Fragilité régionale, capacité de l’État et guerre civile

Civil wars tend to cluster in time and in space. Similar geographical characteristics, resource endowments, and climatic conditions, may favor conflict simultaneously in neighbor countries. Moreover, civil conflict in one country often spills over to neighboring countries. The empirical literature usually considers these two explanations separately. We propose a model of the contagion of civil wars, which suggests that the risk of contagion has an impact of domestic features of a neighbor. In particular, a government can prevent contagion through investment in better institutions. This channel is the source of a strategic complementarity between the institutions of neighboring countries. This explains a pattern of clustering of countries according to their institutions, and suggests that contagion effect may have been underestimated by the empirical literature. Classification JEL: D74, N40, P48.