Civil War Dynamics Research Articles

External Interventions: Bluffing and Adaptive Learning in Civil Wars

ABSTRACT This paper examines the effectiveness of bluffing about external intervention in shaping civil war dynamics using an agent-based model. It argues that warring parties’ initial information levels about interveners and their learning processes determine the success of bluffing. The model explores three scenarios: 1) accurate initial expectations and informative signals 2) inaccurate initial information and uninformative signals and 3) heterogeneous information sets and varied signal updates. Findings suggest bluffing is most effective when both sides start with inaccurate expectations and update slowly. The model’s implications are analyzed through cases in El Salvador, the Warsaw Uprising and South Vietnam negotiations.

Democratization, Foreign Military Intervention, and Rebel Fragmentation in Civil War: Evidence from the PKK Insurgency in Turkey

Abstract In this paper, by studying the fragmentation of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 2004, I identify two distinct pathways to rebel fragmentation: one that is triggered by democratization in the home country (EU-anchored democratization in Turkey) and the other by the empowerment of a rival co-ethnic organization in a neighboring country through foreign military intervention (American invasion of Iraq and the empowerment of Iraqi Kurdish leadership). First, by expanding the room for nonviolent mobilization, democratization can result in an organizational fragmentation between soft-liners, who support laying down the arms, and hard-liners, who prefer the continuation of the armed insurgency under new circumstances. Second, foreign intervention in a neighboring country can radically change the distribution of power and empower an organization’s rival co-ethnic organization. This can lead some actors within the organization to rethink their alliances and advocate a better relationship with their rival co-ethnics and the intervening foreign power, resulting in organizational fragmentation over the organization’s external relationships. The paper broadly contributes to the literature on rebel fragmentation, the effects of democratization on civil war processes, international dynamics of civil wars, transborder ethnic-kin, and rebel alliances in civil wars.

Measuring Spatiotemporal Civil War Dimensions Using Community-Based Dynamic Network Representation (CoDNet)

Civil war exhibits complex geospatial trends over time, which may be missed by models that rely on count-based operationalizations. Here, the spatial and temporal correlation values of monthly civil war events are transformed into their influence degree symbol, which measures geospatial concentration, spread, and intensity of civil war. We then measure variation in these degrees over time to identify relevant spatiotemporal civil war aspects. The network model is constructed using 0.5 degree grid locations as nodes, counting nearby and over time connections. We then extract the temporal community structure behind the data. We use ground-truth data to visualize how our measures correlate with observed patterns, thereby illustrating our method provides accurate depictions of geospatial civil war dynamics. We also evaluate the impact of several indicators highlighted by past research and our community-based spatiotemporal measures and comparing it to the preprocessed count indicator. Our findings indicate that the relationship between state capacity and climate stress show opposite correlations with civil war as those identified by studies that use count-based indicators. Counterintuitively, our results show that conflict intensifies and spreads in locations where the state is stronger and where climate conditions are improved.

Fair-Weather Abusers? Civil War Dynamics and the Onset of State-Sponsored Violence

Abstract Despite decades of rigorous research on the use of government-sponsored violence in armed conflicts, there remains significant uncertainty as to when and where leaders choose to target civilians in war. We argue that the variation in the use of state repression is explained in part by how soldiers perceive battlefield gains by rebel forces. Specifically, while strong opposition forces are often a necessary condition for elites convincing agents to engage in state-sponsored brutality, this is modified by the soldiers’ beliefs surrounding the outcome of the war. If government soldiers believe that rebels are likely to win the war, we posit that they will likely shirk orders to target civilians, fearing post-war accountability. We test this argument by examining subnational variation in battlefield dynamics and the use of government one-sided violence from 1992 to 2010.

Civilian Protest in Civil War: Insights from Côte d’Ivoire

How does civilian protest shape civil war dynamics? Existing research shows that civilian protests against violence and war contribute to peace and restrain violence against civilians. There is less research on civilian protests that are at odds with peaceful conflict resolution, such as protests to salute armed actors, advocate against peace agreements, and oppose peacekeepers. This study develops a novel typology of wartime civilian protest that brings together protests to different ends, and theorizes the heterogeneous effects of protest on civil war dynamics. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence from new disaggregated and georeferenced event data from Côte d’Ivoire, the study demonstrates that—contingent on certain demands—protests were associated with violence against civilians, violence involving peacekeepers, and failed conflict resolution. These findings contribute new knowledge on how civilians shape the dynamics of civil war, and caution that nonviolent civilian action may not only be a force for de-escalation and peace.

Identity, networks, and learning in the study of rebel governance

ABSTRACT The contributors to this special issue have put forth a research agenda that centers the politics of civil war, in contrast to what the introduction presents as the dominant rationalist paradigm. This paper anchors the special issue by first synthesizing the works contained therein. In particular, the articles in this issue focus on how individual and collective identity, networks and orders, and learning or socialization from previous experiences shape behaviors during and after conflict. Next, the conclusion to this special issue aims to move forward a perspective of civil wars that takes seriously the political in civil war by building upon the works contained in this collection and presenting a number of avenues for future research. In particular, this article advocates for taking seriously how individual experiences, identities, and relationships embedded within broader social processes shape and co-constitute civil war dynamics.

Same Same but Different? Ideological Differentiation and Intra-jihadist Competition in the Syrian Civil War

AbstractHow do rebel groups survive and thrive in multiparty civil wars where numerous groups not only fight against a common enemy but also compete with each other for support, recruits, and resources? Literature on the internal dynamics of civil wars has mostly focused on violence as the negative side of inter-rebel competition. The aim of this paper is threefold: First, it aims at explaining when armed groups attempt to use ideological differentiation instead of violence against rivals. Second, it analyzes when this strategy will succeed, and third, it demonstrates what successful differentiation means. The argument is probed by analyzing the puzzling case of Ahrar al-Sham in the Syrian war that emerged as both winner and loser of intra-jihadist competition with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Jabhat al-Nusra/Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Next to offering a new and original analysis of one of the most important Syrian insurgent groups based on interviews and primary documents, the article studies an under-researched rebel strategy whose use is relevant not only for armed groups themselves but also for local civilians, prospective recruits, and external supporters.

French Decolonisation and Civil War: The Dynamics of Violence in the Early Phases of Anti-colonial War in Vietnam and Algeria, 1940–1956

This article draws together historical sources and political science insights to test the emergence of civil war at the end of empire. It focuses on civil conflict in two French colonial territories, Vietnam and Algeria, during and immediately after 1945. It investigates the civil war dynamics of local, often intra-ethnic contests among anticolonial oppositionists. Concentrating on the early, formative years of insurgent violence, we aim to demonstrate that elements of civil war pre-existed the supposed outbreak of decolonisation conflicts – 1946 in Vietnam and 1954 in Algeria. Our approach combines narrative assessments of the early phases of these conflicts with analysis of their civil war dynamics. As we seek to demonstrate, cycles of internecine killing, massacre and counter-massacre, normalized summary killing, maltreatment of detainees, and loss of distinction between civilians, seditionists, and ‘traitors’. Our argument is that decolonisation violence in both Vietnam and Algeria may be usefully rethought in civil war terms.

Losing Hearts and Minds: Civil Conflict, Counterinsurgency Policing and Postwar Crime in Insurgent Strongholds

ABSTRACT Postwar countries often experience high levels of crime. A frequent explanation is that these countries exhibit inefficient and illegitimate state security apparatuses that cannot enforce law and order, and that contribute to an environment conducive to crime. Theoretical arguments outlining how an environment conducive to crime comes about as consequences of armed conflict have remained generic and empirical evidence is scant. Building on theoretical insights from the micro dynamics of civil wars, counterinsurgency policing and environmental criminology, this study makes a contribution by theoretically developing and empirically exploring how local conflict dynamics in insurgent strongholds shape police-community relations in a way that undermines the extent to which the police can handle crime in a postwar context. The suggested causal process is explored in the context of West Belfast (Northern Ireland) from 1969–2008. The analysis indicates overall support for it, though with important nuances.

The Legacy of Civil War Dynamics: State Building in Mexico, 1810–1910

This article studies the legacy of local dynamics of the War of Independence in local state building in Mexico. The analysis shows that municipalities where local militias were organized have a higher number of public servants and a larger budget per capita in the early 1900s than municipalities with an insurgent legacy, relative to those with no conflict. The results hold when restricting the sample to neighbors and controlling for geographic and economic factors. Historical evidence supports existing theories of intra-elite conflict while highlighting the role of local fiscal councils in municipalities with a legacy of local militias. Decentralization during and after the war strengthened local elites, while the negotiated war termination added a political-elite layer of insurgent leaders, born in conflict with colonial-era economic elites. These findings suggest that the local dynamics of civil warfare can have long-lasting effects on state building, boosting local state capacity in some regions and not in others.

Thinking about civil wars with and beyond Bourdieu: State, capital and habitus in critical contexts

Building on Marx and Weber, Bourdieu developed a sociology for scrutinizing the processes of domination and accumulation that allow social reproduction to take place. Yet, Bourdieu rarely tackled the breakdowns of social orders and never construed war as a scientific object, even if he signaled the theoretical interest in an inverse sociogenesis of the state. Despite this limitation, we argue that his work furnishes conceptual instruments for thinking about change and remains heuristic for understanding the dynamics of civil wars. These extreme situations in return let us rethink some of the theory’s central concepts (fields, habitus, capital). Thus, in succession we examine Bourdieu’s definition of the state (which fits into the Weberian tradition), explain the consequences of defining civil war as a violent competition between social orders, and end with an exploration of the social impacts of civil war on habitus.

Civil War, Institutional Change, and the Criminalization of the State: Evidence from Guatemala

The relationship between war and state formation is a central topic in the social sciences. While scholarship on interstate war posits that conflict triggers extractive processes that build the state, research findings on the effects of intrastate war are more mixed, often suggesting that civil war inhibits extraction and induces state decay. This study, however, posits that the negative relationship between civil war and revenue extraction is not underpinned by institutional destruction but by the wartime introduction of undermining rules that structure behavior in ways that subvert taxation. To illustrate this claim, it traces the evolution of undermining rules within the customs administration at the height of the Guatemalan armed conflict. As the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat created institutional ambiguity, newly empowered political-military elites implemented alternative procedures for capturing customs revenues, which systematically undermined the state’s extractive capacity. Comparing this case with one of reinforcing rules that bolster extraction, I posit that the broad or narrow nature of the rule-making coalition explains divergent paths of wartime institutional development. Overall, this study uncovers the inner workings of the counterinsurgent state and illustrates how civil war dynamics induce processes of institutional change that can have long-term effects on state performance.

Teaching from experience: foreign training and rebel success in civil War

This paper addresses the relationship between rebel training from external sponsors and civil war outcomes. While past research has examined how foreign support, broadly, shapes the dynamics of civil wars, little attention has been paid to how foreign training of rebel fighters affects civil wars. We theorize that rebels that receive training from formerly successful rebels are more likely to experience favorable conflict outcomes than those with no training or with training from sponsors inexperienced with fighting a civil war. These propositions are tested with a quantitative analysis of all intrastate conflicts from 1975 to 2010, providing support for our hypothesis.

A Motion of No Confidence: Leadership and Rebel Fragmentation

AbstractWhy do rebel organizations splinter into competing factions during civil war? To explain this outcome, I leverage variation in rebel leadership. I argue that rebel leaders draw on their pre-war experiences—i.e., their military and political experiences—to manage their organizations during conflict. These experiences bear unique patterns of rebel management and, thus, corresponding risks of fragmentation. Empirical evidence comes from a two-stage research design and original data featuring over 200 rebel leaders from 1989 to 2014. In the first stage, I estimate the probability of group fragmentation with a series of logistic regression models. In the second stage, I use Cox proportional-hazards models to estimate leadership effects on the rate of group fragmentation. Results indicate that variation in rebel leadership corresponds with unique risks of fragmentation. In particular, the results suggest that leaders with real military experience are best equipped to maintain group cohesion. This study offers insight into the processes by which rebel groups splinter into armed factions. In addition, it makes an important contribution to the broader discussion on the roles of structure and agency in shaping the dynamics of civil war.

Studying micro dynamics in civil wars: introduction

This article introduces the special issue on the micro-level dynamics of civil wars. Until recently, most empirical work on these conflicts and their consequences has focused on the level of the sovereign state. In contrast, a micro-level approach is categorized by three distinct—albeit intertwined—features: a disaggregation by actors, time and space, interdisciplinarity, and the reliance on a set of different methods for the collection of data. The contributors to this special issue illustrate different approaches to the study of micro-level dynamics. The first part of the Special Issue provides new insights into the international level of civil war affects local conflict dynamics. The second part of the Special Issue is focused on the dynamics occurring at the group and the individual level. The diverse range of contributions to this Special Issue not only illustrate the scientific potential of the individual approaches to micro dynamics of armed conflict, but also the more general contributions that this kind of approach can offer to peace and conflict studies.

The Lebanese Civil War and post-conflict power sharing: continuation of conflict dynamics in post-conflict environments

ABSTRACT Lebanese political dynamics are often characterized by political confessionalism, neo-liberal economics, corruption, and its particularity as an Arab state with Western social orientations. Although these characterizations may seem, at times, contradictory, this article argues that they are part of a political structure that initially developed during the Civil War (1975–1990) that was sustained by Lebanon’s post-conflict power sharing agreement. This article builds on the critiques present in the developing scholarship on post-conflict power sharing, demonstrating how dynamics established as a consequence of the Civil War continued into the post-conflict period. This has led to the reproduction of sectarian boundary inflammation, limitations on democratic and civil society mobilisation, and political stagnation. The article concludes with an analysis of the 2015 Garbage Crisis as exemplary of sustained Civil War dynamics and the consequent constraints on civil society mobilisation caused by these dynamics.

Mapping Violent Presence of Armed Actors in Colombia

Abstract. Heat maps and Early Warning Systems have traditionally contributed to identifying and managing risks associated with crime trends, health hazards, and natural disasters. However, their application to analyzing civil war dynamics still is at an early stage. To address this need, this research integrates Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to generate an interactive map of the violent presence of armed actors in the Colombian civil war between 1988 and 2017. The NLP component generates fine-grained geo-location data of armed actors' violent presence. The GIS component then uses the geo-referenced data to present dynamic clusters of four main types of actors: Government forces, Insurgent organizations, Paramilitary groups, and Criminal organizations. Each type of actors is further disaggregated into a multitude of specific armed organizations. Based on anomalies in the spatio-temporal trends identified in the data, we develop an EWS methodology to detect “emerging”, “intense”, and “critical” cases. This application contributes to the efforts of the academic and policy communities to understanding the spatio-temporal dynamics of political violence and promoting sustainable peace in civil war settings.

Weakened by the storm

How do natural disasters affect rebel group recruitment? Some influential research to date suggests that natural disasters – by lowering the opportunity cost of joining an armed movement – are likely to facilitate rebel group recruitment. In contrast, this study argues that natural disasters can negatively affect rebel organization and their recruitment efforts. It posits that natural disasters may weaken rebel groups in two main interrelated ways: (1) by leading to acute scarcity for rebel combatants and supporters, weakening the rebel group’s organizational structure and supply lines, and (2) by increasing government and international presence in areas where the insurgents operate. Empirically, this article explores these suggested mechanisms in two cases of natural disasters in the Philippines (typhoons Bopha in 2012 and Haiyan in 2013), which affected regions partially controlled by the communist rebel group, the New People’s Army (NPA). Based on data from extensive fieldwork, there is no evidence suggesting a boom in rebel recruitment in the wake of the typhoons. Rather, the NPA was temporarily weakened following the tropical storms, significantly impacting the civil war dynamics in the Philippines.

Praying for Rain? Water Scarcity and the Duration and Outcomes of Civil Wars

Recent anecdotal evidence from the civil wars in Somalia and Yemen suggest that water scarcity may shape the dynamics of civil wars. While a considerable body of research has examined the connection between water scarcity (such as low rainfall) and the onset of civil war, very little research has examined how water scarcity may shape the duration and outcomes of civil wars. Looking specifically at rainfall, this paper argues that changes in access to water play a key role in the duration of civil wars. As rainfall declines, there is a reduction in resources available to both the government and the rebel group, leading to a stalemate in fighting. Furthermore, this paper argues that declines in rainfall are felt more acutely by rebel groups who seek to challenge the government through conventional warfare. This paper tests these propositions using hazard models. The results provide robust support for the propositions.

Inside the Karen Insurgency: Explaining Conflict and Conciliation in Myanmar’s Changing Borderlands

Since 2012 Myanmar’s oldest ethnic rebel group, the Karen National Union (KNU), has sought for considerable rapprochement with the government. To many, this seemed to be the direct outcome of wider political transition in Myanmar. This article proposes an alternative explanation. Based on extensive field research and an emerging literature on armed groups, it demonstrates that the group’s rapprochement with the government was driven by leadership struggles between two rival factions within the KNU. At the core of this contestation are shifting internal power relations, which resulted from military pressures and geopolitical transformations in the Myanmar-Thai borderlands. These findings point to significant shortcomings of Myanmar’s peace process. They also contribute to the field of Conflict and Security Studies with much needed primary source data on the internal politics of insurgency, which shows how dynamics of civil war are driven by an interplay between forces on different levels of analysis.