International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict

Abstract

Because they are chiefly domestic conflicts, civil wars have been studied primarily from a perspective stressing domestic factors. We ask, instead, whether (and how) the international system shapes civil wars; we find that it does shape the way in which they are fought—their “technology of rebellion.” After disaggregating civil wars into irregular wars (or insurgencies), conventional wars, and symmetric nonconventional wars, we report a striking decline of irregular wars following the end of the Cold War, a remarkable transformation of internal conflict. Our analysis brings the international system back into the study of internal conflict. It specifies the connection between system polarity and the Cold War on the one hand and domestic warfare on the other hand. It also demonstrates that irregular war is not the paradigmatic mode of civil war as widely believed, but rather is closely associated with the structural characteristics of the Cold War

Geographic determinants of indiscriminate violence in civil wars

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Building the Rule of War: Postconflict Institutions and the Micro-Dynamics of Conflict in Eastern DR Congo

“…This relationship may partially explain the widespread occurrence of lengthy civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa, a region notorious for its weak state capacity and limited legal infrastructure." Kalyvas and Balcells 2010;Kalyvas 2003Kalyvas , 2005Raeymaekers 2005;Salehyan 2009;Staniland 2012Staniland , 2014 See, e.g., Brass 1997;Hazen 2013;Mampilly 2011;Menkhaus 2007;Raeymaekers, Menkhaus, and Vlassenroot 2008. Kalyvas and Balcells 2010 1969.…”

Regulatory Theory

“…Contemporary contexts of mass violence evolve in a landscape of long-term and multifaceted conflicts, extreme violence and state fragility (for an overview, see Karstedt 2013a). The majority of mass killings since World War II have been part of civil wars and ethnic conflicts (Kalyvas and Balcells 2010). These conflicts typically occur below the level of the nation-state and independent of its boundaries.…”