Preventing violent civil conflict: the scope and limits of government action

In this paper, the author provides a review of the scope and limits for government and international action to prevent the outbreak of civil war. It includes a brief review of the literature on violent conflict indicators and identifies the most significant predictors of civil war outbreak. The author focuses on models and empirical approaches used by World Bank-related research on conflict. In the paper, four strategies are examined: redistribution to reduce prevailing inequities; political decentralization; secession or partition; and multidimensional peace building. The paper provides a synthesis of available knowledge on the topic of organized political violence, focusing on the World Bank's work in the area of conflict analysis and conflict prevention and linking that work with the literature on secession, decentralization, and international intervention in civil wars.