Parallel Perils: The Strategic Causes and Consequences of Multiple Civil Conflicts
Open Access
- Author:
- Lane, Matthew Austin
- Graduate Program:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 03, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Douglas William Lemke, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
David Scott Bennett Jr., Committee Member
Glenn Hunter Palmer, Committee Member
James A Piazza, Committee Member
Scott Sigmund Gartner, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Civil War
Intrastate Conflict
Ethnic Conflict
Conflict Contagion - Abstract:
- It is often noted that civil wars have superseded interstate wars as the primary form of conflict in the international system. What is rarely discussed, however, is that states often find themselves embroiled in parallel conflicts, or multiple civil wars that overlap in time and space. Through four empirical essays, this dissertation project explores the causes and implications of such parallel conflicts through the strategic spatiality of civil war. The first essay questions whether the underlying causes of initial and parallel civil wars systematically differ. I show that, in contrast with the extant literature, these separate types of conflict onsets have dissimilar structural causes, and that by lumping them together we risk conflating the structural foundations of initial and subsequent conflicts. Furthermore, I show that by separating the onset of initial and parallel civil wars, we can leverage important conflict characteristics, such as the severity and geography of ongoing conflicts, to significantly improve predictions of parallel conflict onsets, considerations which are largely absent from the major theories of civil war. Building on these broad insights, the second essay explores the puzzle of why some ethnic groups choose to take up arms against the state. Applying existing theories of conflict contagion between states to the contagion of conflict between ethnic groups within the state, I argue that ongoing conflicts in ethnic groups' geographic proximity provide important resources and information necessary to fight the state, which lowers barriers to entry into conflict. Similarly, the third essay considers why some politically excluded ethnic groups rebel against the state, arguing that the relationship between ethnopolitical exclusion and civil war is shaped by excluded groups' broader political and strategic neighborhoods. I first show that neighborhoods of inconsistent ethnopolitical exclusion, by highlighting excluded groups' disadvantages and exacerbating feelings of resentment, lead groups to take up arms. Paralleling the previous essay, I argue that geographic proximity and relative prevalence of ongoing conflicts in excluded groups' immediate neighborhoods provide logistical and motivational benefits. Shifting from the study of civil war onset, the last empirical essay examines how the duration of civil war is affected by the spatial distribution of multiple conflicts within the state. Through a theory of scarce resource division and the loss of strength gradient, I argue that, as the distance between parallel conflicts increases, states' war-fighting capacities are stretched across multiple fronts, limiting their ability to definitively suppress rebel forces. These spatial effects, in conjunction with the characteristics of overlapping conflicts, shape the duration of hostilities for by altering the bargaining framework between governments and rebels, leading to interdependent conflict durations. Taken together, these essays consistently support the notion that accounting not only for the existence of multiple conflicts, but also the spatial distribution of those conflicts throughout the state, yields important insights for the ongoing study of civil war.