Dynamics of Civil Wars: The Causes and Consequences of Subsidies to Armed Groups [electronic resource].

9781267855787

1 online resource (292 p.)

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This dissertation sets out to explain the logic by which the belligerents in civil wars make decisions that result alternately in conflicts ending or continuing on in the months and years to come, and to empirically test its theoretical account at multiple levels of analysis. The theory of external assistance as a subsidy to armed groups that it develops explains the dynamics of civil wars through an analysis of the strategic interaction between foreign states and the internal warring parties. Its core argument is that when external assistance is available to the belligerents it interacts with the internal strategic environment -- characterized by the cost of escalation of the fighting and the stakes of conflict -- to expand the conditions under which these actors choose to continue to fight. In effect, then, external assistance subsidizes ongoing war. Three principal factors are singled out to help predict whether a conflict will be lengthy: the interests of foreign states in the war-torn country, the cost of escalating the fighting, and the stakes of the conflict. The plausibility of the mechanisms underpinning the theory is established through an analysis of the Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990, based on field research including interviews with former combatants. The theory's predictions are tested using a survival analysis of civil war duration data covering the period 1944-2006. The theory is then vetted through a comparative analysis of cases of civil war in Chad and Yemen which rules out alternative explanations and confirms the theory's account of the link between war duration and external assistance.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

July 24, 2014

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2012.

Yale University. Political Science.