Teaching from experience: foreign training and rebel success in civil War

2020 ◽  
pp. 073889422091297
Author(s):  
Eric Keels ◽  
Jay Benson ◽  
Michael Widmeier
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Intrastate Conflicts ◽  
War Outcomes ◽  
Conflict Outcomes ◽  
The Relationship

This paper addresses the relationship between rebel training from external sponsors and civil war outcomes. While past research has examined how foreign support, broadly, shapes the dynamics of civil wars, little attention has been paid to how foreign training of rebel fighters affects civil wars. We theorize that rebels that receive training from formerly successful rebels are more likely to experience favorable conflict outcomes than those with no training or with training from sponsors inexperienced with fighting a civil war. These propositions are tested with a quantitative analysis of all intrastate conflicts from 1975 to 2010, providing support for our hypothesis.

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 ‘No peace, no war’ proponents? How pro-regime militias affect civil war termination and outcomes

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huseyn Aliyev
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
War Termination ◽  
Intrastate Conflicts ◽  
State Actors ◽  
War Outcomes ◽  
Conflict Termination ◽  
Extra State ◽  
Conflict Outcomes

Previous research on non-state actors involved in civil wars has tended to disregard the role of extra-dyad agents in influencing conflict outcomes. Little is known as to whether the presence of such extra-dyadic actors as pro-regime militias affects conflict termination and outcomes. This article develops and tests a number of hypotheses on the pro-government militias’ effect upon civil war outcomes. It proposes that pro-regime militias involved in intrastate conflicts tend to act as proponents of ‘no peace, no war’, favouring low-activity violence and ceasefires over other conflict outcomes. These hypotheses are examined using an expanded dataset on pro-government militias and armed conflict in a statistical analysis of 229 civil war episodes from 1991 to 2015. These findings shed new light on the role of extra-state actors in civil wars.

Transnational Jihadism & Civil Wars

Daedalus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 146 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-70
Author(s):  
Martha Crenshaw
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Domestic Terrorism ◽  
Transnational Activism ◽  
Power Centers ◽  
Soviet Invasion ◽  
Competing Power ◽  
Foreign Fighters ◽  
The Relationship

When rebels also employ terrorism, civil wars can become more intractable. Since the 1980s, jihadism, a form of violent transnational activism, has mobilized civil war rebels, outside entrepreneurs, foreign fighters, and organizers of transnational as well as domestic terrorism. These activities are integral to the jihadist trend, representing overlapping and conjoined strands of the same ideological current, which in turn reflects internal division and dissatisfaction within the Arab world and within Islam. Jihadism, however, is neither unitary nor monolithic. It contains competing power centers and divergent ideological orthodoxies. Different jihadist actors emphasize different priorities and strategies. They disagree, for example, on whether the “near” or the “far” enemy should take precedence. The relationship between jihadist terrorism and civil war is far from uniform or constant. This essay traces the trajectory of this evolution, beginning in the 1980s in the context of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

scholarly journals Do Terrorists Win? Rebels' Use of Terrorism and Civil War Outcomes

2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Page Fortna
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Rebel Groups ◽  
War Outcomes ◽  
Better Than

AbstractHow effective is terrorism? This question has generated lively scholarly debate and is of obvious importance to policy-makers. However, most existing studies of terrorism are not well equipped to answer this question because they lack an appropriate comparison. This article compares the outcomes of civil wars to assess whether rebel groups that use terrorism fare better than those who eschew this tactic. I evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of terrorism relative to other tactics used in civil war. Because terrorism is not a tactic employed at random, I first briefly explore empirically which groups use terrorism. Controlling for factors that may affect both the use of terrorism and war outcomes, I find that although civil wars involving terrorism last longer than other wars, terrorist rebel groups are generally less likely to achieve their larger political objectives than are nonterrorist groups. Terrorism may be less ineffective against democracies, but even in this context, terrorists do not win.

The Geopolitics of Major Power Interventions in Civil Wars

2020 ◽  
pp. 106591292097691
Author(s):  
Joe Clare ◽  
Vesna Danilovic
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Major Power ◽  
Civil Conflicts ◽  
Major Powers ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Strategic Approach ◽  
The Government

What factors influence third parties to intervene in civil wars? Our focus on major powers, which are disproportionately more likely than other states to intervene in civil conflicts, directs us to the factors that uniquely shape their interests. While our study does not rule out humanitarian interventions by collective security international institutions and individual states, we do not find that humanitarian concerns motivate major powers. We argue and demonstrate that their decisions to intervene are principally motivated by their drive to establish, consolidate, or expand influence in different geopolitical regions. Past research with the strategic approach stressed the importance of an intervener’s prior ties with a civil war state for this decision. Though important, we show the effect of these ties is subordinate to other factors. In our argument, their role is primarily relevant for determining whether an intervener will be on the side of the government or opposition. The key issue of whether major powers are likely to intervene in the first place, however, is contingent on how much the entire region is strategically relevant to warrant intervention. The empirical analysis of civil war interventions over nearly fifty years lends strong support to our theoretical expectations.

Terrorism, Civil War, and Insurgency

2019 ◽  
pp. 347-365
Author(s):  
Jessica A. Stanton
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Domestic Terrorism ◽  
Rebel Groups ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
Terrorist Groups ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Causes Of Violence ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Relationship

Much of the terrorism occurring worldwide is domestic terrorism carried out by rebel groups fighting in civil wars. However, many are reluctant to categorize domestic insurgencies as terrorist groups or to identify the tactics used by domestic insurgencies as terrorist tactics. Through a survey of the literature addressing the relationship between terrorism and civil war, I contend that research on the dynamics of violence in civil war would benefit from a more standardized definition of the concept of terrorism as well as greater consensus on how the concept of terrorism ought to be used in relation to the concept of civilian targeting. The lack of conceptual clarity in distinguishing between terrorism and civilian targeting makes it difficult to compare research findings, and thus to make progress as a field in our understanding of the causes of violence and its consequences. Despite the challenges associated with making comparisons across studies, this chapter attempts to do precisely this, drawing on research on terrorism as well as research on civilian targeting to develop insights on the causes and consequences of terrorist violence employed in the context of civil war.

The Security Bazaar: Business Interests and Islamist Power in Civil War Somalia

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 89-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aisha Ahmad
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Ethnic Politics ◽  
Market Model ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
War Outcomes ◽  
Security Costs ◽  
Economic Considerations ◽  
Close Investigation

In civil wars across the world, certain Islamist groups have competed exceptionally well against their rivals. The conventional wisdom points to either religion or ethnic politics to explain Islamist success. These ideological and identity-based explanations, however, tend to overlook the powerful economic influence that the local business class has over civil war outcomes. Civil war can be modeled as a market for security, wherein protection must be purchased from multiple substate rackets. Using this market model, a close investigation of the Somali case reveals why and under what conditions the interests of the profit-driven business class align with those of ideologically motivated Islamist groups. Security costs are of critical importance to businesses in a civil war, and Islamists are uniquely competitive in lowering these costs. The business-Islamist alliance is therefore driven by rational, economic considerations, which can contribute to the rise of Islamist power.

Terrorism and Civil War: A Spatial and Temporal Approach to a Conceptual Problem

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael G. Findley ◽  
Joseph K. Young
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Event Data ◽  
Conceptual Problem ◽  
Temporal And Spatial Patterns ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The Relationship

What is the relationship between civil war and terrorism? Most current research on these topics either explicitly or implicitly separates the two, in spite of compelling reasons to consider them together. In this paper, we examine the extent to which terrorism and civil war overlap and then unpack various temporal and spatial patterns. To accomplish this, we use newly geo-referenced terror event data to offer a global overview of where and when terrorist events happen and whether they occur inside or outside of civil war zones. Furthermore, we conduct an exploratory analysis of six separate cases that have elements of comparability but also occur in unique contexts, which illustrate some of the patterns in terrorism and civil war. The data show a high degree of overlap between terrorism and ongoing civil war and, further, indicate that a substantial amount of terrorism occurs prior to civil wars in Latin America, but yet follows civil war in other regions of the world. While the study of terrorism and of civil war mostly occurs in separate scholarly communities, we argue for more work that incorporates insights from each research program and we offer a possibility for future research by considering how geo-referenced terror and civil war data may be utilized together. More generally, we expect these results to apply to a wide variety of attitudes and behaviors in contentious politics.

Varieties of civil war and mass killing

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Krcmaric
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Empirical Test ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Mass Killing ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Why do some civil wars feature the mass killing of civilians while others do not? Recent research answers this question by adopting a ‘varieties of civil war’ approach that distinguishes between guerrilla and conventional civil wars. One particularly influential claim is that guerrilla wars feature more civilian victimization because mass killing is an attractive strategy for states attempting to eliminate the civilian support base of an insurgency. In this article, I suggest that there are two reasons to question this ‘draining the sea’ argument. First, the logic of ‘hearts and minds’ during guerrilla wars implies that protecting civilians – not killing them – is the key to success during counterinsurgency. Second, unpacking the nature of fighting in conventional wars gives compelling reasons to think that they could be particularly deadly for civilians caught in the war’s path. After deriving competing predictions on the relationship between civil war type and mass killing, I offer an empirical test by pairing a recently released dataset on the ‘technology of rebellion’ featured in civil wars with a more nuanced dataset of mass killing than those used in several previous studies. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I find that mass killing onset is more likely to occur during conventional wars than during guerrilla wars.

scholarly journals Bargaining Theory, Civil War Outcomes, and War Recurrence: Assessing the Results of Empirical Tests of the Theory

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline A. Hartzell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Bargaining Theory ◽  
Intrastate Conflict ◽  
War Termination ◽  
Interstate War ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Empirical Tests ◽  
War Outcomes ◽  
Bargaining Problems

Once ended, a significant number of civil wars recur. One influential empirical international relations theory on which scholars have drawn in an effort to provide an explanation for this phenomenon is the bargaining model of war. Devised initially for the study of interstate war, the theory posits that bargaining problems may prevent belligerents from reaching a deal that enables them to avoid a costly war. Bargaining problems also have been identified as contributing to the recurrence of armed intrastate conflict. Working within the framework of bargaining theory, a number of scholars have claimed that the most effective way to inhibit a return to civil war is to end the conflict via military victory as such an outcome is thought to help solve key bargaining problems. However, a growing number of empirical tests cast doubt on this proposition. An analysis of the results of these tests as well as new scholarship on civil war termination highlight some of the limitations inherent in employing a theory devised for the study of interstate war to analyze questions related to civil wars.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document