Polarization, Foreign Military Intervention, and Civil Conflict
In a behavioral model of civil conflict, foreign military intervention alters the resources available to warring groups and their probability of winning. The model highlights the importance of distributional measures along with the modifying effect...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/486121511208828389/Polarization-foreign-military-intervention-and-civil-conflict http://hdl.handle.net/10986/28909 |
| Summary: | In a behavioral model of civil conflict,
foreign military intervention alters the resources available
to warring groups and their probability of winning. The
model highlights the importance of distributional measures
along with the modifying effect of the intervention for
conflict incidence. The paper confirms empirically the
finding in the literature that ethnic polarization is a
robust predictor of civil war, but it also finds evidence
that religious polarization is positively and significantly
associated with civil conflict in the presence of foreign
military intervention of non-humanitarian and non-neutral
nature. Such external interventions exacerbate religious
polarization, leading to high-intensity conflicts in the
Middle East and North Africa region, but not in the rest of
the world. These results suggest that, unlike in the rest of
the world, where civil conflicts are mostly about a public
prize linked to ethnic polarization, in the Middle East and
North Africa they are mostly about a sectarian-related
public prize. The results are robust to allowing different
definitions of conflict, model specifications, and data time
spans, and to controlling for other types of foreign
military interventions. |
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