Getting the balance right: A mixed methods approach to the study of post-civil war democratization

Bridging the quantitative-qualitative divide in civil war studies is imperative if we are to improve our understanding of the dynamics of intrastate violence leading up to all-out civil wars. Nicholas Sambanis (2004) pinpointed a list of shortcomings in the quantitative literature on civil wars–measurement error, unit heterogeneity, model misspecification, and unclear specification of causal mechanisms–and called for combining statistical and case study work to address these limitations. Sambanis and Paul Collier (2005) then edited two volumes that identified the causal logic and limitations of the Collier-Hoeffler model of civil war onset and the quantitative methods on which it is based, and expanded it through 16 case studies. In a similar vein, Fearon and Laitin (2005) are conducting a “random narrative” project that essentially combines their statistical model on civil war onset with 25 randomly selected country studies.