Expectations, Rivalries, and Civil War Duration (original) (raw)

Expecting the Expected: Signals, Intervention, and Civil War Duration

This paper examines the effect of external interventions on the duration of civil conflicts. Researchers have presented puzzling findings showing that interventions lead to civil wars with longer durations. I reconsider this finding by examining the relationship between pre-war signals and intra-war interventions, arguing that combatants develop expectations for interventions before the war begins based on pre-war signals from external actors. Interventions during a war are best considered in light of these signals. Expected interventions reveal little information, and should therefore have little effect on the duration of a civil war. Unexpected interventions-and the failure of a state to intervene when expected to-should have a strong effect in decreasing the duration of fighting because they reveal a plethora of information and make a quick victory more likely. This theory is tested by capturing the (un)expectedness of interventions on the duration of 157 civil conflicts from 1951 to 2001.

The dynamics of civil war duration and outcome

Journal of Peace Research, 2004

high stakes generally make compromise difficult (Licklider, 1995). Given these challenges, what goes into the calculations rebels and governments use when deciding to end or continue a civil war? Recent scholarship has focused intensively on the 'greed vs. creed' question (see Collier & Hoeffler, 1999; Collier & Hoeffler, 2002a; de Soysa, 2002). These studies attempt to explain the outbreak and duration of civil wars based on political, ethnic, and economic grievances, and typically theorize from the perspective of the non-state combatants. In the past few years, attention has turned back to the role of the state in civil wars. One such line of inquiry probes the effect of

Civil war and foreign influence

We use different variations of the canonical bargaining model of civil war to illustrate why a potential alliance with a third (foreign) party that affects the probability of winning the conflict can trigger or prolong an already existing civil war. We explore both political and economic incentives for a third party to intervene. The explicit consideration of political incentives leads to two predictions that allow for identifying the influence of foreign intervention on civil war incidence. Both predictions are confirmed for the case of the U.S. as a potentially intervening nation: (i) civil wars around the world are more likely under Republican governments and (ii) the probability of civil wars decreases with U.S. presidential approval rates. These results withstand several robustness checks and, overall, show that foreign influence is a sizable driver of conflict around the world.

WHEN AND HOW THE FIGHTING STOPS: EXPLAINING THE DURATION AND OUTCOME OF CIVIL WARS

Defence and Peace Economics, 2008

Previous research has shown that the duration of a civil war is in part a function of how it ends: in government victory, rebel victory, or negotiated settlement. We present a model of how protagonists in a civil war choose to stop fighting. Hypotheses derived from this theory relate the duration of a civil war to its outcome as well as characteristics of the civil war and the civil war nation. Findings from a competing risk model reveal that the effects of predictors on duration vary according to whether the conflict ended in government victory, rebel victory, or negotiated settlement.

Geography, strategic ambition, and the duration of civil conflict

2005

Both the control of territory possessing natural resources used to finance armed conflict and the distances an army must travel to project force affect how a civil war is fought and who will prevail. In this paper, a model based on a contest success function designed to explicitly account for distances is employed to model the ability to project force and sustain conflict. The strategic ambitions of the rebel group will determine whether the conflict is focused on territorial secession or conquest of the government. These goals, in turn, affect where the war is fought, how it is fought, and the likelihood of one of the parties succeeding militarily. Using both Cox regression and parametric survival analyses, specific propositions regarding the duration of conflicts derived from the formal model are analyzed.

Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars

Does it matter whether a civil war is fought as a conventional, irregular, or symmetric nonconventional conflict? Put differently, do ''technologies of rebellion'' impact a war's severity, duration, or outcome? Our answer is positive. We find that irregular conflicts last significantly longer than all other types of conflict, while conventional ones tend to be more severe in terms of battlefield lethality. Irregular conflicts generate greater civilian victimization and tend to be won by incumbents, while conventional ones are more likely to end in rebel victories. Substantively, these findings help us make sense of how civil wars are changing: they are becoming shorter, deadlier on the battlefield, and more challenging for existing governments-but also more likely to end with some kind of settlement between governments and armed opposition. Theoretically, our findings support the idea of taking into account technologies of rebellion (capturing characteristics of conflicts that tend to be visible mostly at the micro level) when studying macro-level patterns of conflicts such as the severity, duration, and outcomes of civil wars; they also point to the specific contribution of irregular war to both state building and social change.

The Role of External Support in Civil War Termination

Many studies highlight the role that international intervention can play in prolonging civil wars. Yet, direct military intervention is just one way that external actors become involved in civil conflicts. In this paper, a model is developed and analyzed that shows that when the government is unsure about how external support to the rebels will help rebel war making capacity, it is the government that will continue fighting rather than settle the dispute. Different types of external support to rebels influence their fighting capacity differently, and some types of support create uncertainty about how new resources will translate into war making ability. Specifically, more fungible sources of support (such as direct financial support) generate the most uncertainty for states as they attempt to estimate the effect of support to rebels on the conflict. Increased uncertainty inhibits bargained settlement, and disputes characterized by fungible external support are less likely to end than those where rebels receive different kinds of support. Empirical analyses demonstrate strong support for this argument; rebels that receive highly fungible external support (money and guns) are less likely to see conflict termination than rebels that do not.

The conditional impact of military intervention on internal armed conflict outcomes

Conflict Management and Peace Science, 2014

Previous studies of internal armed conflict outcomes have found evidence that rebel-biased military intervention increases the likelihood of rebel victory, but little indication that pro-government interventions improve the odds of government victory. Our argument, grounded in a theory of the utility and limitations of military force in civil wars, anticipates that armed intervention increases the probability of victory for the supported side only when that belligerent's primary challenge is a lack of conventional war-fighting capacity. Empirical analyses of internal armed conflicts from 1945 to 2010 support these expectations. Direct interventions in support of opposition movements have substantively large, robust effects on conflict outcomes. In contrast, government-biased interventions are only effective in increasing the odds of an outcome favorable to the government when the fighting capacity of rebel forces matches or exceeds that of the state.