Is there a link between globalisation and civil conflict?

Abstract

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between globalisation and civil conflict in a sample of 159 countries over the period 1972–2009. To that end, we use a measure of globalisation that distinguishes the social and political dimensions of integration from the economic dimension, thus allowing us to adopt a broader perspective than in most of existing studies. The results show that the inclusion of country fixed effects removes the statistical association between the degree of integration with the rest of the world and the incidence of internal conflict. We present instrumental variables estimates that also show no causal effect of globalisation on civil conflict. These findings do not depend either on the specific dimension of globalisation considered or the measure of conflict used in the analysis. Likewise, the absence of a relationship between globalisation and civil conflict is not driven by countries located in the most conflictive regions in the world.