Foreign-Imposed Regime Change and Civil War

Abstract

This chapter considers the relationship between regime change and civil war in target states. It first situates regime change in the literature on the causes of civil war, then briefly recapitulates the arguments for how regime change can cause civil war and outlines specific hypotheses. The chapter also presents quantitative evidence from an analysis of a country–year dataset covering the years 1816 to 2008, which shows that outbreaks of civil conflict are significantly more likely in the years following regime change—particularly leadership regime change. Regime changes that simultaneously promote political institutions in addition to leaders have no overall effect on civil war onset but increase the risk in poor and ethnically diverse countries—that is, where institutional regime changes are likely to fail. The chapter offers evidence from six historical cases that illustrate the two causal mechanisms connecting regime change and civil war.