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

TLDR

Civil wars have mainly been studied from a domestic‑factors perspective. The study investigates how the international system shapes civil wars and their technology of rebellion. The analysis shows that the international system, especially Cold War polarity, shapes internal conflict, revealing that irregular wars are linked to Cold War structures rather than being the typical civil‑war mode.

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.