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Journal of Conflict Resolution
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What Is Civil War?

Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of an Operational Definition

Nicholas Sambanis

Department of Political Science, Yale University

The empirical literature on civil war has seen tremendous growth because of the compilation of quantitative data sets, but there is no consensus on the measurement of civil war. This increases the risk of making inferences from unstable empirical results. Without ad hoc rules to code its start and end and differentiate it from other violence, it is difficult, if not impossible, to define and measure civil war. A wide range of variation in parameter estimates makes accurate predictions of war onset difficult, and differences in empirical results are greater with respect to war continuation.

Key Words: civil war • Correlates of War • data sets • coding rules

Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 48, No. 6, 814-858 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/0022002704269355
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