Does globalization promote civil war? An empirical research

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between globalization and in-trastate con ict 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 e ect 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 signi cantly to increasing the incidence of civil wars, in direct contrast to arguments which defend that globalization has the bene cial e ect of deterring internal armed con icts. In particular, the dimension of globalization that most robustly relates with internal con ict is economic integration. Our ndings are not a ected by the inclusion of additional explanatory variables in the analysis, or by changes in the de nition 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 con ictive regions in the world.