Civil War and U.S. Foreign Influence∗

We study how foreign interventions affect civil war around the world. We explore both political and economic incentives for a gov-ernment to intervene in conflicts abroad. We test two predictions that allow us to identify the influence of foreign intervention on civil war incidence: (i) civil wars around the world are more likely under Re-publican governments and (ii) the probability of civil wars decreases with U.S. presidential approval rates. These results withstand sev-eral robustness checks and, overall, suggest that foreign influence is a sizable driver of domestic conflict. Using a IV approach, we also find CIA operations to be one of the channels of U.S. interventions in foreign conflicts