Sustain, Change, or Terminate: Shifts in External Support in Civil Wars

• In Event: Proxy War and External Intervention: Causes and Consequences

Abstract

External support is a ubiquitous feature of civil wars and one with reverberating effects on their conduct and the lives of millions. The majority of scholarship studying external support in civil wars focuses on the decisions of states to intervene and how those decisions affect the conduct of wars, including violence against civilians, conflict duration, and conflict termination. Little ink has been spilled, however, on why state-provided external support shifts over the course of a conflict. Paralleling Hirschman’s theory of exit, voice, and loyalty, an already intervening state faces a series of options: at any given time, a state can maintain the same level and type of support, change the support, or exit the relationship completely. Using the UCDP External Support dataset and a controlled comparison of United States’ interventions in El Salvador and Guatemala, this paper tests various hypotheses to answer the question: under what conditions do state interveners sustain, change, or terminate their support in a civil conflict?

Authors

• Meg Guliford, University of Pennsylvania

• Sara Plana, University of Pennsylvania