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Recent years have seen a surge of literature examining how political institutions influence the risk of civil conflict. A comparatively neglected aspect of this debate has been the heterogeneous impact of different forms of authoritarianism. In this article, I theoretically and empirically unpack the authoritarian regime category. I argue that authoritarian regimes differ both in their capacity to forcefully control opposition and in their ability to co-opt their rivals through offers of power positions and rents. Authoritarian regimes thus exhibit predictable differences in their ability to avoid organized violent challenges to their authority. I examine the association between four types of authoritarian regimes-military, monarchy, single-party, and multi-party electoral autocracies-and the onset of civil conflict from 1973 to 2004. I find that military regimes and multi-party electoral autocracies run a higher risk of armed conflict than single-party authoritarian regimes, which on the other hand seem to have an institutional set-up that makes them particularly resilient to armed challenges to their authority. These findings suggest that the emerging view, that political institutions are not a significant determinant of civil conflict, results from treating a heterogeneous set of authoritarian regimes as homogenous.

Recent research identifies state capacity as a crucial determinant of civil peace. Scholars often interpret the association between wealth and peace as state capacity effects, but they have not clearly distinguished the impact of administrative reach and capacity for coercion from those effects that may capture good governance related to the provision of political goods and quality of institutions.We revisit the relationship between state capacity and civil peace by suggesting three different pathways through which the state avoids violent challenges to its authority: coercion, co-optation, and cooperation.We evaluate these three different notions of governing capacity both analytically and empirically, and we find that high levels of government spending on political goods and trustworthy institutions are more significant predictors of civil peace than are states' coercive capacities.The results suggest that civil peace is co-produced by social and state forces, where quasi-voluntary cooperation from society increases state capacity for maintaining peace.This is good news for policies aimed at building state capacity, since there seems to be room for agency beyond simply waiting for societies to become wealthy.

This article argues that, contrary to received wisdom, political corruption is not necessarily associated with a higher risk of civil war in oil-rich states. Political corruption can be used to accommodate opposition and placate restive groups by offering private privilege in exchange for political loyalty. Since oil wealth is associated with large rents accruing in state treasuries, it provides an economic foundation for such clientelist rule. This article thus argues that oil-rich governments can use political corruption to buy support from key segments of society, effectively outspending other entrepreneurs of violence. Based on a logit analysis of civil war onsets, 1985-99, the article finds support for this 'co-optation argument'. A negative and statistically significant interaction term between oil production and political corruption is consistent across different models and robust to a number of specifications. While both variables per se increase the risk of conflict overall, higher levels of corruption seem to weaken the harmful impact of oil on the risk of civil war. This finding suggests the need for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between natural resource wealth, governance and armed conflict. Political corruption has prolonged poverty and bred economic and political inequality in many oil-rich states, but it has also helped cement powerful alliances with a stake in the continuation of the corrupt regimes.

Existing literature on non-state conflict tends to either focus on issues of resource scarcity or on ethnic/religious divisions. Largely overlooked in the empirical literature is the issue of how governance influences the risk that non-state actors take up arms against each other. This paper addresses this issue by examining the occurrence of non-state armed conflicts in Nigeria, claiming more than 7000 lives between 1991 and 2006. I suggest that at the macro level, the government’s strategy of replacing conventional state capacity with a centralized patronage sys- tem, based on purchasing political restraint, explains the proliferation of inter-group violence. Based on the interpretation of non-state conflicts as an expression of institutionalized rent- seeking, I derive testable hypotheses regarding where within a country such conflicts are most likely to occur. Utilizing GIS software and new, unique event based data at the sub-national level in Nigeria, the paper explores local determinants of non-state conflicts. The results lend some support to the notion that non-state actors fight both over wealth and over the political access that secure access to such wealth.