ii DETERMINANTS OF CIVIL WAR IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

This thesis models the outbreak of civil war in developing countries from 2000 until 2004 based upon conditions in the 1990s. This predictive model takes into account economic issues, conflicts, presence of natural resources, and governance issues. A simpler model is also evaluated that takes into account conflict issues and natural resources. The models are tested on five African nations that recently experienced civil war and one that did not to determine if it could have predicted such outcomes in these countries. The models are able to predict accurately civil war in most of the cases. The potential for future civil war is then assessed for several African nations with some discouraging results for several of them. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My time at Georgetown, including my time working on this thesis, has been a long and challenging process. My goals in starting this degree and this thesis were to understand what keeps countries poor and how violence affects those is the developin