On the determinants of internal armed conflict

This study expands upon literature on the cross-national causes of civil war and terrorism by combining the two concepts into an aggregate variable called internal armed conflict. It applies relative deprivation theory to politically excluded ethnic groups and also separates those two entities to examine socioeconomic desperation and ethnic exclusion respectively. From a review of the literature I identify eight variables that were found to be statistically significant predictors of either civil war or terrorism in previous studies and I use them as control variables in my models. I find that countries with excluded ethnic groups are somewhat more likely to experience internal armed conflict. Several control variables including ethnic fractionalization, log population, and percentage of years a country was under imperial or colonial rule were significant predictor variables across all the models. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for extant and future literature and for policies that seek to reduce internal armed conflict