Civil War and Foreign Influence∗
نویسندگان
چکیده
We use different variations of the canonical bargaining model of civil war to illustrate why a potential alliance with a third (foreign) party that affects the probability of winning the conflict can trigger or prolong an already existing civil war. We explore both political and economic incentives for a third party to intervene. The explicit consideration of political incentives leads to two predictions that allow for identifying the influence of foreign intervention on civil war incidence. Both predictions are confirmed for the case of the U.S. as a potentially intervening nation: (i) civil wars around the world are more likely under Republican governments and (ii) the probability of civil wars decreases with U.S. presidential approval rates. These results withstand several robustness checks and, overall, show that foreign influence is a sizable driver of conflict around the world. ∗We thank Sami Berlinski, Benjamin J. Cohen, Matt Cole, Robert Elliott, Sebastián Galiani, Juan Carlos Hallak, Toby Kendall, Hannes Mueller, Gerard Padró i Miquel, James Reade, Sevi Rodŕıguez Mora, Mart́ın Rossi, Jaydeep Roy, and seminar participants at LACEA-PEG 12 Meeting, Edinburgh, LSE and Universidad de San Andr’es for valuable comments and discussions. We also thank Tim Besley and Torsten Persson for sharing their data on political conflict. Hauk thanks the LSE for its hospitality and acknowledges financial support from the Programa de Movilidad de Profesorado project PR2009-0375, from CICYT project number ECO2009-12695 and from the Barcelona GSE research and the government of Catalonia. Albornoz acknowledges funding from the ESRC (RES-06223-1360). †Department of Economics, Birmingham University; email: [email protected] ‡Instituto de Análisis Económico (IAE-CSIC), Campus UAB, Bellaterra (Barcelona); email: [email protected].
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