The Systemic Dimensions of Intrastate Conflict: Assessing the Impact of Polarity on Civil War Duration

Abstract

While the number of ongoing civil wars increased in roughly consistent fashion through-out the Cold War period, they appear to be decreasing in the post-Cold War period. What explains this reversal in trends? In this paper, I show how sensitivity to the polarity of the international system can be leveraged to draw new inferences about civil war duration. I assess the proposition that post-Cold War civil wars are terminating faster than Cold War era civil wars, outlining a theoretical justi cation for why bipolar international systems should prolong intrastate conflicts, but unipolar systems should not. Empirically, I combine matching techniques with duration analyses and identify a signi cant and robust relation-ship between the bipolar period and civil war duration: post-Cold War civil wars are shown to be less than half as long as Cold War era conflicts, a result which I argue highlights the critical influence of systemic factors on intrastate conflicts.