Population, Institutions, and Violent Conflicts – Shedding New light on an Old Conundrum

Knowledge on the prevention and management of violent conflicts remains in a state of flux as understanding of the triggers, severity, and trajectory of violent conflicts remains shallow. Malthus long predicted a link between population and conflicts. According to Malthus, population expansion leads to population-resource supply imbalances, which leads to conflict. Holding the Malthusian prediction true suggests that, beyond some critical population level, conflicts and violence can only be expected to increase with population until increasing violence and mortality regulate population density figures to the relatively peaceful end of the conflict cycle. To the contrary, a good number of empirical studies have shown no linkage, or a weak linkage at best, between population and conflict. To date, there is no generally acceptable guidance on how population pressure affects violent conflicts, and how such conflicts may be managed.
Gaining understanding of what delays the Malthusian population-conflict prediction from materializing helps in increasing the spread of peaceful zones across the world through the development of an environment that supports peace. Neo-malthusians argue that technological growth and income are responsible for failure of the Malthusian conflict prediction thus far. That is, population pressure elicits innovative and technological response which delays realization of the Malthusian prediction. This in fact is a restatement of the Boserup (1965) position on how pressure on resources in agricultural dependent societies leads to innovation and diversification, which increase productivity. That technological growth and income reduce the risk of violent conflicts is understandable. Institutional quality may however have even more significant impact on violent conflicts. Unfortunately, Institutional quality has been largely ignored in research efforts to explain violent conflict.
Institutions, being the rules of society, must be fundamental to the maintenance of peace. In particular, they should serve as a bulkwalk against factors that promote conflict. Research on institutional quality over the past 30 – 40 years shows that institutions are critical not only for explaining economic development disparities across countries, but for explaining violent crime rate, and even happiness. Given what institutions are by definition, and what they have been shown to accomplish in various spheres of economic and social life of people, it follows, that institutional quality will be a reliable factor in explaining violent conflicts.
To explore the role of institutions in violent conflicts more deeply, and throw more light on how population pressure really relates to conflicts, this study uses Panel-Corrected Standard Error (PCSE) and Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimators to estimate the impact of institutional quality variables, income, population pressure, and oil production on violent conflicts across 81 countries.