Civil War from a Transnational Perspective

Civil war is the dominant form of armed conflict in the contemporary international system, and most severe lethal armed conflicts in the post-Cold War era have been civil rather than interstate. Still, it would misleading to see these conflicts as purely domestic, as many contemporary civil wars such as Syria display clear transnational characteristics, including inspirations from events in other countries, links to actors in other countries, as well as often international interventions. Moreover, civil wars often have important implications for other states, including security concerns and economic impacts. This chapter reviews the growth and core findings in the literature focusing on the transnational dimensions of civil war. I focus in particular on how factors outside a particular state can influence the risk of conflict within states as well as some of the central consequences of domestic conflict for other states or relations between states. I conclude that this line of research has helped expand our understanding of both civil conflict and interstate war, and that a comparative focus on varieties conflict and attention to the possible transnational dimensions of civil war deserve a prominent role in future research

Explaining External Support for Insurgent Groups

AbstractMany rebel organizations receive significant assistance from external governments, yet the reasons why some rebels attract foreign support while others do not is poorly understood. We analyze factors determining external support for insurgent groups from a principal-agent perspective. We focus on both the supply side, that is, when states are willing to support insurgent groups in other states, and the demand side, that is, when groups are willing to accept such support, with the conditions that this may entail. We test our hypotheses using new disaggregated data on insurgent groups and foreign support. Our results indicate that external rebel support is influenced by characteristics of the rebel group as well as linkages between rebel groups and actors in other countries. More specifically, we find that external support is more likely for moderately strong groups where support is more likely to be offered and accepted, in the presence of transnational constituencies, international rivalries, and when the government receives foreign support.</jats:p

Democratic Jihad ? Military intervention and democracy

Democracies rarely if ever fight one another, but they participate in wars as frequently as autocracies. They tend to win the wars in which they participate. Democracies frequently build large alliances in wartime, but not only with other democracies. From time to time democracies intervene militarily in ongoing conflicts. The democratic peace may contribute to a normative justification for such interventions, for the purpose of promoting democracy and eventually for the promotion of peace. This is reinforced by an emerging norm of humanitarian intervention. Democracies may have a motivation to intervene in non-democracies, even in the absence of ongoing conflict, for the purpose of regime change. The recent Iraq War may be interpreted in this perspective. A strong version of this type of foreign policy may be interpreted as a democratic crusade. The paper examines the normative and theoretical foundations of democratic interventionism. An empirical investigation of interventions in the period 1960-96 indicates that democracies intervene quite frequently, but rarely against other democracies. In the short term, democratic intervention appears to be successfully promoting democratization, but the target states tend to end up among the unstable semi-democracies. The most widely publicized recent interventions are targeted on poor or resource-dependent countries in non-democratic neighborhoods. Previous research has found these characteristics to reduce the prospects for stable democracy. Thus, forced democratization is unpredictable withregard to achieving long-term democracy and potentially harmful with regard to securing peace. But short-term military successes may stimulate more interventions until the negative consequences become more visible.Population Policies,Peace&Peacekeeping,Parliamentary Government,Politics and Government,Political Systems and Analysis

Rich-club vs rich-multipolarization phenomena in weighted networks

Large scale hierarchies characterize complex networks in different domains. Elements at their top, usually the most central or influential, may show multipolarization or tend to club forming tightly interconnected communities. The rich-club phenomenon quantified this tendency based on unweighted network representations. Here, we define this metric for weighted networks and discuss the appropriate normalization which preserves nodes' strengths and discounts structural strength-strength correlations if present. We find that in some real networks the results given by the weighted rich-club coefficient can be in sharp contrast to the ones in the unweighted approach. We also discuss that the scanning of the weighted subgraphs formed by the high-strength hubs is able to unveil features contrary to the average: the formation of local alliances in rich-multipolarized environments, or a lack of cohesion even in the presence of rich-club ordering. Beyond structure, this analysis matters for understanding correctly functionalities and dynamical processes relying on hub interconnectedness.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Ethnonationalist Triads: Assessing the Influence of Kin Groups on Civil Wars

Although the case-based literature suggests that kin groups are prominent in ethnonationalist conflicts, quantitative studies of civil war onset have both overaggregated and underaggregated the role of ethnicity, by looking at civil war at the country level instead of among specific groups and by treating individual countries as closed units, ignoring groups' transnational links. In this article the authors integrate transnational links into a dyadic perspective on conflict between marginalized ethnic groups and governments. They argue that transnational links can increase the risk of conflict as transnational kin support can facilitate insurgencies and are difficult for governments to target or deter. The empirical analysis, using new geocoded data on ethnic groups on a transnational basis, indicates that the risk of conflict is high when large, excluded ethnic groups have transnational kin in neighboring countries, and it provides strong support for the authors' propositions on the importance of transnational ties in ethnonationalist conflict.</jats:p

A Two-Stage Approach to Civil Conflict: Contested Incompatibilities and Armed Violence

We present a two-stage approach to civil conflict analysis. Unlike conventional approaches that focus only on armed conflict and treat all other cases as “at peace”, we first distinguish cases with and without contested incompatibilities (Stage 1) and then whether or not contested incompatibilities escalate to armed conflict (Stage 2). This allows us to isolate factors that contribute to conflict origination (onset of incompatibilities) and factors that promote conflict militarization (onset of armed violence). Using new data on incompatibilities and armed conflict, we replicate and extend three prior studies of violent civil conflict, reformulated as a two-stage process, considering a number of different estimation procedures and potential selection problems. We find that the group-based horizontal political inequalities highlighted in research on violent civil conflict clearly influence conflict origination but have no clear effect on militarization, whereas other features emphasized as shaping the risk of civil war, such as refugee flows and soft state power, strongly influence militarization but not incompatibilities. We posit that a two-stage approach to conflict analysis can help advance theories of civil conflict, assess alternative mechanisms through which explanatory variables are thought to influence conflict, and guide new data collection efforts

Fitness-dependent topological properties of the World Trade Web

Among the proposed network models, the hidden variable (or good get richer) one is particularly interesting, even if an explicit empirical test of its hypotheses has not yet been performed on a real network. Here we provide the first empirical test of this mechanism on the world trade web, the network defined by the trade relationships between world countries. We find that the power-law distributed gross domestic product can be successfully identified with the hidden variable (or fitness) determining the topology of the world trade web: all previously studied properties up to third-order correlation structure (degree distribution, degree correlations and hierarchy) are found to be in excellent agreement with the predictions of the model. The choice of the connection probability is such that all realizations of the network with the same degree sequence are equiprobable.Comment: 4 Pages, 4 Figures. Final version accepted for publication on Physical Review Letter

Climate Change: A Threat to the Waning of War

War remains a major threat to human security. However, despite many recent dramatic events, war is on the wane as a tool in human affairs. The number of ongoing armed conflicts, the lethality of war as measured by annual battle-deaths, and the incidence of genocide and politicide and other forms of one-sided violence are all declining.Scholars have outlined various possible challenges to the continued waning of war. A leading candidate is climate change, which is widely believed to wreak havoc not just to the economy but also to the security of the planet. However, the evidence base for such beliefs is precarious. Scholars have failed to agree on any robust relationship between climate change and conflict. And the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the consequences of climate change does not provide a clear basis for alarmist predictions.Armed violence continues to present an urgent problem, as is seen notably in several ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. But research indicates that economic and political factors trump climatic ones in generating violence, and this is where countermeasures to violence should be focused. With regard to the social effects of climate change, other problems are probably more important than war. The main concern is simply uncertainty.Ohio State UniversityMershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent web page, event photos, M4V vide