Great Powers and the Patterns of Internal War: Interests, Ideology, and Sovereignty

This theory explains why the patterns and character of civil war have systematically changed over the past two hundred years. Most scholarship on civil war focuses on domestic or regional factors: regime type, economic distribution, lootable resources, ethno-religious hatreds, bad neighbors, and terrain favoring insurgency, among many others. However, international politics has a major and understudied role to play in civil war incidence and intensity. This study uses structural realism to explain how the shifting balance of power leads to the changing character of civil war. Data from all civil wars from 1816 through 2010 are grouped by period – multipolarity, bipolarity, and unipolarity – and compared across a wide array of variables: onset, duration, battle deaths, intervention, intervention type, termination, termination type, ideology, imperialism, and new “weak” states. The hypotheses are tested with both statistical analysis and case studies, and the findings give strong support to the theory’s expectations. Great power interests, internal faction interests, transnational ideology, and new state creation are four main factors that link international politics to civil war, but the effects of each factor are different as the balance of power changes. Multipolarity produces the most conservative character of civil war—the shortest and least bloody. Bipolarity is abnormally intense—the longest durations and most bloody, and the biggest role for ideology and intervention. Unipolarity produces civil wars of neither extreme, but does allow for more conflicts to be terminated through negotiation than military victory. These findings have implications for scholarship and policy. For example, most civil war scholarship groups Cold War and post-Cold War data together, biasing prescriptions for present civil wars, because the majority of their data comes from the historically abnormal Cold War period. This study argues that lessons learned about civil war in one period of history may not be applicable to civil war in subsequent periods. One cannot understand the character and patterns of civil war without understanding the international structure within which they occur