The spread of violent civil conflict : rare state-driven, and preventable

Abstract

This dissertation advances and tests an explanation for the spread of violent civil conflict from one state to another. The fear of such "substate conflict contagion" is frequently invoked by American policymakers as a justification for military intervention in ongoing substate conflicts -- the argument these policymakers often make is that conflicts left uncontained now will spread and become a more pertinent security threat later. My State Action Explanation is that substate conflict contagion is not the sole product of nonstate factors such as transnational rebel networks and arms flows, nor of the structural factors such as poverty that make internal conflict more likely in general. Rather, at least one of three deliberate state government actions is generally required for a conflict to spread, making substate conflict contagion both less common and more state-driven -- and hence more preventable -- than is often believed. These state actions include Evangelization, the deliberate encouragement of conflict abroad by former rebel groups that have taken over their home government; Expulsion, the deliberate movement of combatants across borders by state governments in conflict; and Meddling with Overt Partiality, the deliberate interference in another state's conflict by a state government that subsequently leads to conflict in the interfering state. After introducing this State Action Explanation, I probe its empirical plausibility by identifying 84 cases of substate conflict contagion between 1946 and 2007, and showing that at least one of these three state actions was present and involved in most of these 84 cases. I then conduct two regional tests of the explanation, in Central America (1978-1996) and Southeast Asia (1959-1980). I argue that state actions appear to have been necessary for most of the contagion cases in both of these regions, and that the absence of state actions appears to best explain the cases in which conflicts did not spread.