scholarly journals International Class Solidarity or Foreign Interventions?

1986 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Jansen
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Foreign Intervention

More or less by definition, civil war refers to an armed conflict between citizens of the same country. However, the two outstanding European examples of this century, the civil wars in Spain and Russia, were in fact complicated by foreign intervention. Indeed, in the case of Spain, intervention by foreign powers proved decisive.

INTERNATIONAL CONFLICTS IN CAMBODIA AND AFGHANISTAN

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subira Onwudiwe
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Civil Conflicts ◽  
Foreign Intervention

A civil war marked by the intervention of foreign military troops is known as an internationalized non-international armed conflict.' This type of armed conflict happens often and presents a number of issues of concern to international lawyers. The scope of this article is confined to the application of international humanitarian law in such circumstances, and it does not address the validity of foreign involvement in a civil war. In civil conflicts involving foreign intervention, the sides seldom agree on the facts or their interpretation. As a result, this article is dependent on certain factual assumptions, assumptions for which evidence cannot always be provided.

Civilian Self-Protection and Civilian Targeting in Armed Conflicts: Who Protects Civilians?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betcy Jose ◽  
Peace A. Medie
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
International Community ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Effective Protection ◽  
Civilian Protection ◽  
Vast Literature ◽  
Self Protection

Studies have shown that civilians are often intentionally targeted in civil wars and that civilian protection efforts launched by the international community have not always been successful, if they occur at all. Civilians, therefore, have had to rely on themselves for protection in most conflicts. However, despite the pervasiveness of civilian self-protection (CSP) and its success at protecting civilians from violence in some cases, it is rarely discussed in the civilian protection literature, and its impact on civilian targeting is inadequately explored. Addressing this gap in the study and practice of civilian protection by carefully conceptualizing CSP and appreciating its role in civil war dynamics can further scholarly and practitioner discussions on civilian protection. CSP is defined as (a) actions taken to protect against immediate, direct threats to physical integrity imposed by belligerents or traditional protection actors; (b) primarily selected and employed by civilians; and (c) employed during an armed conflict. CSP strategies can be organized into three categories. The first, non-engagement, describes strategies in which civilians do not interact with belligerents or traditional protection actors who pose a threat to them. The second, nonviolent engagement, entails some interaction with one or more actors who may harm civilians. The third, violent engagement, includes CSP strategies that incorporate physical violence. These CSP strategies may actually render civilians more vulnerable to threats. First, some CSP strategies might lock civilians into unpredictable relationships with belligerents, which can become dangerous. Second, allying with one set of belligerents might lead to targeting by opposition forces, who view these CSP strategies as crucial support for their enemies. Third, civilians may overestimate how successful their CSP strategies can be, exposing them to harm. Fourth, civilian use of violence may cause belligerents to view them as threats, leading to intentional targeting. Appreciation of the reasons why civilians engage in CSP and understanding when and how this may endanger them can inspire more effective protection policies, as well as advance our understanding of civil war dynamics. For instance, further study on these issues can provide some insights into the conditions under which CSP is effective in protecting civilians and how the international community can support CSP. This information could be particularly useful in the design and execution of peacekeeping strategies that are sensitive to the efforts and needs of conflict-affected communities. Additionally, studying CSP can advance the vast literature on civilian targeting by shedding additional light on why belligerents kill civilians.

Reaction, War, Invasion, and Revolutionary Terror

2020 ◽  
pp. 36-62
Author(s):  
Daniel Chirot
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
High Price ◽  
Foreign Intervention ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter explores how civil wars and foreign intervention can strengthen revolutions. It shows that the repressions of even potential—or sometimes just imagined and falsely accused—counterrevolutionaries in France, Russia, and later Iran were very bloody. In France, the revolution led not only to civil war but also to foreign intervention and a long series of international wars. In Russia, outside involvement contributed to a prolonged, terrible civil war. In Iran, the very costly Iraqi invasion of 1980 and subsequent eight-year war also exacted a high price in lives. The paradox is that outside intervention and civil war actually strengthened the revolutionaries in all three of these cases and significantly contributed to their radicalization.

Managing Civil Wars from the Perspective of Their Development

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaroslav Tir ◽  
Johannes Karreth
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Intergovernmental Organizations ◽  
The Will ◽  
Management Approaches

After surveying the literature on the causes, consequences, and management of civil wars, we argue that novel ways of examining civil war management are needed. We advocate for a developmental view of civil wars in order to better understand how to prevent the escalation of low-level armed conflict to full-scale civil war. To prevent full-scale civil war, third parties need to (a) respond swiftly, (b) have the will and ability to impose tangible costs on (and offer benefits to) governments and rebels, and (c) remain involved over the long term. Our analysis shows that typical third-party civil war management approaches (mediation, peacekeeping, and intervention) fail to adequately address at least one of these issues. This motivates our argument in favor of focusing on a different type of third party that could arguably play a particularly constructive role in civil war prevention: highly structured intergovernmental organizations.

Getting Religion Right in Civil Wars

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200272199789
Author(s):  
Monica Duffy Toft
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Third ◽  
World Today ◽  
Arab Muslim ◽  
The World

Surveying civil war in the world today is striking in terms of how often religious cleavages and grievances have become central to armed conflict. How are the causes and outcomes of religious civil wars different than other civil wars, if at all? Is Islam implicated for the contemporary surge in religious civil war? The first section reviews the literature and addresses the importance of religion for civil war. I then introduce a dataset and describe key trends in religious civil war in the third section, while in the fourth section I present tests of whether Muslim or Arab Muslim societies in particular are more prone to religious strife. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the main findings.

Foreign intervention and warfare in civil wars

2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 2337-2364 ◽  
Author(s):  
ADAM LOCKYER
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Foreign Assistance ◽  
Foreign Intervention ◽  
External Assistance ◽  
Irregular Form ◽  
The Military

AbstractThis article explains how foreign assistance to one or both sides in a civil war influences the dynamics of the conflict. It submits that external assistance has the potential of affecting the military capabilities available to the belligerents. It then argues that the balance of those capabilities impacts significantly on whether the warfare in a civil war assumes a conventional, guerrilla or irregular form. These theoretical assertions are tested against the case of the Angolan Civil War. It is shown that during that war, variations in the form of warfare correlated closely to the type, degree, and direction of foreign intervention given to each of the belligerents.

Third-party regime type and civil war duration

2021 ◽  
pp. 002234332097581
Author(s):  
Sara Norrevik ◽  
Mehwish Sarwari
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Regime Type ◽  
Selection Effects ◽  
Intrastate Conflicts ◽  
Party Support ◽  
Conflict Outcomes ◽  
The Relationship

Does the regime type of a foreign intervener influence the duration of civil wars? Existing research has shown that third-party support affects the outcome of a conflict. Moreover, studies show that the type of support offered to conflict actors can determine how a war ends. While this research has offered significant implications on conflict dynamics, extant works have overlooked the importance of characteristics of foreign supporters and how their attributes can impact conflict outcomes. Focusing on foreign troop support and quantities, this article examines the relationship between the regime type of a foreign supporter and the outcome of an armed conflict. We argue that regime type of an external troop sponsor can influence war duration based on two dynamics: selection effects and signaling effects. Specifically, troop assistance provided to warring parties by democracies decreases the length of civil wars and increases the likelihood for a one-sided victory for the supported faction. The empirical findings for all intrastate conflicts during the period 1975–2012 provide evidence for our claims that the regime type of an external intervener influences the outcome of a conflict.

scholarly journals Civil War from a Transnational Perspective

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
International System ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Post Cold War

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/intrastate rather than interstate. Still, it would be 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 international interventions. Moreover, civil wars often have important implications for other states, including security concerns and economic impacts. There is a need to focus on the growth and core findings in the literature on transnational dimensions of civil war, 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. 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.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaroslav Tir ◽  
Johannes Karreth
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Conflict Management ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Intergovernmental Organizations ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
Specific Subset ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Management Techniques ◽  
Ontological Shift

We describe the deleterious consequences of civil wars and note that, despite some successes, common conflict management techniques (mediation, intervention, peacekeeping) still leave much room for improvement in managing civil wars. We argue that an ontological shift is needed, in which civil wars are considered from the perspective of their development. This would allow third parties to address the issue of civil war prevention by taking steps to ensure that nascent, low-level armed conflict does not escalate to full-scale civil war. We maintain that a specific subset of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), highly structured IGOs [such as the World Bank or International Monetary Fund (IMF)], are particularly well positioned to engage in civil war prevention. Such IGOs have an enduring self-interest in member-state peace and stability and potent tools with which they can incentivize a return to peace.

scholarly journals The Civil War as a Type of Armed Violence: Definition of the Phenomenon in Ukrainian and Foreign Political Science

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 98-107
Author(s):  
Anton Bader
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Political System ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Armed Violence ◽  
Definition Of

The article analyzes the main concepts and theories regarding the characterization, origins and consequences of civil wars as a type of armed violence. During the work the views on the problem of leading Ukrainian and foreign scientists were considered, in particular, E. Ankudinov, I. Artsybasov, T. Garr, O. Huseynov, S. Danilov, G. Demin, A. Kasesse, V. Korchmit-Matyushov, O. Ladinenko, S. Mosova, S. Nefedova and others. Much attention is paid to the analysis of the concept of civil war, its essence, causes and consequences, which was formed by the Ukrainian scientist S. Vovk.Having considered the problem, the author states that some aspects of the problem need more elaboration ‒ there is a need for a comprehensive generalization of the most common views on defining the phenomenon of civil war.The author concludes that consideration of the main achievements in the coverage of the Civil War, as a type of armed violence, showed that this aspect was studied quite vividly. Today there are several common interpretations of the phenomenon of civil war, its causes and origins, and political implications in the world of political science. Having analyzed them, the author gives his own interpretation of the concept of civil war as a type of armed violence.According to the author, civil war can be attributed to a specific type of internal armed violence, since it leads to significant changes in the socio-political system of the state. These phenomena are similar, but not identical. The Civil War is only an extraordinary stage in changing the state's political and political system. This kind of armed violence can be triggered by a revolution, or, conversely, victory in a civil war by supporters of radical change may lead to revolution. However, the purpose of armed conflict during the civil war is, first and foremost, the seizure / retention of power, the overthrow / canning of political structures, rather than radical systemic change. In fact, civil war leads to socio-political transformations indirectly. Unlike the revolution, which is a kind of armed violence that results in rapid, fundamental changes in all spheres of society.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document