IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/joupea/v44y2007i3p293-309.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Transnational Dimensions of Civil War

Author

Listed:
  • Kristian Skrede Gleditsch

    (Department of Government, University of Essex & Centre for the Study of Civil War, PRIO, ksg@essex.ac.uk)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, 2007. "Transnational Dimensions of Civil War," Journal of Peace Research, Peace Research Institute Oslo, vol. 44(3), pages 293-309, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:joupea:v:44:y:2007:i:3:p:293-309
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/44/3/293.abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Massimiliano Calì & Alen Mulabdic, 2017. "Trade and civil conflict: Revisiting the cross-country evidence," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 25(1), pages 195-232, February.
    2. Brast, Benjamin, 2017. "Liberal Statebuilding Interventions and the Monopoly on Violence," SocArXiv yqk9v, Center for Open Science.
    3. Christopher Blattman, 2009. "Civil War: A Review of Fifty Years of Research," Working Papers id:2231, eSocialSciences.
    4. Silve, Arthur & Verdier, Thierry, 2018. "A theory of regional conflict complexes," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 133(C), pages 434-447.
    5. Christophe Muller & Pierre Pecher, 2018. "Transborder Ethnic Kin and Local Prosperity: Evidence form Night-Time Light Intensity in Africa," LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES 2018006, Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES).
    6. Carmignani, Fabrizio & Kler, Parvinder, 2016. "Surrounded by wars: Quantifying the role of spatial conflict spillovers," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 7-16.
    7. Schudel, Willem, 2015. "Shifting horizons: assessing macro trends before, during, and following systemic banking crises," Working Paper Series 1766, European Central Bank.
    8. Carmignani, Fabrizio & Kler, Parvinder, 2018. "Your war, my problem: How conflict in a neighbour country hurts domestic development," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 484-495.
    9. Christopher Blattman & Edward Miguel, 2010. "Civil War," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 48(1), pages 3-57, March.
    10. van der Maat Eelco, 2014. "A Typology of Mass Political Violence," Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 20(4), pages 1-11, December.
    11. Wong, P-H., 2014. "Insurgents in motion: Counterinsurgency and insurgency relocation in Iraq," MERIT Working Papers 2014-045, United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT).
    12. Fabrizio Carmignani & Parvinder Kler, 2017. "The spillover of war in time and space: exploring some open issues," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(3), pages 273-288, January.
    13. Carmignani, Fabrizio & Kler, Parvinder, 2016. "The geographical spillover of armed conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa," Economic Systems, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 109-119.
    14. Abu-Bader, Suleiman & Ianchovichina, Elena, 2019. "Polarization, foreign military intervention, and civil conflict," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(C).
    15. Almohad, Selman, 2019. "Bringing regional politics to the study of security sector reform: Army reform in Sierra Leone and Iraq," GIGA Working Papers 319, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    16. Nicolas Rost & J Michael Greig, 2011. "Taking matters into their own hands: An analysis of the determinants of state-conducted peacekeeping in civil wars," Journal of Peace Research, Peace Research Institute Oslo, vol. 48(2), pages 171-184, March.
    17. Zhukov, Yuri M., 2016. "Trading hard hats for combat helmets: The economics of rebellion in eastern Ukraine," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(1), pages 1-15.
    18. Mukherjee, Shivaji, 2018. "Historical legacies of colonial indirect rule: Princely states and Maoist insurgency in central India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 113-129.
    19. Yuri M. Zhukov & Charles H. Anderton & Jurgen Brauer, "undated". "On the Logistics of Violence," Working Paper 255276, Harvard University OpenScholar.
    20. Martínez, Luis R., 2017. "Transnational insurgents: Evidence from Colombia's FARC at the border with Chávez's Venezuela," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 138-153.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:joupea:v:44:y:2007:i:3:p:293-309. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.prio.no/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.