Globalization, Democratization, and the Prospects for Civil War in the New Millennium

The last half of the twentieth century was marked by dramatic changes in the patterns of armed conflict in the world. First, whereas wars between sovereign nation-states had defined the contours of international politics for the previous three hundred years, civil wars—revolutions, secessionist wars, and anticolonial revolts—became the most frequent and deadly forms of armed conflict in the post-World War II era. The Correlates of War data indicate that between 1945 and 1999 there were only twenty-five interstate wars (resulting in a total of 3.3 million battle deaths), but five times as many civil wars (127) occurred, resulting in five times as many battle deaths (16.2 million) (Fearon and Laitin 2003:75). Second, whereas the major powers (including Europe, the United States, China, and Japan) had been the site of most of the world's interstate wars, the Third World—Asia, Africa, and Latin America—became the locus of almost all the armed conflict that punctuated the history of the last half-century. While Europe enjoyed what John Gaddis (1986) termed the “long peace” (the longest period in the post-Westphalia era without a major war among the major powers), conflicts in the Third World inflicted all but 176,000 of the 22 million battle deaths that occurred between 1945 and 1989 (Holsti 1992:37).