External territorial threat, state capacity, and civil war

Abstract

We argue that the regional threat environment a state faces plays a consequential role in its political development and the likelihood of experiencing future intrastate wars. Challenges to a state’s territorial integrity lead governments to increase their military personnel, and the resources that support these increases most often come willingly from a public that seeks security. Territorial threats are unlike other types of threats because they challenge individual lives and livelihoods, which both connects the average citizen with the state and allows for easier government extraction of necessary resources. Thus, external territorial threats increase state capacity by unifying the state and by increasing the repressive power of the central government. We identify territorial threats as both latent and realized claims against state territories and find that the presence of an external threat to territory leads to an increase in the capacity of central governments to connect and extract from its citizens, as well as the capacity to repress potential regime dissidents. We also find that the presence of a claim against a state’s territory from a neighbor corresponds with a substantial decrease in the likelihood of intrastate conflict at both high and low levels of intensity. The effect of territorial threat is observed even in the short term after a territorial threat has been resolved. Our tests, using standard models of state capacity and insurgency models of conflict on a sample of all states from 1946 to 2007, are robust to multiple model specifications.