Does globalization promote civil war? An empirical research

Abstract

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between globalization and in-trastate conflict in a sample of 160 countries over the period 1970-2009. To that end, we use a measure of globalization that distinguishes the social and political dimensions of integration from the economic dimension, thus allowing us to adopt a broader perspective than in most of existing studies and examine the effect of these three distinct aspects of globalization on civil violence. The results of the paper show that the degree of integration with the rest of the world contributes significantly to increasing the incidence of civil wars, in direct contrast to arguments which defend that globalization has the beneficial effect of deterring internal armed conficts. In particular, the dimension of globalization that most robustly relates with internal confict is economic integration. Our findings are not affected by the inclusion of additional explanatory variables in the analysis, or by changes in the definition of civil war. Likewise, the relationship observed between the degree of integration and civil violence does not seem to be driven by countries located in the most confictive regions in the world.