{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.020497803806734993, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004392386530014641, 'mean_word_length': 5.048672566371682, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War Revisited

In an important recent article, Fearon and Laitin (2003) present strong evidence against the conventional wisdom that the root cause of civil wars in the latter half of the 20th century is ethnic and religious diversity. In the paper below, we argue that ethnic, and perhaps religious, factors likely play a larger role than many researchers would be led to believe from the Fearon and Laitin results. We make two major points. First, under reasonable causal assumptions, the eects of ethnic and religious fractionalization on civil war onset that Fearon and Laitin estimate are direct eects and not total eects. Yet the question of whether ethno-religious diversity is the “root cause” of civil war onset is best understood as a question about the total eect of fractionalization on the onset of conflict. Under plausible causal assumptions, estimates of the total eect of ethnic fractionalization on civil war onset and ethnic war onset are positive, significant, and substantively large enough to be meaningful. Second, if one is primarily interested in the direct eect of ethno-religious diversity on conflict onset, it is the case that some significant relationships do exist. We show that a slightly dierent specification of the model for ethnic war onset reveals a significant, but highly nonlinear, direct eect