External Meddling in Internal War: Tracking Global Trends, 1946-2009

• In Event: Causes and Conduct of Proxy Warfare

Abstract

Has the prevalence of foreign meddling in civil wars varied over time? How did major global events, such as the end of the Cold War or the onset of the US-led “war on terror,” affect the frequency and scope of intervention in internal wars? Who have been the primary beneficiaries of changing trends in external support to domestic combatants? This paper answers these questions by introducing the Extended External Support Dataset, a novel dataset that records information on external military assistance to civil war combatants for all years 1946–2009. It presents a range of new descriptive data and describes how patterns of intervention have varied over time. A number of striking findings emerge. First, I show that external intervention has been a central dimension of the ostensibly “internal” civil war process since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, the vast majority of internal wars attracted external aid of some kind—a finding that 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. While many have linked the termination of superpower competition to decreased foreign interference in civil wars, I demonstrate that the percentage of conflicts attracting external aid in fact remained virtually unchanged between the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. However, while external meddling remained a ubiquitous feature of the civil war process, the configuration of military aid flows to domestic combatants changed dramatically: the rate at which competitive intervention afflicts civil wars was almost halved in the post-Cold War period, while the rate of one-sided intervention increased by one-and-a-half times. I show that government combatants have been the primary beneficiaries of these changing trends—an outcome driven by American foreign policy activism under the auspices of the global “war on terror.” Finally, in contrast to popular notions that superpower proxy wars pervaded the Cold War period, I show that they were in fact much less common than often assumed. 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, both past and present. Taken together, the paper’s empirical findings underscore the role of global geopolitical competition as a key determinant of variation in external meddling in civil war over time.

Author

• Noel Anderson, University of Toronto