Sambanis and Schulhofer-Wohl use their new data (SSW dataset) to replicate several studies that have used civil war data from the Armed Conflicts Dataset (ACD) and find that the results of those studies are often overturned or weakened when the analysis is based on the SSW dataset as opposed to ACD. The new data are then used in comparisons to other commonly used measures in the literature. This new article addresses these issues and applies the concept of sovereignty rupture to code a new list of civil wars from 1945-2016. These conceptual issues become even more pronounced due to ambiguities regarding the coding of when civil wars start and end and how civil wars are distinguished from other forms of violence within the same country. Civil wars should not be conceptualized as dyadic conflicts between the state and an armed group, which is the current trend in the literature. Sovereignty rupture means that civil wars reflect a polity-level challenge to sovereignty and should be considered as events that happen to a society in the aggregate. In a new article, Nicholas Sambanis (Penn) and Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl (University of Virginia) argue that civil war is an instance of “sovereignty rupture” and is inherently a polity-level phenomenon. What is a civil war? When are episodes of internal armed conflict classified as civil wars as opposed to coups, genocides, terrorism, or other adjacent phenomena? Empirical analyses of the causes or consequences of civil war are premised on our ability to clearly define and measure the concept we are trying to explain, yet scholars classify instances of violent conflict into different categories based on fairly arbitrary criteria and the term ‘civil war’ is now used interchangeably to refer to conflicts as large as Syria’s conflict from 2011 to 2019 as well as any minor armed conflict causing more than 25 battle deaths in a given year.
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