Fighting at Home, Fighting Abroad

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Idean Salehyan and Kenneth Schultz
Additional contact information
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch: Department of Government, University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom, and the Centre for the Study of Civil War, Oslo, Norway
Idean Salehyan: Department of Political Science, University of North Texas, Denton
Kenneth Schultz: Department of Political Science, Stanford University, California

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2008, vol. 52, issue 4, 479-506

Abstract: Although research on conflict has tended to separately study interstate conflict and civil war, states experiencing civil wars are substantially more likely to become involved in militarized disputes with other states. Scholars have typically focused on opportunistic attacks or diversionary wars to explain this domestic–international conflict nexus. The authors argue that international disputes that coincide with civil wars are more often directly tied to the issues surrounding the civil war and emphasize intervention, externalization, and unintended spillover effects from internal conflict as important sources of international friction. They empirically demonstrate that civil wars substantially increase the probability of disputes between states. An analysis of conflict narratives shows that the increased risk of interstate conflict associated with civil wars is primarily driven by states' efforts to affect the outcome of the civil war through strategies of intervention and externalization and not by an increase in conflicts over unrelated issues.

Keywords: civil war; interstate disputes; externalization; spillover effects; diversion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022002707313305 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jocore:v:52:y:2008:i:4:p:479-506

DOI: 10.1177/0022002707313305

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().