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International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2010

STATHIS N. KALYVAS  and
LAIA BALCELLS
STATHIS N. KALYVAS*
Affiliation:
Yale University
LAIA BALCELLS*
Affiliation:
Institute for Economic Analysis, CSIC
*
Stathis N. Kalyvas is Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science, Yale University, 201 Rosenkranz Hall, 115 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06520-8301 (stathis.kalyvas@yale.edu).
Laia Balcells is Researcher, Institute for Economic Analysis, Spanish Higher Council for Scientific Research, Campus UAB, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain (laia.balcells@iae.csic.es).
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Abstract

Because they are chiefly domestic conflicts, civil wars have been studied primarily from a perspective stressing domestic factors. We ask, instead, whether (and how) the international system shapes civil wars; we find that it does shape the way in which they are fought—their “technology of rebellion.” After disaggregating civil wars into irregular wars (or insurgencies), conventional wars, and symmetric nonconventional wars, we report a striking decline of irregular wars following the end of the Cold War, a remarkable transformation of internal conflict. Our analysis brings the international system back into the study of internal conflict. It specifies the connection between system polarity and the Cold War on the one hand and domestic warfare on the other hand. It also demonstrates that irregular war is not the paradigmatic mode of civil war as widely believed, but rather is closely associated with the structural characteristics of the Cold War.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 104 , Issue 3 , August 2010 , pp. 415 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2010

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