Civil War and U.S. Foreign Influence∗

We study how foreign interventions affect civil war around the world. We explore both political and economic incentives for a gov-ernment to intervene in conflicts abroad. We test two predictions that allow us to identify the influence of foreign intervention on civil war incidence: (i) civil wars a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Facundo Albornoz, Esther Hauk
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2012
Subjects:
civil war
foreign influence
US politics. ∗Previously circulated as “Civil War and Foreign Influence”. We thank Sami Berlinski
Francesco Caselli
Benjamin J. Cohen
Matt Cole
Robert Elliott
Elliott
sami
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.645.3159
http://research.barcelonagse.eu/tmp/working_papers/480.pdf
Description
Summary:We study how foreign interventions affect civil war around the world. We explore both political and economic incentives for a gov-ernment to intervene in conflicts abroad. We test two predictions that allow us to identify the influence of foreign intervention on civil war incidence: (i) civil wars around the world are more likely under Re-publican governments and (ii) the probability of civil wars decreases with U.S. presidential approval rates. These results withstand sev-eral robustness checks and, overall, suggest that foreign influence is a sizable driver of domestic conflict. Using a IV approach, we also find CIA operations to be one of the channels of U.S. interventions in foreign conflicts.

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