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Despite untold human suffering, widespread destruction, and far-reaching destabilization, the fires of many of the world's most violent civil wars continue to burn. How can we explain costly and stalemated, yet seemingly endless, conflicts?
Wars Without End provides an answer. Bringing together battlefield bargaining dynamics, the escalatory pressures of interstate competition, and the systemic dimensions of geopolitical rivalry in civil wars, the book challenges traditional conceptions of "proxy war" by deriving new propositions about the strategic logics that motivate it. Combining statistics with detailed case studies, it explains how protracted fighting within states is linked to enduring competition
between them.
List of contents
- List of Acronyms
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Introduction
- 2. A Theory of Competitive Intervention in Civil War
- 3. External Meddling in Internal War: Tracking Global Trends, 1946-2009
- 4. Competitive Intervention and Protracted Civil War, 1946-2009
- 5. The Angolan MPLA-UNITA Civil War, 1975-1991
- 6. The Afghan Communist-Mujahideen Civil War, 1979-1992
- 7. Conclusion: Extensions, Implications, and Future Trajectories
- Appendices
- References
About the author
Noel Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His research explores external intervention in internal conflicts, limited war, and counterinsurgency. His work has been published in the
British Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, and
Political Science Research and Methods, among other venues, and has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the United States Institute of Peace. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Summary
Despite their untold human suffering, widespread destruction and loss, and far-reaching destabilization, the fires of many of the world's most violent civil wars continue to burn. In light of their devastating effects, how can we explain the intractability of costly and stalemated, yet seemingly endless, civil wars? By situating internal conflicts within the broader geopolitical environment in which they take place, Wars Without End provides an answer. It highlights the critical role of competitive intervention--opposing, simultaneous transfers of military assistance from different third-party states to both government and rebel combatants--in the dynamics, duration, and global prevalence of internal conflict. Providing a comprehensive theoretical and empirical account of this form of external meddling, it brings together battlefield bargaining dynamics, the escalatory pressures of interstate competition, and the systemic dimensions of geopolitical rivalry in civil wars to explain how protracted fighting within states is linked to enduring competition between them. In doing so, it challenges traditional conceptions of "proxy war" by deriving new propositions about the strategic logics that motivate it, offering new and productive angles on the behaviors of armed groups, the strategies of foreign interveners, and the trajectories of internal wars. Combining statistical analyses with detailed case studies drawing on fieldwork, original interviews, declassified intelligence reports, and archival research, the book explains competitive intervention's pernicious effects, documents its consequences for civil wars, and proposes policy prescriptions aimed at resolving some of today's most intractable conflicts.
