EH.N: CfP: Civil Wars and the Economy

[Harrison, Mark]

Call for Papers: Civil Wars and the Economy

Proposed Panel on "Civil Wars and the Economy: A Global Phenomenon in the Twentieth Century." This is a draft proposal to the International Committee of the Fifteenth World Economic History Congress of the International Economic History Association in Utrecht, Netherlands, August 3 to 7, 2009. The International Committee's deadline for us to finalise the panel proposal is October 1, 2008.

Panel organisers:

Gómez-Galvarriato, Aurora (CIDE, Mexico)
Harrison, Mark (University of Warwick, UK).
Martín Aceña, Pablo (University of Alcalá-Madrid, Spain)
Robinson, James (Harvard University, USA)

Recent internal conflicts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Great Lakes of Africa, have stimulated scholarship on civil wars. Political economists, quantitative social scientists, and historians have contributed narrative accounts of internal conflicts and analysis of the conditions under which civil wars break out, their consequences, and how to prevent them.

Our panel will bring together social scientists and historians from different regions to examine civil wars of the twentieth century in all continents, including Africa and Asia.

We will focus initially on whether civil wars have economic causes, alongside others such as ethnicity and linguistic fractionalisation, cultural and educational factors, colonial legacies, and political factors. Beyond that, we are interested in the short and long term consequences of civil wars, including losses of population, wealth, and income, structural imbalances, and redistribution, and the likelihood of renewed internal conflict subsequently. The twentieth century saw long run changes in trade costs, conflict technologies, and the political and ethnic identities and networks underlying both trade and conflict, and we are also interested in how these changes interacted with the character of civil wars.

We will approach the subject in a comparative vein, looking beyond the boundaries of the nation-state to capture the transnational character of many of the twentieth century's civil wars.

We welcome proposals of papers on all aspects of this subject. Paper proposals (500 words) must be submitted electronically by September 15, 2008, to Pablo Martín Aceña <pablo.martin at uah.es>. If the Panel is then accepted for the conference, we will require completed drafts by April 30, 2009.