Following Civil Wars Across Borders

Abstract

The Transnational Dynamics of Civil War. Edited by Jeffrey Checkel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 319 pp., $95.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1-107-02553-0). This edited volume has an innovative point of departure: If conflict crosses borders, how should the tools of scholarship follow? Numerous studies have shown that civil wars have increasingly important transnational dimensions. This volume combines insights from the large-N approach to civil war with perspectives from international relations and sociology on peaceful transnational politics. Its theoretical motivation is reflected in the fact that four of the nine chapters are largely theoretical. Large-N studies have shown that more than half of the armed conflicts that the world has experienced since 1945 involve a rebel group with external linkages. Transnational linkages may provide opportunity: rebel groups with limited opportunities to challenge a state often find the opportunity to mobilize greater support abroad. Yet, there may be a boomerang effect, where changes outside the state feed back into the domestic conflict and transform it. As diffusion is a rather vague metaphor for the process by which a conflict in one state spills over into another, this book aims to establish specific ways to make the metaphor operational. Some familiar concepts—emulation, persuasion, flows of resources, framing—are adapted for this purpose. The case studies explore how the rebel movements were affected by transnational processes: Afghani exiles in Pakistan, transnational Islamic militantism in Chechnya, the Kurdish diaspora in Germany, Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army fighting in its neighboring states, and transnational activism on the issue of child soldiers in the Sudan. In all …