Transnational Dimensions of Civil War

TLDR

Existing research on civil war has focused on country‑specific factors, yet many contemporary conflicts are transnational, with actors, resources, and events crossing borders, and regional context can raise conflict risk. The article argues that transnational linkages between states, rather than treating each state as an isolated polity, significantly shape the risk of civil conflict. It tests these ideas with a conditional autologistic model that incorporates transnational linkages and country‑specific civil‑war predictors. The analysis shows that transnational linkages and regional factors strongly affect civil‑war risk, indicating that a country's likelihood of conflict depends on its connections to other states rather than solely on domestic characteristics.

Abstract

Existing research has related civil war primarily to country-specific factors or processes that take place within individual states experiencing conflict. Many contemporary civil wars, however, display a transnational character, where actors, resources, and events span national boundaries. This article challenges the 'closed polity' approach to the study of civil war, where individual states are treated as independent entities, and posits that transnational factors and linkages between states can exert strong influences on the risk of violent civil conflict. Previous research has shown that conflicts in a state's regional context can increase the risk of conflict, but the research has not distinguished between different varieties of transnational linkages that may underlie geographic contagion, and it has failed to consider the potential influences of domestic attributes. The article develops and evaluates a series of hypotheses on how transnational factors can influence the risk of conflict and the prospects for maintaining peace in a conditional autologistic model, including country-specific factors often associated with civil wars. The results suggest that transnational linkages between states and regional factors strongly influence the risk of civil conflict. This, in turn, implies that the risk of civil war is not determined just by a country's internal or domestic characteristics, but differs fundamentally, depending on a country's linkages to other states.