The paper "Beyond Greed and Grievance: Feasibility and Civil War" by Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, and Dominic Rohner examines the factors that make a country prone to civil war. The authors analyze a comprehensive global sample of civil wars from 1965 to 2004 and subject the results to robustness tests. They find that variables closely related to feasibility have a significant impact on the risk of civil war, supporting the "feasibility hypothesis" that civil war occurs when it is feasible, regardless of motivation. The authors use a stepwise deletion process to identify key variables, including per capita income, growth rate of GDP, primary commodity exports, social fractionalization, population size, and geography. They also introduce three new variables: being a former French colony in Africa, the proportion of young men in the population, and the proportion of mountainous terrain. These variables significantly increase the risk of civil war. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for policy, emphasizing the importance of economic development and the need for special measures to address the risks associated with international trade in primary commodities. It also highlights the role of security guarantees from former colonial powers and the potential for economies of scale in state functions, such as deterrence of organized violence.The paper "Beyond Greed and Grievance: Feasibility and Civil War" by Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, and Dominic Rohner examines the factors that make a country prone to civil war. The authors analyze a comprehensive global sample of civil wars from 1965 to 2004 and subject the results to robustness tests. They find that variables closely related to feasibility have a significant impact on the risk of civil war, supporting the "feasibility hypothesis" that civil war occurs when it is feasible, regardless of motivation. The authors use a stepwise deletion process to identify key variables, including per capita income, growth rate of GDP, primary commodity exports, social fractionalization, population size, and geography. They also introduce three new variables: being a former French colony in Africa, the proportion of young men in the population, and the proportion of mountainous terrain. These variables significantly increase the risk of civil war. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for policy, emphasizing the importance of economic development and the need for special measures to address the risks associated with international trade in primary commodities. It also highlights the role of security guarantees from former colonial powers and the potential for economies of scale in state functions, such as deterrence of organized violence.