Economic, Social, and Institutional Determinants of Domestic Conflict in Fragile States

In this article, we use Fixed Effect Poisson Regression (FEPR) with robust standard errors to study the economic, social, and institutional determinants of domestic conflict in 58 fragile states over the period 2004 to 2017. We show that effective institutions (measured by judicial effectiveness) and higher incomes would help reduce conflict in these countries. By contrast, democracy would not mitigate violence, democratic experiences generally showing an increase in conflicts in fragile countries. It would also seem that the development of human capacity does not contribute to the reduction of conflict. This would imply that fragile states first improve the social, economic and institutional conditions of their populations before they benefit from political reforms and of education. The same would be true for economic reforms in the context of globalization, which would not help reduce violence in fragile countries either.