Global Trends in External Military Aid to Civil War Combatants, 1946-2009

• In Event: States and Other People's Rebels

Abstract

How have trends in external military aid to civil war combatants changed over time? Which combatants have been the primary recipients of foreign weapons and financing? Did major global events, such as the end of the Cold War or the onset of the US-led “war on terror,” affect the type and scope of aid provided? This paper sets out to answer these and related questions, providing an empirical overview of global trends in external meddling in internal wars over time. It introduces a novel dataset of military aid to civil war combatants, presents a range of new descriptive data, and describes how patterns of intervention have varied from 1946 to 2009. A number of striking findings emerge. First, I show that external intervention has been a central dimension of the ostensibly “internal” civil war process across time, affecting a remarkable 75 percent of conflicts per year, on average. This finding presents a powerful challenge to the traditional distinctions scholars have drawn between intra- and inter-state conflicts. Second, I show that the end of the Cold War had a profound effect on the nature of external aid flows to civil wars---but not in the ways one might expect. In contrast to popular notions that superpower “proxy wars” pervaded the Cold War, I show that they were in fact much less common than often believed, afflicting less than 10 percent of conflicts per year, on average. This is an important finding not only because it corrects the conventional wisdom, but also because it highlights the pernicious role that lesser powers have played in civil wars over time. Finally, while many have linked the termination of superpower competition to decreased intervention in civil wars, I demonstrate that the percentage of conflicts attracting intervention has in fact remained virtually unchanged since 1990. What has varied, however, is the configuration of the interventions that afflict civil wars: while the prevalence of competitive intervention has been almost halved in the post-Cold War period, the prevalence of one-sided interventions has nearly doubled. With the onset of the global “war on terror” in 2001, this trend has been amplified---a function of both a sharp increase in US aid to governments and the exploitation of American command of the commons to limit support to “terrorists” (i.e. rebels). Taken together, the paper’s findings underscore the critical importance of global geopolitical competition and international structural change as key drivers of civil war dynamics over time.

Author

• Noel Anderson, University of Toronto