The Likelihood of Civil Wars: Impact of Collective Action Problem Report (Assessment)

Wars come in different shapes and sizes and range in many aspects, ranging from magnitude and actors involved to agendas and relations to national borders. Yet whether interstate or civil, framed in national, ethnic, or other terms, all wars have some things in common: they are violent and, therefore, dangerous, and they are an essentially collective effort. This makes them subject to the collective action problem: as long as there are costs of participation, individuals may rationally choose not to participate in a collective effort even if it would promote the common good. Moreover, wars usually involve large groups – nations, classes, and ethnic or religious communities. This fact exacerbates the collective action problem even further: as Olson rightly noted, large groups “will not organize for collective action merely because, as a group, they have a reason for doing so.”¹ Thus, the collective action problem impacts the likelihood of the civil war in several ways. Free rider majority makes it easier for smaller groups to threaten the status quo, and the difficulties in enlisting support make it harder to maintain peace or create a strong rebellion, necessitating diverse recruitment strategies.

One way in which the collective action problem makes civil war more likely is the obvious advantages of free-riding as compared to the active support of the ruling government and existing status quo. Free riders are the individuals who prefer not to participate in collective action, even when this action seeks to promote public good that would ultimately affect them as well. A well-functioning state is the ultimate example of a public good: everyone needs military defense, protection against civil unrest, and the functioning legal system, and everyone benefits, if indirectly, from their existence.² Yet states distribute the public good over large populations, meaning that the proportion of said good received by every individual is not particularly significant. As a result, when reasonable individuals face a conflict between promoting public good at a cost for themselves or abstaining from doing so, assuming that others will contribute instead, they would likely choose the latter. Hence, the collective action problem severely undermines active popular support for the government actively and, by extension, peace within the country.

This prevalence of free-riding does not merely limit the support for the existing status quo in a given polity but also makes it easier for a smaller group to upset it. The number of government’s active supporters is inversely proportional to that of the free riders. Consequently, the collective action problem creates a situation when a cohesive minority can upset the balance of power in a polity if the majority of its population consists of free riders. Empirical evidence suggests that “societies characterized by ‘ethnic dominance,’ i.e., where one ethnic group makes up 45-90 percent of the population, have a systematically higher risk of civil war”.³ This data suggests that even an overwhelming majority may prove unable to maintain peace when plagued by the collective action problem. Internal conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are a good case study, where Rwandan ethnicities constitute merely 6% of the population yet account for more than 20% of conflicts.⁴ Thus, the collective action problem increases the likelihood of civil war by undermining active support for the status quo through free riding and creating a window of opportunity for smaller groups at the same time.

Yet the very same collective action problem that makes it harder to maintain internal peace also decreases the efficiency of the insurgent movements seeking to overthrow the existing state of things. In many senses, rebellion against a real or perceived injustice is a pursuit of public good – and, as such, it shares “the weaknesses of a public good, primarily susceptibility to free riders.”⁵ While supporting the government incurs its costs, supporting the rebellion is normally even costlier. Moreover, the positive change promised by the rebels, such as the just redistribution of land, “potentially benefits all peasants, not simply those who choose to invest in the rebellion,” thus making free-riding even more appealing.⁶ In this respect, the problem of collective action may actually decrease the likelihood of the civil war in the sense that it impedes the rebel’s effort to gather sufficient support.

Political actors overcome this obstacle with a number of strategies. Framing the conflict as developing along ethnic or class lines may “help to resolve the dilemma of collective action by providing for reciprocity.”⁷ The aforementioned case of Rwandan minorities in DRC mobilizing to a far greater degree may serve as an example of successfully using ethnic appeals.⁸ An example of successful class appeals would be the liberation war in Zimbabwe. In this case, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) managed to mobilize the urban proletariat “to specifically show their force in urban areas, as well as by attacking Rhodesian government strongholds.”⁹ Ideological motivation, whether rooted in ethnicity, class, or another identity, is not the only way of overcoming the problems of collective action and the obstacles posed by free-riding. Coercion may serve as yet another way of getting people to participate by increasing the costs of abstaining for free riders and remains a “common constant of most contemporary conflicts.”¹⁰ Thus, political actors are not unaware of the collective action problem and devised numerous means of addressing it.

The sheer variety of strategies listed above demonstrates that free-riding impedes the attempts to both maintain the current government and to overthrow it. It clearly shows that the mere existence of a cause is “typically insufficient to make war work, either for rebels or incumbent governments.”¹¹ However, there is still one noteworthy difference: the collective action problem is much more prevalent in larger groups than in smaller ones.¹² Hence, both types of actors can use any of the strategies described above, but the latter usually have a harder time because they need to mobilize larger groups and, thus, face a greater number – and relative proportion – of free riders. Yet the goal always remains the same: to overcome the collective action problem that inevitably impacts the likelihood of any political violence by either providing incentives for participation or increasing costs of non-participation.

As one can see, the collective action problem affects the likelihood of a civil war in several ways. Maintaining the existing status quo is a public good, and the large number of individual citizens who each receive a very share of this good make free-riding a reasonable individual choice. Free riders’ passivity makes it easier for a small but cohesive group to start a civil war even when it constitutes a tiny minority of the population. Both rebels and governments have a range of strategies to overcome the collective action problem, ranging from identity mobilization to coercion. Yet since governments have to organize larger groups, they generally face a higher number of free riders in both absolute and relative terms. Thus, the collective action problem ultimately increases the likelihood of civil war because its negative effect is more pronounced in maintaining peace nationwide rather than mobilizing smaller groups to challenge the status quo.

References

Collier, Paul, and Anke Hoeffner, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War.” Adobe PDF File.

Cramer, C. “Homo Economicus Goes to War: Methodological Individualism, Rational Choice and the Political Economy of War.” World Development, vol. 30, no. 11, 2002, pp. 1845–1864.

Koren, Ore, and Anoop K. Sarbahi. “State Capacity, Insurgency, and Civil War: A Disaggregated Analysis.” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 2, 2018, pp. 274-288.

Michalopoulos, Stelios, and Elias Papaioannou. “The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 17620, 2011.

Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action: Public goods and the theory of Groups. Harvard University Press, 1971.

Weinstein, Jeremy. Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Footnotes

1. Olson 65.
2. Olson 13.
3. Collier and Hoeffner 1.
4. Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 35.
5. Cramer 1848.
6. Weinstein 97.
7. Weinstein 99.
8. Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 35.
9. Koren and Sarbahi 285.
10. Cramer 1852.
11. Cramer 1852.
12. Olson 65.