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ABSTRACT
Intrastate conflicts, long eclipsing interstate conflicts, are often internationalized. This paper examines internationalized intrastate conflicts through the types of both the intervening and the embattled regimes. Do democracies, more or less than autocracies, support autocratic governments in their fights against rebels? This paper tests three hypotheses: (1) democracies support autocrats fighting rebels less than autocracies do. (2) Democracies support democratic governments fighting against rebels more than autocracies do. (3) The more democratic two states are, the higher the probability one would support the other’s fight against rebels. Covering all documented external support in intrastate wars (1975–2000), our findings support hypothesis one and two only partly and confirm hypothesis three. However, comparing the two major accounts of the Democratic Peace theory (DPT)—the normative and the structural—our findings corroborate only the former robustly. The paper thus helps enriching the insights of the DPT beyond interstate conflicts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Ogen S. Goldman, PhD in International Relations (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2010); Lecturer, Ashkelon Academic College (2008–), has main research interests in terrorism, interstate wars, intrastate wars. His recent publications include Ogen S. Goldman and Michal Neubauer-Shani, ‘Does International Tourism Affect Transnational Terrorism?’, Journal of Travel Research, Forthcoming and Mordechai Chazziza and Ogen S. Goldman, ‘What Factors Increase the Probability of Chinese Interventions in Intrastate Wars?’, Asian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2016), pp. 1–20.
Uriel Abulof is a Senior Lecturer (US Associate Professor) of Politics at Tel Aviv University and an LISD research fellow at Princeton University. His recent books include The Mortality and Morality of Nations (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Living on the Edge: The Existential Uncertainty of Zionism (Haifa University Press, 2015), which received Israel’s best academic book award (Bahat Prize). He is the recipient of the 2016 Young Scholar Award in Israel Studies, and studies political legitimation, existentialism, social movements, nationalism and ethnic conflicts. His articles have appeared in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, International Political Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, British Journal of Sociology, European Journal of International Relations, Ethnic and Racial Studies and International Politics.
ORCiD
Ogen S. Goldman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4592-6443
Notes
1. Antti Sillanpää and Tommi Koivula, ‘Mapping Conflict Research: A Bibliometric Study of Contemporary Scientific Discourses’, International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2010), pp. 148–71.
2. For a comprehensive literature review about democratic peace see: Jarrod Hayes, ‘The Democratic Peace and the New Evolution of an Old Idea (Review Article)’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2012), pp. 767–91; Piki Ish-Shalom, Democratic Peace: A Political Biography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); and Jameson Ungerer, ‘Assessing the Progress of the Democratic Peace Research Program’, International Studies Review, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2012), pp. 1–31. Still, attention has been given to the link between democracy and intrastate wars, for example, Havard Hegre et al., ‘Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816–1992’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 95, No. 1 (2001), pp. 33–48; Matthew Krain and Edson Myers, ‘Democracy and Civil War: A Note on the Democratic Peace Proposition’, International Interactions, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1997), pp. 109–18.
3. For example, according to the UCDP, in 2014 there was but one interstate conflict compared to 26 intrastate conflicts. For comprehensive review on civil wars, see Christopher Blattman and Edward Miguel, ‘Civil War: A Review of Fifty Years of Research’, Center for Global Development, 2009; and Nicholas Sambanis, ‘A Review of Recent Advances and Future Directions in the Quantitative Literature on Civil War’, Defence and Peace Economics, Defence and Peace Economics, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2002), pp. 215–43.
4. This theoretical difference is a bit artificial because in reality, there is a strong correlation between normative and structural characters of regimes, but it is the customary typology in IR literature.
5. Christopher Layne, ‘Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace’, International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1994), pp. 5–49; and Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, ‘Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946–1986’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (1993), pp. 624–38.
6. For example, Bruce Russett, ‘Why Democratic Peace?’, in Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (eds), Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 82–115.
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9. Stina Högbladh, Therése Pettersson, and Lotta Themnér, ‘External Support in Armed Conflict 1975–2009-Presenting New Data’, Unpublished Manuscript, Presented at the International Studies Association Convention in Montreal, March 2011. All those supportive states had, in the relevant years, a score of 6 or above and the supported state had a score less than 6 in the Polity IV scale. Non-military material aid has often been part of the equation.
10. Nicholas Sambanis, ‘Do Ethnic and Nonethnic Civil Wars Have the Same Causes? A Theoretical and Empirical Inquiry (Part 1)’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2001), pp. 259–82; Håvard Hegre and Nicholas Sambanis, ‘Sensitivity Analysis of Empirical Results on Civil War Onset’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 50, No. 4 (2006), pp. 508–35; and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, ‘Transnational Dimensions of Civil War’, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2007), pp. 293–309.
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27. Findley and Teo, ‘Rethinking Third-party Interventions into Civil Wars’ (note 12); Kathman, ‘Civil War Contagion and Neighboring Interventions’ (note 24), who explicitly focused on both the support for the rebels and for the government.
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33. For example, Maoz and Russett, ‘Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace’ (note 5); Layne, ‘Kant or Cant’ (note 5); Russett, ‘Why Democratic Peace?’ (note 6); David Rousseau, Christopher Gelpi, and Paul K. Huth, ‘Assessing the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace, 1918–88’, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 90, No. 3 (1996), pp. 512–33.
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35. For example, Paul K. Huth and Todd L. Allee, The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and John M. Owen, Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (New York: Cornell University Press, 2000).
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44. Rosato, ‘The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory’ (note 8), p. 586.
45. Ember et al., ‘Peace Between Participatory Polities’ (note 43), p. 576.
46. For example, Uriel Abulof and Ogen S. Goldman, ‘The Domestic Democratic Peace in the Middle East’, International Journal of Conflict and Violence, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2015), pp. 1–15.
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48. Rousseau et al., ‘Assessing the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace’ (note 33).
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