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Cited by 397

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 49 of the 49 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Explaining the Severity of Civil Wars

Lacina, Bethany·2006·Journal of Conflict Resolution

Abstract

The burgeoning literature on civil conflicts seldom considers why some civil wars are so much deadlier than others. This article investigates that question using a new data set of the number of combat deaths in internal conflicts from 1946 to 2002. The first section presents descriptive statistics on battle deaths by era, conflict type, and region. The article then tests state strength, regime type, and cultural characteristics as predictors of the number of combat deaths in civil war. The determinants of conflict severity seem to be quite different from those for conflict onset. Democracy, rather than economic development or state military strength, is most strongly correlated with fewer deaths; wars have also been less deadly on average since the end of the cold war. Religious heterogeneity does not explain the military severity of internal violence, and surprisingly, ethnic homogeneity may be related to more deadly conflicts.

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Metadata

Authors
Lacina, B.
Venue
Journal of Conflict Resolution
Published
2006-04
Volume
50
Issue
2
Pages
276-289
ISSN
  • 0022-0027 (ISSN-L)
  • 1552-8766
OpenAlex
W2053874766
Cited by
397
References
49
FWCI
41.50
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Explaining the Severity of Civil Wars. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0022002705284828
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Lacina, B. (2006). Explaining the Severity of Civil Wars. Journal of Conflict Resolution. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002705284828

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.