Contagious Conflicts? Civil Wars, Militant Mobilization, and Escalation

• In Event: States and Other People's Rebels

Abstract

Under what conditions, do political uprisings in one country cause revolution elsewhere and why? Despite some evidence of contagion effects from the Arab Spring and the Color Revolutions, scholars still disagree over how and even whether revolutions spread. We argue this debate exists, in part, because of a lack of fine-grained data about lower-level militant campaigns, which had the potential to escalate into national revolutions. This paper develops a new theory to explain both when and why political uprisings spillover by disaggregating along two dimensions: conflict intensity and conflict type. First, we argue that contagion effects increase the likelihood that armed groups mobilize to challenge the state, but state reactions minimize the escalation of these conflicts. Second, we suggest that neighboring uprisings have heterogeneous contagion effects depending on the conflict’s character (e.g. aim, ideology, or ethnicity). The paper derives a series of observable predictions about under what conditions contagion effects are most likely to cause revolution and test these hypotheses on an unprecedented, cross-national dataset of approximately 1,200 militant campaigns between 1970-2012.

Authors

• Iris Malone, George Washington University

• Lindsay Hundley, Stanford University