Conclusion

Abstract

Civil wars have occurred often in the post–World War II era. Their frequency of initiation decreased after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but the persistence of these conflicts meant that there was not a dramatic decline after the end of the Cold War. The causes of civil wars and their consequences for the stability of the international environment have, however, changed dramatically in the last two-and-a-half decades. During the Cold War, most civil wars were proxy battles between the Soviet Union and the United States; both superpowers were interested in maintaining regimes that were sympathetic to their side. The Soviet Union was never interested in the promotion of democratic regimes. The United States professed a commitment to democracy, but when faced with a choice between a Communist or even left-leaning democracy and an autocrat who aligned his state with the West, the United States chose the latter. The strongly positive statistical relationship between per capita income and democracy, which holds for most of the period between 1820 and 2000, disappears during the Cold War, when both superpowers were more interested in external alignment than in democracy.1The impact of civil wars on the stability of the international system has increased during the twenty-first century. September 11, 2001, marks a watershed because, for at least some observers in the advanced industrialized world, the ability of transnational terrorists to destroy two of the tallest buildings and kill thousands of people in the commercial center of the most powerful country in the world, as well as to fly a commercial airliner into the command center of the most powerful military (an event that one of us witnessed first-hand from inside the Pentagon and the other witnessed from the State Department across the Potomac River) represented a sea change in the extent to which developments in poor and remote countries could affect even the strongest and most powerful. September 11 created an urgency that was absent during the 1990s, when major powers believed that they could walk away from war-torn countries such as Somalia with limited consequences for their own polities.Greater urgency however, has not led to agreement, even in the academic world, on two critical issues: First, what are the potential threats to stability that might emanate from civil wars and weak governance in poor and remote areas of the world? Second, what policy instruments, if any, can be deployed to treat civil wars and reduce the downstream effects on other states and global order? There are no consensus answers to any of these fundamental issues.Rather than trying to identify some common ground, which we do not believe exists, we offer our own assessment of the consequences of civil wars, the nature of civil wars, and possible interventions that external actors might most effectively pursue. Our judgments have been informed by the essays in this issue of Dædalus and in the previous issue, but are not dictated by them.Civil wars can impact the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world. The most consequential potential impacts are transnational terrorism and pandemic diseases, global crises that could be caused by intrastate conflict. Civil wars might also lead to large-scale migration, regional instability, and potential great-power conflict. And high levels of intrastate violence and loss of government control can often give rise to massive criminality, though this is most effectively addressed through domestic law enforcement rather than international initiatives.The nature of civil wars varies. The most important distinction is between civil strife that is caused by the material or political interests of the protagonists and civil strife that is caused by transnational ideological movements. The latter, if successful, might threaten regional stability and even the stability of the contemporary international system that is based on sovereign statehood. Transnational ideological movements, which in the contemporary world are almost all associated with particular versions of Islam, base legitimacy on the divine and reject both existing boundaries and secular authority. While transnational movements claiming divine authority are more threatening to the existing international order, it is very difficult for such movements to secure material resources. Institutions that control these resources, primarily states but also international organizations, NGOs, and multinational corporations, are manifestations of the extant global order. When combatants in civil wars are motivated by material incentives and accept the principles of the existing international order, then the “standard treatment” for addressing civil strife- UN peacekeeping plus some foreign assistance-is the most effective option if combatants believe that they are in a hurting stalemate, and if there is agreement among the major powers. If, however, combatants reject the existing order, then the standard treatment will not work.Finally, based on most, but not all of the essays in these two issues of Dædalus, the opportunities for external interveners are limited. Countries afflicted by civil strife cannot become Denmark or be placed on the road to Denmark; they cannot be transformed into prosperous democratic states. The best that external actors can hope for is adequate governance in which there is security, the provision of some services especially related to health and possibly education, and some limited economic growth. This is true whether the standard treatment is applied or if one side can win decisively. More ambitious projects aimed at consolidated democracy, sustained economic growth, and the elimination of corruption are mostly doomed to fail and can be counterproductive regardless of whether the combatants are interested in seizing control of an existing state or are motivated by some alternative, divine vision of how political life might be ordered. National political elites in countries afflicted with civil strife will be operating in limited-access, rent-seeking political orders in which staying in power is their primary objective. National elites will not accept accountability, legal-rational bureaucracies, or free and fair elections, all of which would threaten their power.The essays in these two issues of Dædalus and the literature more broadly identify six threats from civil strife that might directly impact the wealthy and more powerful polities of the world, or the nature of the postwar liberal international order. The first two-pandemic diseases and transnational terrorism-are potentially the most consequential, although neither poses the kind of existential threat presented by war among nuclear armed states.Pandemic diseases. As the essay by Paul Wise and Michele Barry points out, since 1940, some four hundred new diseases have emerged among human populations.2 Most of these diseases have been zoonoses: disease vectors that have jumped from animal populations, in which they may be benign, to human populations, in which they might cause serious illness. Most of these outbreaks have occurred in a belt near the equator, where human beings intermingle more closely with animals, such as bats and monkeys. The main impact of civil wars is, however, not in increasing the number of new diseases, but rather diminishing the capacities of health monitoring systems that could identify, isolate, and possibly treat new diseases. Effective detection requires constant monitoring, which is extremely difficult in areas that are afflicted by civil war. Epidemics, or at least disease outbreaks, are inevitable given the ways in which human beings impinge more and more on animal habitats, but allowing an epidemic to evolve into a pandemic is optional. If effective detection and monitoring are in place, a disease outbreak will not turn into a pandemic that could kill millions. So far, the world's population has been spared such an outbreak. If, however, a disease can be transmitted through the air, and if civil strife or something else prevents effective monitoring, the likelihood of a pandemic increases.Transnational terrorism. Terrorism, which in recent years has primarily, but not exclusively, been associated with Islamic jihadism, can arise in many different environments. At the time of the September 11 attacks, Al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden were resident in Afghanistan, a very poor, land-locked country. Before that, Bin Laden had found refuge in Sudan. Most of the participants in the September 11 attack, however, were born in the heart of the Arab world, namely in Saudi Arabia, and had resided for a number of years in Germany. The perpetrators of the July 7 attacks on the mass transit system in London were Muslims of Somali and Eritrean origin, raised and schooled in the United Kingdom. The bomber, whose efforts to bring down an airliner headed for Detroit were frustrated by a courageous and alert passenger, was a Nigerian citizen who had spent time with jihadi ideologues in the Middle East. The attacks in Paris and Nice in 2015–2016 were carried out by individuals born in North Africa, but who had lived for many years in Western Europe. The murders of fourteen people in San Bernardino, California, were perpetrated by a U.S. citizen born in Chicago, whose parents were from Pakistan and who was educated at California State University, San Bernardino, and his wife, who was born in Pakistan but spent many years in Saudi Arabia. The massacre at the Orlando, Florida, night club in 2016 was carried out by the American-born son of a man who had emigrated from Afghanistan and had lived for many years in the United States.While terrorism associated with Islamic jihadism is hardly an exclusive product of safe havens in countries afflicted by civil strife or poor governance, the existence of such safe havens does, as Martha Crenshaw argues, exacerbate the problem.3 Safe havens are environments within which would-be terrorists can train over an extended period of time. A number of terrorists, even those raised in Western, industrialized countries, have taken advantage of such training. Transnational terrorist organizations might or might not secure weapons of mass destruction; they might or might not develop more effective training; their operatives might or might not be discovered by intelligence services in advanced industrialized democracies. Civil war and weak governance, however, increase the likelihood that transnational terrorist groups will find safe havens, and safe havens increase the likelihood of attacks that could kill large numbers of people.Global pandemics and transnational terrorism are the two most serious threats presented by civil wars. The probability that either will significantly undermine the security of materially well-off states is uncertain, but both are distinct sources of danger. Civil wars and weak governance increase the likelihood that large numbers of people could be killed by either threat. Neither is an existential threat, but both could have grave consequences for advanced industrialized democratic states. Hundreds of thousands or millions of people could die from a pandemic outbreak resulting from an easily transmissible disease vector or from a transnational terrorist attack that could involve dirty nuclear weapons, an actual nuclear weapon (still quite hard to obtain), or artificial biologics (increasingly easy to produce).Either a global pandemic or terrorist attack, possibly using weapons of mass destruction, would almost certainly lead to some constraints on the traditional freedoms that have been associated with liberal democratic societies.Migration, regional instability, and great-power conflict. Civil wars are also dangerous because they could lead to greater refugee flows, regional destabilization, and great-power conflict. Not every civil war has the potential for generating these global crises, but if generated, they would be a product not just of civil strife but also of policy choices that were made by advanced industrialized countries. In this regard, they should be contrasted with possible pandemics and transnational terrorism that, arguably, would occur regardless of the policies adopted by wealthy democratic states.As Sarah Lischer's essay shows, the number of migrants–especially people displaced by civil wars–has increased dramatically in recent years.4 Most of these migrants have been generated by three conflicts, those in Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia. The wave of migrants entering Western Europe has destabilized traditional politics and contributed to the success of Brexit in the UK, the increased share of votes secured by right-wing parties in a number of Western European countries, and the electoral gains of a number of right-wing parties in Eastern Europe. Anxiety about immigration contributed to Donald Trump's victory in the United States. European countries, even those on the left like Sweden, have responded to rising numbers of refugees by tightening the rules for potential migrants. The European Union reached a deal with Turkey in 2016 to provide financial resources in exchange–among other things–for an increase in acceptance of refugees. At the same time, the sheer number of refugees in Jordan and Lebanon can potentially undermine government control in those countries.The impact of civil wars in one country can spread to surrounding areas. ISIL's ambitious campaigns have afflicted Syria and Iraq. Civil strife in Somalia has, as Seyoum Mesfin and Abdeta Beyene write, influenced the policies of Ethiopia.5 The FARC insurgency in Colombia impacted Venezuela and Ecuador. Conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) drew in several neighboring states. Some regional conflicts have resulted in millions of deaths, most notably the war in the DRC, with limited impact on and attention from wealthy industrialized countries. Wars in the Middle East, however, have been more consequential because they have led to the involvement of Russia and the United States, they are closer to Europe and have therefore generated more refugees, and Middle Eastern oil is a global commodity on which much of the world depends. Regional destabilization in the Middle East does matter for the West; regional destabilization in Central Africa may only matter for those who live in the neighborhood.Direct confrontation between major powers has not occurred since the end of World War II. In well-governed areas, where civil wars are absent, the likelihood of great-power conflict is small. Territorial conquest has been delegitimized (though Russia's annexation of Crimea stands as a recent exception to this norm). The existence of nuclear weapons has removed uncertainty about the costs of a confrontation between nuclear-armed states with assured second-strike capability. Great-power confrontations are, however, more likely in areas that are afflicted by civil strife, because instability and appeals from local actors could draw in major state actors with vested interests. This is especially true for the Middle East. Moreover, in countries on the periphery of Russia that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, especially those with sizeable Russian ethnic populations, the government in Moscow has demonstrated that it can increase the level of internal unrest. There is no guarantee of stability, even in countries that might have been stable absent external support for dissident groups that would otherwise have remained quiescent.As Barry Posen suggests in his essay, multipolarity makes all aspects of external involvement in civil wars more fraught, including the possibility of a conflict among the major powers.6 In a multipolar world, no single pole is likely to be able to dictate outcomes to potential combatants. The possibility of a hurting stalemate declines because all sides hope that their fortunes could be resurrected by some outside power. Absent a hurting stalemate, which makes the standard treatment including UN Peacekeeping Operations (UN PKOs) and other forms of assistance attractive to major combatants, civil wars are more likely to continue. The contemporary international environment is more multipolar than was the case during the bipolarity of the Cold War or the unipolarity of the United States that lasted for a little over a decade after the Soviet Union collapsed. Managing civil wars will now be more difficult. The possibility of great-power conflict has increased. And because wars will prove harder to end, refugee flows will persist.Criminality. Criminality is a final area in which there may be some association between civil wars and weak governance, and the well-being of individuals in advanced industrialized countries. Because of the ease of transportation and communication, criminality is not limited to specific countries. Internet theft can originate from and impact many different countries. The loss of billions of dollars a year, drug smuggling, and human trafficking are familiar manifestations of transnational criminality. As Vanda Felbab-Brown writes, large-scale criminality can greatly exacerbate the challenges states face in defeating insurgencies and ending civil wars.7Addressing criminality associated with civil wars is fraught with difficulty. The association between criminal gangs and the state may be uncertain. National elites may protect criminal organizations. Some criminal organizations may generate revenues that help national elites stay in power. Yet while transnational criminality does affect individuals and institutions in the wealthier democracies, it is not a threat to their domestic political orders. The problem is best dealt with through national and international law enforcement.The most important conclusion that emerges from the discussions at the core of our project is that the policy options for addressing civil wars are limited. The essays in these two issues suggest that there are four factors that external actors must take into account when considering responses to intrastate warfare in weakly governed polities: the extent to which the interests of external and national political elites are complementary; the presence of irreconcilable groups in a civil conflict; the threat of great-power conflict; and the costs of intervention.Alignment of interests. Of these four factors, the greatest impediment to successful interventions is the misalignment of domestic and external elites' interests. Domestic elites governing an area afflicted by civil strife will be primarily interested in keeping themselves in power. The path to Denmark is paved with free and fair elections, rational-legal bureaucracies, and the rule of law, all of which are antithetical to the interests of those who hold power in closed-access or exclusive polities.The best that external actors can hope for is to bring some degree of security to areas that are afflicted with civil strife, which is easier to accomplish if none of the combatants are motivated by ideologies that cannot be reconciled, and if competing major or regional powers are not engaged in waging proxy wars. But even if irreconcilable and contending states are not part of a civil war's landscape, ambitious programs for state-building and democratization will usually fail because domestic elites are primarily interested in staying in power, not in structural reform.Foreign and security assistance has been effective in creating a limited number of better state institutions and probably lessening the chances of civil war, but then only under favorable circumstances and only to some extent. Foreign assistance might create islands of excellence, but these islands are likely to remain isolated or wither away when foreign assistance is withdrawn. Without the support of domestic elites, external actors will usually fail to quell civil wars or effectively deal with spillovers from such strife.Most of the world's polities, especially polities plagued by intrastate warfare, are rent-seeking states in which the political elite maintains itself in power through foreign assistance and corruption. Election results will not lead to ruling factions going quietly into the night unless the number of votes approximates the number of guns that political leaders require to stay in power. The Madisonian sweet spot in which the government is strong enough to maintain order but constrained enough to allow individual freedom within a polity is not the natural order of things. For almost all of human history in almost all places in the world, governments were exploitative and repressive. If individuals could escape the grip of the state they did.8In some instances, external actors might be able to alter the incentives of national elites in predictable ways. But the conditions under which this might happen are uncommonly found. Political elites in poorer countries torn by civil war are almost always enmeshed in what economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James Robinson have termed an exclusive order.9 Their primary objective is to stay in power. This requires the care and feeding of members of their essential support network. Most important, they must have command over enough of those who control the instruments of violence so that they cannot be overthrown. Political leaders in exclusive or rent-seeking orders are focused on avoiding the loss of status, prestige, money, and even life that would follow from a loss of office. These leaders will regard efforts to, for instance, hold free and fair elections or to eliminate corruption as existential threats.Even more modest policies, like reforming customs services, which are often revenue sources for elites in exclusive orders, might be regarded as problematic. External actors are only likely to have leverage if domestic elites are highly dependent on foreign assistance, which, as James Fearon's essay notes, is often the case, and if external actors can credibly threaten to withdraw aid, which is often not the case.10 If domestic rulers have alternative sources of revenue, such as payments from extractive industries, or if the recipient state is strategically important, donors will not be able to credibly threaten to withdraw assistance as government scholars Desha Girod and Michael Ross have explained.11These constraints were vividly apparent in Afghanistan, where the United States, despite investing billions of dollars in elections, anticorruption efforts, and counter-narcotics campaigns, was unable to curb the rapaciousness of the Karzai regime. Hamid Karzai resented rather than embraced American efforts to alter the fundamental character of Afghanistan's polity because such initiatives threatened his position. The 2009 elections were manifestly corrupt because Karzai could not risk losing office (though corruption abounded on all sides). Efforts to investigate the plundering of some $800 million from the Bank of Kabul were blocked by Karzai because the loot benefited his family and his supporters.As Stephen Biddle indicates in his essay, principal-agent analysis provides a framework for understanding the problems that occur when the interests of external and internal actors are misaligned, which will always be the case when external actors try to promote accountability in rent-seeking polities. Biddle focuses on security force assistance. He argues that creating an effective national security force, at least effective in the eyes of external donors, is much harder than has generally been recognized or accepted.12 As noted above, interests of domestic elites are often profoundly different from the interests of external elites. The former focus on retaining power and domestic threats to their position, while the latter focus more on international or transnational threats that could endanger their home countries.Adverse selection is, as Biddle emphasizes, a problem that cannot be avoided: the United States is most likely to provide security assistance to states that are badly governed polities; if these polities were well-governed, they would not need external security assistance. In corrupt rent-seeking states, political leaders will not view the military as an objective neutral force. Rather the armed forces will be viewed, as William Reno emphasizes, as a potential rival that must be contained through some combination of enfeeblement, pay-offs, and enmeshing military officers in illegal activities that tie them to the fate of the regime.13 A well-organized, efficient military capable of fighting effectively in the field is exactly what leaders in poorly governed, rent-seeking states do not want. As Biddle remarks, it would be almost impossible for an external actor to monitor behaviors, such as rewarding loyalists with military sinecures or stealing or diverting funds, which would be in the interests of clientelistic national elites, but not in the interests of external actors attempting to create an effective national military force.From this perspective, the sudden collapse of the Iraqi army in Mosul in 2014, despite one decade of U.S. military effort and billions of dollars of expenditures, was hardly surprising. The United States wanted that army to fight effectively against its ideological enemy, ISIL. Iraqi leaders wanted an army that would not threaten them and their grip on power.Civil wars usually do not create the conditions that allow countries to build stable inclusive polities and significantly improve the economic livelihoods of large parts of the population. As Steven Heydemann illustrates with regard to the Middle East, the rent-seeking patterns that were established before the conflict are likely to be reinforced during periods of civil war.14 Economic activity is essentially a protection racket that allows elites to pay off those with guns, whom they need to stay in power.Further complicating the task of the external powers is the problem of information asymmetry, referred to above when noting the challenges of monitoring the implementation of security assistance programs. External actors are not likely to be able to fully, or even partially, understand the interests and capabilities of relevant actors in countries crippled by civil strife. Cultures may be alien. Language facility may be elusive. Local power brokers and their families live in towns and villages for a lifetime, while foreign diplomats and soldiers often remain for one year at most.In sum, if the goal of the United States or other external actor is to help countries that have been afflicted with civil war move toward consolidated democracy and open-market systems, there will inevitably be wide, unbridgeable chasms between the preferences of domestic and foreign elites.The presence of irreconcilables and great powers. If one or more of the major warring factions are irreconcilables, or if two or more major powers have significant and diverging interests regarding conflict termination, policy options to treat civil wars will be limited.Transnational terrorism has been motivated primarily by ideological movements that entirely reject the extant rules and norms of the global order. As the essays by Tanisha Fazal and Stathis Kalyvas make clear, religiously motivated insurgents have embraced a worldview that is completely antithetical to the reigning, almost taken-for-granted, norm of appropriateness in the contemporary international order: the sovereign state system.15 The principles and norms associated with Westphalian sovereignty and international legal sovereignty are completely hostile to those that have been accepted and promulgated by Islamic jihadi groups.For Islamic jihadis and, as Fazal points out, other religious groups, authority is derived from God, not from some man-made institution. For Islamic jihadis, there is a fundamental distinction between Dar al-Islam, the world of Islam populated by Muslims and ruled by Islamic law, and Dar al-Harb, the house of infidels or where Islamic law is not implemented. According to some interpretations of Islamic law, Islamic states can only sign permanent treaties with other Islamic polities; with the non-Islamic world, agreements are limited to ten years. ISIL, the most prominent contemporary example of Islamic jihadi thought, has indicated that its purpose is to create a caliphate in the Middle East. Such a caliphate would ignore established state borders and the norms and rules of sovereignty.To an extent, secular rebels who uncompromisingly wish to establish a breakaway independent sovereign state pose the same challenge to external powers that place a premium on the maintenance of the contemporary international system and the preservation of existing state borders. They cannot be bought off with foreign assistance and they will not accept compromise.In such instances, the most realistic policy option for those committed to the defense of the status quo might be to “give war a chance.” As Sumit Ganguly describes, the Sri Lankan armed forces were able to defeat the separatist Tamil Tigers, who, while subscribing to the international order, were, from the perspective of the Sri Lankan government, irreconcilable.16 Indigenous forces may not, however, always be strong enough to prevail. Foreign forces may have to be deployed. However, as the painful examples of Afghanistan and Iraq make clear, subjugating irreconcilables, particularly when partnered with a domestically unpopular corrupt regime, usually involves a costly, protracted investment. Special forces or raiding parties are a more attractive option.Just as the misalignment of domestic and external actors' interests has far-reaching policy consequences, so do the misalignment of major powers' interests. The presence of opposing major powers in a civil war, as already noted, can potentially threaten the security of each, as well as the international system. But the pres