Combining Behavioral and Structural Predictors of Violent Civil Conflict: Getting Scholars and Policymakers to Talk to Each Other

Large-N studies of civil war overwhelmingly consider the state-specific structural conditions that make conflict likely. Meanwhile, policymakers often ignore these factors and instead search for patterns among the behavioral triggers of violence. This article combines these approaches. I use conflict narratives from the International Crisis Group’s CrisisWatch publications to cross-validate structural analyses of civil conflict and confirm the mechanisms that lead to outbreaks of violence in conflict-prone countries. I then correct for selection bias in the narrative data with an underlying model of conflict likelihood. I find that several indicators thought to be causally related to civil conflict do indeed continue to have an effect after selection. However, the narrative data overemphasizes both the importance of several low-intensity, separatist conflicts within developed democracies and the potential for conflict among oil-rich states. These analyses highlight the importance of combining structural, large-N analyses with qualitative assessments of conflict zones. My findings also provide support for a state-capacity explanation of conflict behavior.