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Proxy Wars: Implications of Great-Power Rivalry for the Onset and Duration
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 1

Proxy Wars: Implications of Great-power Rivalry for

the Onset and Duration of Civil War

Indra de Soysa
Dept. of Political Science and Sociology
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
7491, Trondheim
Norway
 2

Abstract:

The bulk of social science theories explaining civil war focus on endogenous factors, generally
ignoring the systemic effects of superpower rivalry during the Cold War, or great power politics
associated with regional rivalries and ambitions. The question of proxiness of civil wars also
potentially challenges notions of commitment and time-inconsistency problems associated with
explanations of why rational agents fail to find less costly bargains compared with costly
fighting. Despite much historical evidence about intervention of great powers either overtly or
covertly in civil wars, theories of civil war have only focused on the in-country ills that
apparently determine violence. These models, however, have only had very limited predictive
power. Can it be that systemic factors and great power politics make civil war in distant places
and strategic sites more feasible due to proxy intervention? Examining these issues is all the
more critical today because the multipolar world emerging out of the Cold War era promises to
generate proxy struggles in a world where the costs of fighting directly are very high. While
the study of civil war moves in the direction of disaggregating in order to understand micro
processes associated with rebellion, it might also be prudent to aggregate up to understand the
macro processes in multilevel-level models because the feasibility of fighting over not fighting
are likely to be decided at higher rather than lower levels of aggregation.
 3

It would be the policy of the United States to support free people who are
resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
Harry S. Truman, March 12, 1947. Speech to US Congress, which later
became the Truman Doctrine.

[w]hen external and internal forces hostile to socialism try to turn the
development of a given socialist country in the direction of…the capitalist
system...this is no longer merely a problem for that country’s people, but a
common problem, the concern of all socialist countries. Leonid
Brezhnev, November 12, 1968. Speech to the United Polish Workers Party,
which subsequently became the Brezhnev Doctrine. Cited in Ouimet (2003:
69).

We oppose war, but we support the anti-imperialist wars waged by oppressed

peoples. We support the revolutionary wars waged in Cuba and Algeria. We
also support the anti-US imperialist war conducted by the South Vietnamese
people. Mao Zedong, June 23, 1964. Statement made to Chilean journalists
on Chinese support for national liberation movements. Cited in Hershberg
(1995/1996: 239).

1. Introduction

Despite the intense study of civil war and political violence in the social sciences, the systemic

effects of great power rivalry, or the geopolitics of great powers are not theoretically identified,

nor scrutinized empirically until quite recently (Albornoz and Hauk 2014, Hironaka 2005,

Kalyvas and Balcells 2010). As Andrew Mumford (2013: 111) writes, “proxy wars have been

far more prominent in the past and present of warfare than the academic literature, policy

debates or journalism has acknowledged.” The bulk of civil war studies, particularly during the

Cold War, focused on structural factors, the role of ideological struggle and revolution by the

masses, or ethnic minority rebellions against discrimination (Gurr 1970, Horowitz 2000,

Lichbach 1989, Scott 1976, Skocpol 1979). Many identified the lack of modernization as the

problem, particularly problems associated with state making, the inability to generate economic

development, the lack of democracy, and low state capacities for addressing political grievances

(Huntington 1968, Olson 1963, Rostow 1960, Tilly 1985). While overt and covert superpower

support in these civil wars, such as in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and several other sites around the

globe are glaring examples, the general effect of the Cold War rivalry rarely enter analyses
 4

centrally, whether regarding the instigation of civil war or its durability. Indeed, US

policymakers are sometime portrayed as hapless victims in search of stability (Kissinger 1959).

American diplomatic historians, on the other hand, have focused directly on the foreign policy

actions of the US and the USSR in terms of how rivalry caused, sustained, and sometimes ended

Third World wars (Gaddis 1997, Jones 2001, LaFeber 1983, Westad 2007). Some even term

the Cold War the “third world´s war” (Ferguson 2010). To what extent is superpower rivalry

and the involvement of great powers (regional powers) in the politics of others undervalued in

the theoretical and empirical study of civil war? How might we incorporate the idea of proxy

war in the study of civil war to broaden the general understanding of how civil wars occur and

end? Indeed, according to many observers, we are entering a multipolar era where the strategic

objectives of great powers are likely to be played out in proxy wars (Mumford 2013, Sawers

2016). As Kalevi Holsti (1996:127) has put it “intervention of one kind, or the other, has

become the norm” in international relations.

2. The international system and civil war

Structural realists pin their analyses of international relations on the configuration of power in

the global system (Gilpin 1981, Organski and Kugler 1980, Waltz 2001). These scholars,

though preoccupied with great power politics and questions of interstate war, focus on system

polarity as a defining factor explaining interstate behaviour related to the search for security

and relative advantage vis-à-vis other powers through geopolitical struggle, alliance politics,

and the peddling of influence. Indeed, international conflict is viewed as a form of rivalry that

relates to issues of geopolitical expansion and territorial security (Colaresi and Thompson 2002,

Rasler and Thompson 2006). The Cold War period of extreme bipolarity is generally thought

of as being special. This bipolar world began immediately following the end of World War II,

lasting roughly 40 years and is characterised by intense superpower rivalry between the United
 5

States and the Soviet Union, explained simply as the natural outcome of a bipolar concentration

of power in the international system (Waltz 2000). Indeed, Marquis Alexis de Tocqueville,

predicted the Cold War almost two hundred years before by writing:

“There are now two great nations in the world…the Russians and the Anglo-
Americans…Each seems called by some secret design of providence one day
to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world” (Cited in Gaddis 1997: 1).

The “secret design of providence” de Tocqueville refers to is possibly his astute assessment of

the power that these two countries would one day muster judging simply by their enormous

geographical size, potential population growth, and access to natural resources; i.e. the

ingredients of economic and military power.

Alexis de Tocqueville´s prophecy came to pass when the wartime alliance between the

US and the USSR broke down immediately following the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. In

effect, the US and the USSR emerged as the two most powerful states based on military might

and productive capacity. Given the devastation of Europe and the threat of Soviet expansion,

the US could not retreat into isolationism, as it had done after the First World War. Inevitably,

the US designs for the post-war global order clashed with the Soviet vision. This clash can be

traced to the fundamental antipathies between the US´s liberal vision of a world order and the

Soviet vision premised on World revolution, now steered by a mistrustful Stalin that hoped to

bring security to the USSR by annexing territory (Gaddis 1997). As Westad (2007) notes,

superpower rivalry was also driven by underlying sympathies within both camps for extending

their own versions of modernity to other nations throughout the world. According to many

historians, thus, the Cold war represents a struggle for ‘world domination’ by two superpowers,

who now each possessed nuclear weapons that could have destroyed the planet in any potential

direct armed confrontation (Brodie 1973, Mueller 1995, Snow 1987). The fact that the Cold

War ended without a major power war has led some to refer to this period as the “long peace”,

but the rest of the world was hardly peaceful, nor spared the effects of superpower struggle
 6

(David 1997, Gaddis 1989). Unable to fight each other directly because of mutual assured

destruction (MAD), the superpowers fought “proxy wars” throughout the world, often by

directly intervening with troops and by actively supporting one or another´s side with material

assistance (Halperin 1963, Mumford 2013, Snow 1996).

Reluctant to confront the USSR militarily, the US adopted a strategy of containment

based on the advice of the long-time Soviet expert George F. Kennan, who advised the

administration in the infamous “long telegram” to Washington to draw a line in the sand and

resist further Soviet expansion outside its sphere of influence. The fall of China to communism

and the Korean war highlighted the need for resisting communist aggression across the world,

even to try to “roll back” communist influence where it had taken root. The US saw communist

infiltration as a major threat to national security because poor, premodern societies around the

world were thought to be vulnerable to communist propaganda, and these nations, particularly

in Latin America, South East Asia and Africa were expected to fall like dominoes. The domino

theory in turn provoked the US to act to fight communist/Soviet expansion everywhere

vigorously, because failure to act in one location meant its inevitable spread to others (Jones

2001, Westad 2007). An extremely distrustful Soviet leadership saw US actions in the same

way that the US viewed the Soviets, as expansionist and hostile to communism. As Westad

2007: 72) writes:

By the early 1960s, Soviet ideology had already reached a stage where the
competition for influence in the Third World was an essential part of the
existence of socialism … The Soviet Union´s role was to help make the world
safe for revolution.

Indeed, the Cold War led to the development of elaborate security apparatuses in both countries,

geared to fight an existential struggle, spanning the globe (Westad 2007). 1 By the time President

1For excellent recent histories of the activities of the CIA, see Kinzer, Stephen. 2013. The
Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Alan Dulles, and Their Secret World War. New York: Times
Books, Prados, John. 2006. Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the Cia. Chicago, IL:
 7

Eisenhower left office, he was to warn of a military-industrial complex driving US foreign

policy because of the arms race that had developed and the fear that escalation of tensions would

make war between the superpowers inevitable. President Truman´s statement quoted above

reflects the logic of the Truman Doctrine, but the same can be said of the Brezhnev Doctrine,

and the Chinese communists´ commitment to support national liberation movements as cited in

Chairman Mao´s statement above. The Soviet-Chinese rivalry also drove both sides to buy

influence in the politics of many newly-liberated countries (Westad 2007). It is not just the Cold

War superpower rivalry that may affect civil wars in an exogenous manner, but all great power

aspirants that see themselves as regional and global powers generally influence the foreign and

domestic politics of other states, which relate to the onset of violence, particularly in weak-state

environments. Before understanding the phenomenon of proxy war, I examine the theoretical

bases on which the issue of proxiness makes sense in extant explanations of civil war.

3. Theory: Non-endogenous sources of civil war feasibility

As stated earlier, until recently, most studies of civil war and political violence focused on

theories of revolution, where Cold War conflicts in the Third World are characterized as peasant

revolts, revolutions of rising expectations, and as ethnic and class wars, much of it driven by

the desire of ordinary people to be free of repressive states (Gurr 1970). These theories came

under criticism from scholars of rational choice because where revolutions and revolts were

expected, they mostly failed to materialize (Tullock 1987). Rational choice theorists argued that

people don’t just revolt against states because the “logic of collective action” prevented people

from organizing costly conflict against states (Skocpol 1979, Tullock 1971). As Gordon

Tullock (1987: 53) put it:

Ivan R. Dee Publishers, Weiner, Tim. 2007. The Legacy of Ashes: The History of the Cia.
New York: Doubleday.
 8

In the mythology of revolution, the people rising to throw off a tyrannical

ruler is the dominant theme ... Most of the mythology concerns a people
driven beyond endurance by the vicious oppression of their masters rising
up and establishing a noble and just republic. I regret to say that this myth
is mainly myth.

The most recent attack on theories addressing the causes of war as based on political

and social “grievances”, or as “justice-seeking” movements, came in the form of several

publications from the World Bank. Paul Collier, as the head of the World Bank´s development

research section, generated what is now some of the most widely-cited studies on civil war.

Collier and colleagues argued that what explained conflict is what enabled large finances for

conducting war against organized state forces. In other words, their insight bound factors that

generate large violence, the ability to generate rebel income, and the motivation to join rebellion

in one source that also solved the collective action problem. People join rebellions for its

relative financial attraction and rebellions exist because they can be financed, largely through

what Collier termed “quasi-criminal” activity (Collier 2000). Instead of “justice-seeking”,

conflict could be explained by “loot-seeking” behaviour. The empirical analyses showed that

typically grievance-causing factors, such as the lack of democracy and income inequality, did

not predict the outbreak of conflict as much as did the availability of lootable income, such as

natural resources, and widespread poverty (Collier and Sambanis 2005, Collier, Hoeffler and

Rohner 2009, Collier and Hoeffler 2001). Poverty mattered because it lowered the opportunity

costs of individuals to engage in costly forms of behaviour and because it lowered the costs of

rebel labour. However one might argue against the view that rebellion is only about groups

forming to profit from war, the basic insight from the World Bank´s studies are clear—conflict

requires finance to be feasible! Violence, in other words, has to be funded.

Many others confirmed the basic findings of the World Bank studies, which is that

grievance-causing factors mattered less that opportunity for rebellion, or feasibility-related

 9

factors (de Soysa 2002, Fearon and Laitin 2003). However, rather than loot-seeking as a

motivation for war, others pointed out that what matters is state capacity because a civil war

only exists due to a state´s loss of monopoly over the use of force. Poverty, captured by income

per capita, proxies a weak state because it limits the amount of taxes that allow a state to be

administratively efficient. Weak states, thus, are easily targeted by armed groups because of the

technology of insurgency, which favours small bands of lightly-armed groups against

(dis)organized state forces (Fearon and Laitin 2003). Thus, rather than simply the availability

of lootable income, such as natural resources, poverty and the availability of natural resources

capture features of weak state capacity for preventing and overcoming insurgency (de Soysa

and Neumayer 2007, Fearon 2005). Since insurgency is a cheap form of warfare and does not

require much finance, the weak state/insurgency explanation and Collier´s “looting rebels”

explanation dominate theoretical and empirical discussions of civil war. Indeed, empirical

studies generally report robust results only for a handful of variables. Despite the heavy

theorizing, empirical models of civil war have poor predictive power (Hegre and Sambanis

2006, Ward, Greenhill and Bakke 2010). Is leaving out exogenous sources of civil war,

particularly systemic factors and power rivalries, a weakness of existing explanations?

The studies discussed above have generally theorized about the endogenous sources of

civil war. They explicitly focus on individual and state-level factors. Theories of conflict,

particularly of conflict duration, view armed conflict as a result of bargaining failure (Fearon

1995). Rational actors engage in this costly, seemingly-irrational form of behaviour because

each side has little incentive to negotiate with the other due to the so-called commitment

problem. Conflicts, particularly of an ethnic nature persist because of bargaining failure. Each

side cannot trust the other to keep their word. Fearon and Laitin (2010), for example, argue that

the longest civil wars are those which they call “sons of the soil” conflicts, where a small

territorially-based minority fights a majority-controlled state because of in-migration by the

 10

majority into minority “homelands.” These “ethnic” conflicts last long because the rebels do

not trust the government to keep its word after rebels disband. Importantly, these studies found

no difference between the Cold War era marked by intense superpower rivalry, a view generally

not shared by US diplomatic historians, who write about the Cold War as an era of proxy war

in a global geopolitical and ideological struggle. Fearon (2003: 77-78) writes:

The prevalence of civil war in the 1990s is not due to the end of the Cold
War and associated changes in the international system.

While many empirical studies try to model exogenous sources of finance, for example, from

ethnic diasporas, the effects of the Cold War do not enter the analyses directly. Typically,

empirical studies employ a dummy variable capturing the Cold War era, which most find not

to matter compared with the post-Cold War era. Curiously, however, these studies also report

that previous conflict experience is a strong predictor of future conflict. These results were

generally explained as the effects of the accumulation of “conflict-specific capital” in the form

of hatreds, left-over stockpiles of weapons, and the perpetuation of poverty (Collier et al. 2003).

Surely then, the Cold War era might have mattered in terms of lingering effects of Cold War

era conflict? Indeed, some historians trace the origins of many of today´s conflicts to the

geopolitics of the Cold War (Westad 2007). What exactly is conflict-specific capital and how

important it this for making conflict feasible? The role of great power politics in the instigation

and duration of civil war has been a noticeably absent notion in the study of the causes of

internal political violence and civil war. At least one recent study that addresses the question of

overt and covert CIA and KGB support to countries during the Cold War reports that CIA

interventions have long-term consequences for democratization (Berger et al. 2013a). Why then

might such interventions not affect the long-term conflict-proneness of countries?

Recently, at least two sets of studies have looked directly at Cold War factors to explain

the nature of civil war during the Cold War. The first looks at how partisan politics in the United
 11

States helped to drive civil war during the Cold War years (Albornoz and Hauk 2014). Albornoz

and Hauk argue that Republican US presidents were more likely to be hawkish and intervene

in the internal struggles of other countries militarily, particularly when their popularity at home

was low. They show statistical evidence in support of their proposition, and find that

Republican presidents were more likely to use the CIA in overt and covert operations abroad. I

do not directly address the veracity of this issue and the nature of the empirical evidence, but

to think that superpower rivalry beginning with President Truman, a Democrat, whose policy

of containment is an artefact of US domestic politics rather than the grave rivalry developing

with the USSR does considerable violence to history. While it is true that Republican presidents

were more likely to use force abroad, whether they were more likely to start civil wars is a novel

and perhaps more difficult proposition to demonstrate. However, the subject of diversionary

war is prominent in terms of theories of international war and could possibly be more closely

examined in this context in the future (Ostrom and Job 1986).

Others look at the Cold War era to explain the changing nature of civil war, particularly

in terms of the features of war fighting itself, usually addressed in terms of the technology of

warfare (Balcells and Kalyvas 2014, Kalyvas and Balcells 2010). Kalyvas and Balcells (2010,

2014) argue that during the Cold War, insurgents and governments were bolstered by

superpower support, which led to a form of robust insurgency, characterized as relatively large

formation irregular war, supported by masses of people—the so-called “peoples’ wars” or wars

of national liberation. They argue that these wars often led to rebel victories. States, they argue,

often win against primitive rebellions, which are characterized by loosely-organized bands of

insurgents that are able to take advantage of rough terrain and hit-and-run tactics. Their main

argument about the post-Cold War era is that absent Cold War support, states and rebels are

symmetrically balanced, leading to wars that are conventionally fought, but due to the lack of

external support and ideologically-motivated movements, they are less disciplined. They call
 12

these types of war symmetric non-conventional wars characterizing today´s conflicts. They

criticize the view expounded by Fearon and Laitin (2003) that the technology of insurgency is

a constant, but rather that the mode of financing war, in other words its financial feasibility,

shapes the nature of war fighting. Thus, the Cold War era conflicts for them were more

disciplined because of the constraining factors attached to support from superpowers. It is of

course quite hard to evaluate whether superpower-supported conflicts were less bloody and less

harmful to civilian interests than the current conflicts without closer analysis of data. Today we

have a globalized media with twenty-four-hour coverage and pictures that were absent during

the conflict in Biafra, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, not to mention a great deal of civilian

suffering in Vietnam. More importantly, however, this study too ignores the nature of funding

from other great powers, particularly regional powers, of both post-Cold War and Cold War

conflicts.

Consider for example the so-called ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, which started off in the

mid-to-late 1970s with violence breaking out among several rival Tamil-minority rebel groups,

which fought each other and the state for supremacy and the allegiance of the Tamil population.

Out of several rebel groups, many of them sworn enemies of the others, The Liberation Tigers

of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) under the leadership of Vellupillai Prabakharan gained supremacy,

largely due to training and funding received from the Indian government and the regional

government of Tamil Nadu in India (Narayan Swamy 2010). The LTTE used largely hit-and-

run tactics against a weak Sri Lankan military and survived narrowly by avoiding defeat for

decades, slowly building up a base of off shore funding by taxing the Tamil diaspora abroad

and acquiring legal and illegal businesses.2 After 20 years, the group emerged as a major

conventional force, commanding finances of almost 350 million dollars in revenue per year,

2Prabakharan narrowly escaped capture on two occasions by fleeing to India, where he was
even jailed for a brief period.
 13

and even defeating the Sri Lankan army in several conventional pitched battles. Yet, in May

2009, after several rounds of failed negotiations, the LTTE was decisively beaten on the battle

field, and its entire leadership either killed or captured in the space of a few months. Why? In

this case, by simply studying the changing technology of war fighting, it is not clear how an

extremely astute rebel leader, Vellupillai Prabakharan, who built up one of the most formidable

rebel armies and survived 30 years of intensive insurgency, would face such a crushing defeat.

Nor is it clear where the lessons of war fighting reveals about micro processes. Why was a

successful technology suddenly proven wanting? It is also unclear why knowing how the war

was fought tell us much about its origins, or the motivations of people that did not join the

movement, or why some of the LTTE´s forces defected to the state, or other micro-processes

of value? One very strong plausible reason for the defeat of the LTTE after 9/11 was simply

how international systemic factors and great power politics of the region turned against the

LTTE and made war making difficult. The so-called ethnic war in Sri Lanka is best explained

in terms of dynamics relating to how proxy war support matters, where proxy-war dynamics

explain why bargaining failure occurs, and how war is made feasible, often for reasons lying in

exogenous factors rather than the local. It is hard, at least from the Sri Lankan illustration, to

conclude that the nature of external support for war alone can shape the way they are fought.

I approach the Cold War´s effects on civil war in a similar light, from the point of view

of how superpower struggle increased the feasibility of groups to organize violence. Rebels and

states face endogenous and exogenous, or systemic constrains for initiating and sustaining war.

The European peace in the post-War years might not be explained only because the issues that

drove civil wars in Europe had suddenly dissipated, but rather as a direct result of the hegemony

of the United States, in its own sphere of influence, and the Soviet Union, in its own sphere of

influence. Superpower rivalry elsewhere provide ample room for further understanding how

small wars got generated and sustained over long periods of time. The decline of organized
 14

violence in the post-Cold War world may not mean that external factors matter less in this era,

but the argument is that absent superpower rivalry, the enabling environment for civil wars,

although diminished, may also increase space for other powers, such as India, China, Iran, and

Saudi Arabia, not to mention powerful non-state actors, to fill systemic vacuums and further

geopolitical interests by supporting proxy wars. According to many, an era of proxy war due to

great-power geopolitics is already intensifying (Klare 2008, Sawers 2016). Civil war theory

may need to incorporate the external with internal politics in an inverted version of “two-level

games” as espoused in many theories of international politics (Putnam 1988).

Looking simply at the trend in the incidence and onsets of civil wars in the post-war years

is illustrative because one can examine the temporal and spatial patterns to clue us into the

systemic factors that may in fact be driving them. The past few decades have seen a noticeable

decline of violence, accentuated sharply since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end

of the Cold War (Fearon and Laitin 2003, Gleditsch 2008). Figure 1 displays the trends in

conflicts, where at least 25 deaths have occurred in a single year between 1946 and 2014.

Figure 1.

The Global Risk of the Incidence and Onset of Civil War,

1947-2014
0.25

0.2
RISK OF CIVIL WAR

0.15
incidence
onset(5)
0.1
onset(1)

0.05

0
1954

1987
1948
1951

1957
1960
1963
1966
1969
1972
1975
1978
1981
1984

1990
1993
1996
1999
2002
2005
2008
2011
year

Source: UCDP (2016) armed conflict incidence an onset determined at 25 battle deaths and above.
 15

Clearly, something about the Cold War era mattered—greatly. As more countries gradually

entered the international system as independent entities after the end of World War II, there

was commensurately a steady increase in the risk of civil war, much of it because of the

accumulation of ongoing wars over time. This trend is replicated by data that use different

battle-death thresholds to identify wars (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Balcells and Kalyvas 2014).

The risk peaked around 1991 and thereafter declined sharply. This peak is often explained as

the sudden onsets of the “end of empire” wars with the dissolution of the USSR and Yugoslavia

(Kalyvas and Balcells 2010). However, the two lines at the bottom of the figure show that onsets

of civil war during and after the Cold War remain fairly uniform. This temporal pattern, while

suggesting that the Cold War mattered, and that many conflicts have died since 1991, reveals a

fairly limited picture. The geographical variation in conflict during and after the Cold War,

however, potentially reveals more. Figure 2, shows the regional trends in civil war since World

War II. As seen there,

Figure 2.

Regional Risk of Civil War, 1946-2014

0.5

0.45

0.4

0.35

0.3

0.25

0.2

0.15

0.1

0.05

0
1959

1965

1979

1985

2005
1947
1949
1951
1953
1955
1957

1961
1963

1967
1969
1971
1973
1975
1977

1981
1983

1987
1989
1991
1993
1995
1997
1999
2001
2003

2007
2009
2011
2013
year

ssa we mena la asia

 16

Source: UCDP (2016) armed conflict incidence an onset determined at 25 battle deaths and above.

the most noticeable drop in the risk of civil war since 1990 has been in Latin America. East and

South East Asia, which had the highest risk in the early days of the Cold War has also declined.

Indeed, Latin America and East and South East Asia were hot superpower battle grounds and

several of the countries in these regions hosted US and Soviet bases, surrogate states of both

superpowers, and they hosted wars in which the superpowers directly intervened. Simply

examining endogenous factors in Latin America would not reveal why Latin American wars

have now diminished to nothing. Almost all regions have seen declines except for North Africa

and Middle East (MENA), which has had a relatively high but steady risk throughout the Cold

War period, but it suddenly rises steeply after the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks on the

US and the subsequent war on terror. Again, this highly stylized view from the trend data

suggest something about the importance of great power politics as it affects the systemic risk

of civil war. Why the MENA region should see such a massive increase the year following the

9/11 attacks cannot just be coincidental, nor the sudden decline of civil war in Latin American

be explained easily only by factors endogenous to the individual countries in the region, many

of which are plagued by poverty, high inequality, and high levels of interpersonal violence, or

conditions often associated with state failure and war (Rivera 2016).

4. Great power rivalry & proxy war theory

Many have argued that endogenous factors alone might be fairly poor at explaining why civil

war occurs (Gleditsch 2007, Gleditsch et al. 2010). These studies correctly point out that

conflicts may cluster in space, spill over borders, cut-across ethnic and political groups that

straddle borders, and be supported and sustained by transnational sources of finance, including

issues relating to interdependencies among rebel groups and the consequences of refugee flows.

These studies, however, focus on geographic interdependence between conflicts and dynamics
 17

related to wars in the neighbourhood spilling over. There is little work that directly address

proxy aspects of civil war, both in terms of theory and empirics. Nor have any studies, as far as

I am aware, incorporated regional power rivalries when modelling the risk of civil war onset

and duration. I address some areas in empirical research that may begin to address these

concerns. First, however, I look at the idea of proxy war and its implications for civil war

research.

The Oxford Living Dictionary online (OLD) defines a proxy war as “a war instigated

by a major power which does not itself become involved.” 3 Indeed, all the “example sentences”

provided by OLD relate to the Cold War funding of civil wars by the two superpowers. Andrew

Mumford (2013: 11) writes,

“Proxy wars are the indirect engagement in a conflict by third parties wishing to
influence its strategic outcome…in short, proxy wars are the logical replacement
for states seeking to further their own strategic goals yet at the same time avoid
engaging in direct, costly and bloody warfare.”

A proxy war thus is a war fought at the behest of a third party. It is hard to imagine, thus, that

the Cold War strategic struggles between the two superpowers would not have had an influence

on almost all countries decolonizing from former empires, or that political rivals jostling for

power were unlikely to tap into sources of support from outside. Proxy wars are fought not just

by great powers willing a war but by actively participating in the instigation and support of

specific groups. These wars are fought by extending direct support, such as the supply of one´s

own nationals as combatants, training of indigenous combatants and mercenaries, supply of

weapons and other material, logistical support, safe havens, and political support among other

great powers, and support for surrogates in international fora (Mumford 2013). As direct

confrontation between super/major/regional powers has become costlier in terms of the

3 See https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/proxy_war (accessed 15, January 2017).

 18

violation of international law and norms and in terms of finances, the inclination to deploy

proxies has strengthened.

The readiness of great powers to get involved in local affairs is not lost on local actors

either. During the Cold War, many leaders of countries, such as Israel, Egypt, Algeria, Vietnam,

and many independent African states, switched sides at one time or another based, not on

ideological commitment to one side or the other, but on expected support as a result of

geopolitical struggle. It is undeniable that several conflicts were begun directly by the

Superpowers, such as the US´s funding of the Contra rebels against the Soviet-backed

Sandanista regime in Nicaragua, or the CIA´s support for the Mujahedin fighters in

Afghanistan. The CIA and the KGB actively sought to destabilize each other´s proxy regimes

in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Given this situation, one needs also to ask whether rebels

might have appeared in some places without the knowledge that a potential patron might be

interested in your cause, willing to bankroll the movement. As an example, Vellupilai

Prabakharan, the leader of the LTTE guerrilla movement in Sri Lanka was initially strongly

Marxist before he became a committed ethnic separatist, possibly as a way to attract Soviet

attention since the then Sri Lankan government flirted with the idea of offering the US

government a very strategic base at Trincomalee harbour (Narayan Swamy 2010). Clearly,

knowing if a superpower, or regional power, in this case India, might support you is endogenous

to the decision to rebel and affects the process of bargaining. Indeed, it is hard to imagine rebel

advantages in battle against the organized forces of governments without external support.

One interesting issue around proxy wars is that even if the some of the central issues are

related directly to the warring parties, such as the desire for more political rights, or ethnic

group emancipation from discrimination, the paymasters are able by and large to pull the strings

of these wars in ways which may constrain a domestic bargain. Since great powers can simply

use their financial and political muscle, they can in many instances also pull the plug on
 19

fighting. For example, Morton Halperin, writing in 1963, argued that “local wars” involving

the superpowers did not have the potential to escalate into all-out war because the US and

Soviets had extremely limited aims for a number of reasons. He suggested four main reasons

for why superpower proxy wars remain limited. First, both powers had fairly limited foreign

policy interests in the countries that required their assistance. Secondly, they had a mutual

desire to avoid nuclear confrontation, for avoiding a regional or global conflagration over a

distant war. Third, both parties understood the role of force; they both subscribed to the idea

that fighting must be limited, for limited aims, so as to avoid escalation, and fourthly, the

domestic aims of the two countries and the public sentiment were directed at avoiding war

rather than open confrontation. Indeed, Balcells and Kalyvas (2014) suggest that Cold War

conflicts were “tamer” because they ended in rebel victory due to robust insurgency and the

ideological nature of the movements, but it could very well be because of the restraining

influence of superpowers, who avoided the dangers of direct confrontation, an issue that may

not similarly concern all great powers that may fight a proxy war, such as we have seen in the

case of Indian involvement in Sri Lanka, Syrian involvement in Lebanon, Russian involvement

in Syria and the Ukraine recently, nor the Saudi involvement in Yemen.

5. Conclusions

Until recently, the idea that civil wars in the Third World might be instigated and nurtured by

the strategic interests of great powers rarely entered theoretical and empirical discussions of the

general causes of political violence and rebellion. This issue is all the more surprising given the

heavy focus of Sovietologists and US diplomatic historians on the idea of superpower rivalry

as a cause of internal conflicts in peripheral countries. The social science scholarship on civil

war has generally avoided the inclusion of superpower rivalry and great power geopolitical

struggle directly in explanations of civil war. Many descriptions of the concerns of the US and
 20

the USSR, which were locked in a deadly existential struggle during the Cold War treats

peripheral wars in the Third World as a nuisance in the US´s search for global stability (Halperin

1963, Kissinger 1959). In the words of Donald Snow, Third World civil wars were “distant

thunder” with no vital national interests at stake for superpowers (Snow 1997). Yet, the

exigencies of superpower rivalry and the “necessary peace” in terms of avoiding direct

confrontation with each other, the superpowers fought proxy wars by challenging each other

for influence in distant places (Snow 1987). Indeed, some historians of US foreign relations see

the Cold War era struggles between the superpowers as “global war” (Ferguson 2010, Westad

2007). Others have identified the conscious policies of the US of supporting capitalist dictators

during the Cold War as a recipe for violence (LaFeber 1983). Recently, Cold War era civil wars

have entered analyses directly (Albornoz and Hauk 2014, Kalyvas and Balcells 2010). The

interest in the Cold War from the angle of civil war theory has focused on the quality of the

war, juxtaposing post-Cold War conflicts as being different. Despite the heavy focus on

opportunity factors, or the feasibility of rebellion as one of the critical reasons for why civil war

occurs, very little theorizing has directly incorporated great power rivalry and systemic effects

on the risk of civil war from the angle of how proxy war drives the feasibility of organizing

violence.

Recent data on superpower activity in terms of CIA and KGB support to surrogate

regimes in the developing world, offers the opportunity for future studies to probe interesting

propositions about the causes and effects of proxy wars (Berger et al. 2013a, Berger et al.

2013b). Indeed, data on great power rivalry also allows scholars to broaden the scope of

understanding how systemic effects compound problems of political violence in countries in

terms of geopolitical, ethnic, or religiously-motivated rivalries (Thompson 2001). Before this

can happen, however, a proper understanding of how proxy wars are fought and what it means

to existing theory of civil war needs to be more closely examined. Recent research on civil war,
 21

perhaps correctly, has moved in the direction of disaggregating country-level factors, using

sophisticated GIS methodology to understand the spread of fighting and other dynamic

processes. Such efforts might very well be supplemented with understanding processes that

aggregate up in two-level models because ultimately, great powers and powers with ambitions

of regional hegemony have rarely remained disinterested agents in the political misfortunes of

other countries, particularly since organized violence is financially costly and often driven by

stakes large enough to warrant the interests of powerful state and non-state actors.

Unfortunately, the issue of proxy war has thus far been neglected in the theoretical and

empirical models of civil war. Incorporating great power politics is likely to increase our

understanding of why civil wars occur and how they are fought, an enterprise that has begun to

take shape with recent scholarship (Kalyvas and Balcells 2010).

 22

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