violence. This problem may be more acute in the developing world where countries are more ethnically diverse. When colonial powers drew political boundaries in the Middle East and Africa, they failed to take into account the ethnolinguistic and religious diversity in these regions of the world. This may have created the conditions that would make countries more prone to conflict.
Samuel Huntington took the primordialist argument in a more controversial direction (Huntington, 1993). He argues that it was not only ethnic diversity but the specific differences between those ethnic groups that matter when it comes to economic and political development. Huntington claims that certain religions are be less open to democratic norms and values due to the nature of their religious beliefs and are more prone to violence. From his perspective, Muslims have a religious text that is considered to be the direct word of God, which leaves less room for personal interpretation of one’s religion. Catholicism emphasizes hierarchy and submission to authority through a highly structured church order. In contrast, Protestantism emphasizes individual interpretation of the bible and one’s individual relationship with God, so a Protestant culture is more likely to encourage literacy, critical thinking, and individualism. Huntington’s claims are not new. Numerous sociologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, most notably Max Weber, promoted the idea that Protestant communities were more likely to develop economically and embrace democracy due to their work ethnic and individualistic mentality. Samuel Huntington merely revived this idea. According to Huntington, ethnic and religious groups with very different cultural frameworks may be more likely to clash with one another than groups that have similar cultural attitudes and values.
Primordialists have been criticized by another group of scholars known as constructivists. While primordialists view ethnicity as being static, constructivists argue that ethnicity can change overtime as socioeconomic and political conditions evolve (Hale, 2004). Intermarriage can dilute the effects of racial diversity, and linguistic uniformity can be created through state educational institutions. Furthermore, constructivist scholars have shown that individuals can have multiple ethnic identities, and certain identities may become more or less salient overtime. For example, an analysis of poll data from Muslim communities in different parts of the world reveals that there is an incredibly amount of diversity among the adherents to this religion in terms of their attitudes towards politics, the economy, and society. Some Muslims claim to be very dedicated to their faith whereas others don’t see their religion as a central part of their identity. Several factors can influence the saliency of ethnic identity and the relationship between ethnic groups. The structure of political institutions may encourage violence or cooperation. Institutionalists such as Arend Lijphart have argued that governments can mitigate conflict by promoting power sharing between ethnic groups (Lijphart, 2004). They can do this through federalism, the use of ethnic quotas in bureaucracies, and development programs for economically disadvantaged groups. In contrast, authoritarian political systems that discriminate against groups and fail to uphold the rule of law may foster conflict. Furthermore, past scholarship has shown that coinciding cleavages—two or more cleavages that occur at the same time—are more likely to breed conflict. Cross-cutting cleavages make it easier for members of different ethnic groups to join the same political parties, labor unions, and business associations since they are more likely to share similar interests (Varshney, 2002). Strong civil society organizations that are interethnic in nature may create common interests across groups that foster cooperation between them.
Other scholars have rejected the notion that ethnicity effects conflict all together; some have instead focused on how the nature of the economy can create grievances and opportunities that will motivate men to rebel (Fearon and Latin, 2003). Many scholars of civil war have also claimed that poverty is what has driven conflict as states without resources lack the tax revenue to build a strong military, create an infrastructure, and enforce laws. Citizens living in a state of poverty may also have more grievances against the state and will become more willing to mobilize against it. These countries may get stuck in a conflict trap as civil war creates problems with economic development, which in turn creates more problems with conflict. Many protracted civil wars of a secessionist nature have taken place in peripheral regions of countries that are impoverished, have rough terrain, and lack adequate infrastructure for political and economic development.
Scholars such as Michael Ross also believe that some states are stuck in a state of political and economic underdevelopment due to an overdependence on rents like oil and mineral resources (Ross, 2004). Postcolonial scholars have argued that colonial powers such as Great Britain and France failed to prepare their colonies for independence economically. Colonial regimes created an infrastructure for extracting agriculture and natural resources but failed to foster educational systems in their colonies or develop industrial sectors. For Michael Ross, an overdependence on rents is particularly problematic. Rents such as oil and mineral resources require little work to pull out of the ground and make a profit. They may entrench authoritarian leaders in power as they can use the revenue from the export of these resources to invest in security and a welfare state without having to actually invest in economic development. Furthermore, past studies have shown that the existence of lootable rents such as on-shore oil and diamonds may give rebel groups potentially easy access to resources to mobilize against the state. Countries with a greater dependence on oil and mineral wealth may also attract greater attention from powerful countries. Past studies have shown that when international powers intervene economically or militarily in a conflict, it is more likely to exacerbate violence and prolong civil wars. In particular, authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are heavily dependent on rents and have received an unusually extensive amount of military aid from Western powers in comparison with other regions of the world.
Methodology
Before testing these theories through a multi-regression analyses, it is first critical to conceptualize and operationalize the dependent and independent variables. The dependent variable is civil war. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), a civil war is a conflict between the state and an organized rebel group that involves twenty five or more deaths in a calendar year (UCDP, 2017). These conflicts include revolutions over control of the state, separatist conflicts between a minority group and the state, and coups d’état. Excluded from this definition are wars between colonial powers and their colonial subjects, interstate wars that only involve conflict between two states, and domestic conflicts between non-state actors. While some scholars argue that civil wars should involve at least 1,000 battle related deaths, I argue that this will exclude long term, low intensity conflicts such as the civil war that took place between FARC and the Columbian government. To operationalize this variable, I will use the UCDP data set, which has a dichotomous measure of whether or not a country had a civil war in a calendar year. Countries that had a conflict between the state and an organized rebel group that involved at least 25 deaths will be labeled as having a civil war.
The first independent variable is ethnic diversity. Here, I will use Donald Horowitz’s relatively thick definition of ethnic diversity, which includes groups who define their identity based on race, language, religion, caste, tribe, nation and region (Horrowitz, 1985). What all of these forms of identity have in common is that they are ascriptive. In other words, they are either inherited genetically or they are passed down to us by our parents at a very young age. Unlike other forms of identity such as party identification, ethnicity has a stickier component to it in that it is very difficult to change in a short period of time. Race is something that is impossible to change over the course of one’s lifetime, and ancestral forms of identity such as region of descent are given to us by birth. Furthermore, language and religion are usually passed down at a very early age and are very difficult to change. A person can learn a second language, but this is usually additive in that a person will maintain superior knowledge of their first language. Furthermore, religion can be changed through conversion but at a very high social cost to individuals as family members may reject a religious convert. To measure the amount of ethnic diversity in a country, I will use Alberto Alesina’s Ethnic Fractionalization Index, which measures the probability that two random individuals in a population will be of the same ethnicity (Alesina, et al, 1999). If primordialists are correct, greater amounts of ethnic diversity should be correlated with a higher probability of civil war.
The second independent variable of interest is religious identification. Here, I will test the impacts of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam on civil war onset and duration. Each of these faiths is mutually exclusive in that one cannot openly declare themselves to be members of two or more religions at the same time. Each faith is exclusive in that it demands a belief in certain religious texts and theological principles. Furthermore, the members of each religion have very distinctive traditions in terms of religious rituals. In the data set, a country is measured as being Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, or other based on the religious identification of the majority of the population. Dummy variables will be included for Protestant, Catholic, and Islam, and the constant will represent other faiths. If Samuel Huntington is correct, Islam and Catholicism should be statistically associated with a higher probability of a country having a civil war whereas Protestantism should be negatively associated with it.
The third independent variable is Michael Ross’ rentier effect (Ross, 2004). I define a country as being a rentier state if they are dependent economically on oil, mineral wealth, lumber, and contraband such as weapons and narcotics. Scholars disagree on how this should be measured. Some have used the World Bank’s measurement on rents as a percentage of GDP or as a percentage of exports. Other scholars have argued that this creates a problem with endogeneity. Civil wars might lead to economies becoming more dependent on rents since they are relatively easy to extract and export. Some scholars have used a dummy variable for whether a country has oil wealth or not instead. In this study, I control for rentierism by including a dummy variable for the Middle East, which is where over 50 percent of the world’s oil wealth is produced. Furthermore, many countries in the region that do not possess a lot of oil have transport rents such as oil pipelines and the Suez Canal that do not usually appear in data sets on rents. If rentier theory is correct, the Middle East, while controlling for other variables, will be positively associated with the probability of civil war.
This fourth independent variable is economic modernization. It is assumed that higher levels of economic development will make civil wars less likely. States that are more developed economically will have more resources to build an infrastructure, maintain security, and coopt individuals through the creation of a robust welfare state. To test for this, I will use the United Nation’s measurement of the log of GDP per capita, which is the total amount of wealth in a population produced per person (World Bank, 2018). It is expected that GDP per capita will be negatively correlated with civil war. There may also be a problem with endogeneity. Civil wars may have a negative effect on economic development. To control for this, I will lag GDP per capita by a year as well as any other variables that can potentially be affected by the outbreak of civil war.
The final independent variable is regime type. Institutional factors may affect the likelihood of conflict. Some scholars have argued that higher levels of democracy will decrease the chances of civil war since democratic institutions can mitigate tensions between groups. Others have argued that semi-democratic regimes are more likely to have civil war than authoritarian or democratic governments since regimes in transition are more likely to be politically unstable. To operationalize regime type, I will use the Polity IV index, which measures authoritarianism on a scale of -10 to +10 (The Center for Systemic Peace, 2018). It is an institutional measure of democracy in that it measures whether countries had free and fair elections between competing political parties over consecutive years and at least one incident where power changed hands between parties through elections. This variable will be divided into three categories. Countries that have a score of -10 to -6 are labeled as authoritarian. Countries that have a score of -5 to +5 are labeled as an anocracy or semi-democratic/semi-authoritarian regime. Countries that have a score of +6 to +10 are labeled as democracies. Dummy variables for democracy and anocracy will be used with authoritarianism being represented in the constant.
Several control variable variables will also be included. It is assumed that countries that have larger populations will have a greater diversity of economic interests that can lead to conflict, and more peripheral regions that may seek to break away from their respective states. Furthermore, having a larger number of people will simply increase the likelihood of having some violence against the state. To control for this, I will use the log of a country’s total population lagged by a year. Furthermore, international military intervention may also increase the probability of having a conflict. An internationalization index will be included which looks at the level of international involvement in a civil war on a scale of 0 to 1 with one meaning a foreign actor has troops on the ground supporting one side or the other in the conflict. Regional affects will also be included in this analysis. It is assumed that a civil war in one region might have affect the stability of neighboring countries due to the migration of refugees and rebel groups moving across the border. To control for this, dummy variables will be included for South America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia. Furthermore, civil wars in previous years increases the probability of civil wars in following years due to the conflict trap, although the effect should become significantly less with longer lags as the groups fighting a conflict may eventually suffer from war fatigue. To control for this, I use lags of one, two, and three years. I also control for the end of the Cold War by having a Post-Cold War dummy variable. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia at the end of the Cold War may have had a significant impact on the number of civil wars. Furthermore, this will control for the change in the international environment that took place with the end of the Cold War. In a separate regression analyses in model two, I include fixed effects, which are dummy variables for every country and every year.
I collected data on 157 countries from 1975 to 2004, and after losing some observations due to the lags, it left a total of 3,382 observations. I eliminated from the data set small island nations with tiny populations since the political dynamics of these states are very different from other countries. I also eliminated states that had missing data. I used a logit model with a log of the odds to calculate the effects of the independent variables on the probability of a country having a civil war within a calendar year. It is my hypothesis that the measurements of ethnic diversity and religion will have no statistical effect on civil war once other variables are controlled. Furthermore, I expect that countries with lower levels of GDP per capita, countries in the Middle East, and authoritarian regimes to be statistically correlated with the probability of civil war.
Analysis of the Results
Prior to conducting the multi-regression analysis, I will first show the statistical results without the controls. I first conducted two simple regression models. One of these models looked at the correlation between religion and the probability of civil war, and the other analyzed the correlation between ethnic diversity and the probability of civil war. In the model that analyzes only the relationship between Islam and the dependent variable, countries with Muslim majorities are 1.9 times more likely to have had civil wars. In contrast, Protestant countries are 60 percent less likely to have a civil war than other religious groups. Ethnic diversity also has a very strong and statistically significant impact on civil war without the controls. However, once the controls are added, the results tell a very different story as seen below:
Civil War Odds in a Calendar Year
|
Model1
|
Model2
|
||||
Coefficients
|
Odds Ratio
|
|||||
Log of GDP per capita (1 year lag)
|
0.52
|
(0.13)
|
**
|
0.84
|
(0.50)
|
|
Log of Population (1 year lag)
|
1.87
|
(0.31)
|
***
|
0.27
|
(0.73)
|
|
Ethnic Fractionalization
|
1.47
|
(0.66)
|
1.51
|
(6.78)
|
||
Democracy (Polity IV-1 year lag)
|
1.76
|
(0.46)
|
*
|
1.54
|
(0.70)
|
|
Anocracy (Polity IV-1 year lag)
|
1.7
|
(0.40)
|
*
|
2.18
|
(0.72)
|
*
|
Muslim Majority
|
1.05
|
(0.27)
|
27.20
|
(68.90)
|
||
Catholic Majority
|
1.55
|
(0.54)
|
9.95
|
(27.74)
|
||
Protestant Majority
|
0.89
|
(0.28)
|
0.75
|
(1.27)
|
||
Middle East Region
|
4.07
|
(2.09)
|
**
|
0.06
|
(0.13)
|
|
Internationalization of Conflict (1 year lag)
|
4.75
|
(2.09)
|
***
|
3.04
|
(1.68)
|
*
|
Civil War (1 year lag)
|
39.13
|
(8.56)
|
***
|
16.30
|
(3.85)
|
***
|
Civil War (2 year lag)
|
3.25
|
(0.93)
|
***
|
2.21
|
(0.63)
|
*
|
Civil War (3 year lag)
|
2.48
|
(0.69)
|
***
|
1.29
|
(0.37)
|
|
Post Cold War
|
0.65
|
(0.13)
|
*
|
0.56
|
(0.56)
|
|
1989
|
3.58
|
(1.51)
|
**
|
|||
1991
|
2.75
|
(1.09)
|
**
|
|||
Africa
|
2.14
|
(1.15)
|
0.04
|
(0.10)
|
||
Asia
|
1.84
|
(0.94)
|
0.14
|
(0.34)
|
||
Central and Eastern Europe
|
1.54
|
(0.86)
|
0.07
|
(0.12)
|
||
South America
|
1.29
|
(0.60)
|
0.01
|
(0.02)
|
||
Constant
|
0.01
|
(0.01)
|
101.25
|
(1357.95)
|
||
Pseudo R-Squared
|
0.66
|
0.54
|
||||
*95%
|
||||||
**99%
|
||||||
***99.9%
|
||||||
As expected, when controlling for other variables, the correlation between Islam and the probability of civil war is statistically insignificant. The same is true of ethnic diversity and civil war. In contrast, the log of GDP per capita lagged by a year had a statistically negative correlation with the probability of civil war onset. Furthermore, the Middle East variable was statistically significant. A country being in the Middle East made it four times more likely to be involved in a civil war. Moreover, international intervention in a conflict makes it 4.75 times more likely that a civil war will continue in the following year. The strength of these two variables gives a lot of support to the rentier theory. Slightly surprising is the effect of regime type on civil war. Anocracy had a very strong impact on civil war, which means that it is semi-authoritarian regimes, not democracies or authoritarian regimes, which are more likely to experience conflict. Most of the control variables had the expected results. Countries with larger populations are more likely to experience Civil Wars. Furthermore, countries that have had a Civil War in the previous year are far more likely to have a civil war in the following year than if they had no conflict. However, the effect of the lag starts to decline substantially after one year, although lags of two and three years still had a statistically significant impact. Additionally, countries were more likely to experience a civil war at the end of the Cold War in 1989 and in 1991 as expected. The regional variables had no statistically significant impact on conflict. When the fixed effects were added, most of the variable were statistically insignificant. Only the variables for anocracy, international intervention, and prior conflicts maintained their statistical significance. Surprisingly, GDP per capita is no longer significant once the fixed effects are added.
Conclusion
The statistical analysis provides evidence against Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations theory. While it is true that countries with Muslim majorities experienced more conflict from 1973 to 2003, the correlation between Islam and civil war may be spurious. When controlling for levels of economic development, rentierism, international intervention, and other pertinent variables, the relationship between Islam and civil war disappears. This does not mean that ethnicity was not a factor in several of these conflicts. What it does mean is that some countries that are ethnically diverse—including countries that have Muslim majorities—have been able to avoid ethnic conflict due to other socioeconomic and political factors. New York City, one of the world’s most diverse cities, has been able to avoid extensive ethnic violence whereas Lebanon has been plagued by religious conflict. The nature of the economy, political institutions, and the international environment may affect whether or not ethnic groups are able to coexist in peace.
With that said, there numerous weaknesses with the methodology in this paper. First of all, it would have been better to include a variable that measures rents per capita as a robustness check. Furthermore, I could have used the Ethnic Power Relations Index, which measures political inequality between politically relevant ethnic groups, to measure the effect of ethnicity on conflict. Growing research is beginning to show that ethnic diversity on its own has a weak effect on conflict, but statistics that measure horizontal inequalities between ethnic groups better explain civil war onset and duration (Cederman, 2011).
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