10 Instability and Revolution
Introduction
The number of military coups, civil wars, communal conflicts and other
manifestations of political instability in the Third World has been too great
not to attract a great deal of attention in the social sciences. Since 1945 both
inter-state and intra-state conflict (the latter far more common) moved from
the industrialized to the developing countries, a trend only slowed by the
outbreak of conflict in the states of the former Soviet bloc following the
demise of communist regimes (Singer, 1996, pp. 35–6).
How the scale and costs of political instability are calculated depends on
the indicators used to measure its frequency. Some indication of the size
of the problem can be had from the study of civil wars, arguably evidence of
the highest level of conflict over the acceptability of a current regime and
therefore its stability. Civil wars account for nearly all the armed conflicts
since the Second World War, and in the last two decades of the twentieth
century there were on average 26 major armed conflicts per year. The
majority of these – some 93 per cent – have been in developing countries. In
1999 only two of the 27 were not in developing countries and only two were
conflicts between rather than within states.
The social and economic costs of such conflicts are enormous. More than
4 million people died as a result of violent conflicts in the 1990s, either
directly from military action or indirectly from the destruction of food sup-
plies and health facilities. In southern Africa alone the 1980s saw more than
1.5 million deaths from civil war. In the 1990s 25,000 casualties from land-
mines occurred worldwide every year. At the end of the 1990s over 40,000
Angolan citizens were physically handicapped, mainly as a result of land-
mines (Mohammed, 1999, p. 5). Sierra Leone’s 10-year civil war cost some
200,000 lives and left one in five of the population as refugees.
Life expectancy is down to 33 years. Sudan’s civil war has cost more than
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