Foreign-Imposed Regime Change, State Power and Civil War Onset, 1920–2004 (original) (raw)

An Empirical Analysis of the Association Between Types of Interventions and Civil War Onset

2015

Quantitative studies have focused on economics, social structures, and lack of political freedoms as being elemental factors for civil war onset. However, these studies have neglected the possibility of a civil war being an unintended consequence of international military intervention. I conduct an empirical analysis of the association between military intervention and civil war onset by collecting data for twenty countries within the Middle East/North African regions from 1980 to 2000. Using the International Military Intervention data set, I categorized "international intervention" into nine different types, all of which were regressed with intrastate war data derived from the Correlates of War project. Two logit regression analyses were used to obtain the results, one of which analyzes civil war at time t and the independent variables at t-1. Additionally, marginal effects were computed to reflect accurate estimates. Overall, the data revealed that certain types of interventions are conducive to civil war onset, such as those pursuing terrorists or rebel groups across the border, gaining or retaining territory, and humanitarian interventions. Other types of interventions, such as those for social protection purposes, taking sides in a domestic dispute, and for the purpose of affecting policies of the target country, has a negative association with civil war onset. Two case studies, the 1953 U.S. intervention into Iran and the 1979 Soviet Union intervention into Afghanistan, reflects the observed findings of the two regression models. The occurrences of international military interventions and civil wars have increased iv dramatically since the end of World War II; therefore, it is important to have a better understanding of the association between the two events. To my knowledge, this is the first study that has categorized different types of interventions under which results indicate that the purpose of a military intervention does effect the likelihood of civil war onset. Scholars may develop this study further with the goal of establishing a better understanding of both phenomena so that we can find more efficient ways of preventing them. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Mirilovic for his patience and guidance throughout the writing process. His encouragement and kind advice have been most helpful in the organization of this thesis. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Lanier, who has aided me immensely with the methodology portion of this thesis. Assembling a panel data set is complex; thus, I am most appreciative to Dr. Lanier for assisting me with ideas on how to accomplish this ambitious datacollecting and data analysis project. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Sadri for being a member on my committee. His expertise on the Middle East / North African regions are most respected and I am grateful that he took the time to sit on my committee. vi

The Constraints that Bind: The Connection between Coup Attempts and Civil Conflict Onsets (2016)

What is the relationship between coup attempts and civil conflict onsets? Although extensive literatures examine each phenomenon independently, little work has been done to understand the two processes simultaneously. The purpose of the current paper is to determine whether there is a systematic relationship between the two forms of political violence. I theorize that the coup attempts and civil conflict onsets may be understood as part of the same underlying process. A time-series-cross-sectional bivariate probit is conducted on states with a population greater than 500,000 from 1975-2005. The results indicate that the two processes are related modeling this link reduces bias for estimates in predicting each dependent variable. The covariate results suggest that prior coup attempts and ongoing civil conflict affect both coup attempts and civil conflict onset, albeit in opposite ways. Instability, repression and years of repression also significantly affect both coup attempts and civil conflict onsets.

Who Wins, Who Loses, Who Negotiates Peace in Civil Wars: Does Regime Type Matter?

Journal of Global Security Studies, 2019

Previous research has shown that the outcome of a civil war is related to conflict duration: military victory by either the government or the rebels occurs early if it occurs at all, and the longer a civil war lasts, the more likely it is to end in a negotiated settlement. The models of civil war duration and outcome that have produced these findings are built on characteristics of the civil war and less on attributes of the state itself, other than where the state lies on the Polity autocracy-democracy scale. We propose that the risk of government victory versus negotiated settlement varies not only between democracies versus authoritarian regimes but across the different authoritarian regime types as identified by Geddes, Wright, and Franz. The distinguishing attributes of these regime typesdemocracy, one-party, personalist, military, monarchicalresult in variation across regime types in their ability to defeat a rebel movement, their vulnerability to being defeated by such a movement, and their willingness and ability to negotiate a peace agreement with rebel movements. Results from a series of competing risk models using the Uppsala-PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset demonstrate that how civil wars end is partly a function of the characteristics of the regime. Who Wins, Who Loses, Who Negotiates Peace in Civil Wars: Does Regime Type Matter? Research on how civil wars end has identified a number of characteristics of the civil war nation and of the conflict itself that affect whether the conflict will end in government victory, rebel victory, or a negotiated peace agreement (Mason and Fett 1996; Mason, Weingarten and Fett 1999; DeRouen and Sobek 2004; Brandt et al. 2008). Within this body of research, studies have identified discrete attributes of the regime itself that affect the duration and outcome of civil wars. Among these attributes are the quality of state institutionsi.e., whether it is a democracy,

War Makes the Regime: Regional Rebellions and Political Militarization Worldwide

British Journal of Political Science

War can make states, but can it also make regimes? This article brings the growing literatures on authoritarianism and coups into conversation with the older research tradition analyzing the interplay between war and state formation. The authors offer a global empirical test of the argument that regional rebellions are especially likely to give rise to militarized authoritarian regimes. While this argument was initially developed in the context of Southeast Asia, the article deepens the original theory by furnishing a deductively grounded framework embedded in rational actor approaches in the coup and civil–military literatures. In support of the argument, quantitative tests confirm that regional rebellions make political militarization more likely not simply in a single region, but more generally.

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.

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.

Population Shifts and Civil War: A Test of Power Transition Theory

International Interactions, 2007

Do shifts in the distribution of ethnic group populations within a multinational state make civil war more likely? This article tests the proposition that they do using the competing logic of two core theories of interstate politics: power transition (PTT) and balance of power theory (BPT). The universe of potential population transition types are reduced to nine, and the logic of each of the competing explanations of war likelihood are reduced to four testable hypotheses. Overall, PTT fares better than BPT; although the article concludes that, as is the case at the interstate level, the key determinate of war likelihood rests more with how power is perceived than with raw changes in its distribution across the spectrum of meaningful political actors. Finally, the article offers a useful framework for further specifying the conditions under which population shifts alter the likelihood of an escalation to civil war.

How much war will we see? Estimating the incidence of civil war in 161 countries (Working paper

2002

authors ’ and do not necessarily represent the World Bank or its Executive Directors. Quantitative studies of civil war have focused either on war initiation (onset) or war termination and have produced important insights into these processes. In this paper, we complement these studies by noting that equally important to finding out how wars start and how they end is to identify how much war we are likely to observe in any given period? To answer this question, we combine recent advances in the theory of civil war initiation and duration and develop the concept of war incidence, which denotes the probability of observing an event of civil war in any given period. We test the theories of war initiation and duration against this new concept using a five-year panel data-set of 161 countries. Our analysis of war incidence corroborates most of the results of earlier studies on war initiation and duration and enriches those results by highlighting the significance of socio-political varia...

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