1 The Spread of Violent Civil Conflict: Rare, State-Driven, and Preventable by Nathan Wolcott Black B.A. History Rice University, 2006 SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF POLITCAL SCIENCE IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JUNE 2012 © 2012 Nathan Wolcott Black. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of Author: __________________________________________________ Department of Political Science April 30, 2012 Certified by: __________________________________________________________ Kenneth A. Oye Associate Professor of Political Science Thesis Supervisor Accepted by:__________________________________________________________ Roger Petersen Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science Chairman, Graduate Program Committee 2 3 The Spread of Violent Civil Conflict: Rare, State-Driven, and Preventable by Nathan Wolcott Black Submitted to the Department of Political Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on April 30, 2012 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science ABSTRACT This dissertation advances and tests an explanation for the spread of violent civil conflict from one state to another. The fear of such “substate conflict contagion” is frequently invoked by American policymakers as a justification for military intervention in ongoing substate conflicts — the argument these policymakers often make is that conflicts left uncontained now will spread and become a more pertinent security threat later. My State Action Explanation is that substate conflict contagion is not the sole product of nonstate factors such as transnational rebel networks and arms flows, nor of the structural factors such as poverty that make internal conflict more likely in general. Rather, at least one of three deliberate state government actions is generally required for a conflict to spread, making substate conflict contagion both less common and more state-driven — and hence more preventable — than is often believed. These state actions include Evangelization, the deliberate encouragement of conflict abroad by former rebel groups that have taken over their home government; Expulsion, the deliberate movement of combatants across borders by state governments in conflict; and Meddling with Overt Partiality, the deliberate interference in another state’s conflict by a state government that subsequently leads to conflict in the interfering state. After introducing this State Action Explanation, I probe its empirical plausibility by identifying 84 cases of substate conflict contagion between 1946 and 2007, and showing that at least one of these three state actions was present and involved in most of these 84 cases. I then conduct two regional tests of the explanation, in Central America (1978-1996) and Southeast Asia (1959-1980). I argue that state actions appear to have been necessary for most of the contagion cases in both of these regions, and that the absence of state actions appears to best explain the cases in which conflicts did not spread. Thesis Supervisor: Kenneth A. Oye Title: Associate Professor of Political Science 4 Acknowledgments No research project as big as this one is ever truly the product of one person. As I try to come up with a list of people and organizations to thank for their support of this dissertation, I am thoroughly overwhelmed, and now have a sense of how people must have felt when they tried to read this beast. So a long list follows below — and please accept my apologies if you have been left out! First, I must thank Kenneth A. Oye, my dissertation chair, who grabbed this topic with gusto from our first meeting and never let up in either his enthusiasm or in his willingness to keep pushing me. He is the best chair I could have had for this type of project, because we needed to be creative and methodologically eclectic — both qualities he has in spades. Fotini Christia was a key member of the committee; the short length of time that had elapsed since her own dissertation gave her a closeness to the process that was invaluable. She has also been a tremendous resource during my job search, which I greatly appreciate. Roger Petersen and Barry Posen both offered key advice as well. It was Roger’s idea to study contagion at the regional level of analysis, which I think improved the case study chapters markedly. Barry, despite being my fourth (and ostensibly peripheral) committee member, read every word of this dissertation and had the incisive line comments to prove it, at which I am both astounded and grateful. If my faculty committee members guided the project at 30,000 feet, it was my fellow graduate students who suffered alongside me through the diabolical details. In the three years I worked on this dissertation, I incessantly beat my colleagues over the head with chapter drafts and practice talks (to say nothing of the two years before this project even started). My thanks go to the entire crop of MIT Political Science graduate students, past and present, but I am particularly grateful to Dan Altman, Sameer Lalwani, Miranda Priebe, Josh Shifrinson, and David Weinberg, who saw my work so often over the years that it probably haunts their dreams. Speaking of people I haunted, I must also thank the numerous area experts who helped me with my codings in Chapter 3 — I asked difficult, sometimes discipline-busting questions of them, and their responses were not only helpful but remarkably quick. For a productive and informative summer in Central America in 2011 that facilitated much of the analysis in Chapter 4, I have a particularly long list of people and organizations to thank. First, I wish to thank my 24 interview subjects in Belize, Costa Rica, and Honduras, who are identified by name in Chapter 4 unless anonymity was requested. Given the continuing political sensitivity of the matters we discussed, I was pleasantly surprised by the access I was granted and the candor of the current and former officials I spoke with. My interpreters in Costa Rica, Marcela Gómez and Luis Hernandez, deserve great thanks for opening doors that would have otherwise remained linguistically shut to me, and Johnny Meoño at the University of Costa Rica also has my gratitude for providing key contacts. The Hotel Aranjuez in San José was an excellent, convenient, and hospitable refuge. In Belize, I wish to thank Elsie Alpuche at the George Price Centre for Peace and Development and Mary Alpuche and others at the Belize Archives and Records Service for their assistance with my archival research. Diana Locke and Idelso Leslie at the Belize Ministry of Foreign Affairs were invaluable in connecting me to the 5 current and former policymakers I wished to speak with in-country. I greatly enjoyed staying at the Bull Frog Inn in Belmopan and getting to know the friendly staff. Finally, I must re-thank (since they were among my interview subjects) Bobby (Robert) Leslie and René Villanueva, Sr. for their above-and-beyond hospitality to a stranger from the north asking strange questions. Turning to institutions now, I thank the Smith Richardson Foundation for providing me a World Politics and Statecraft Fellowship to support my trip to Central America, and Paula Kreutzer at the MIT Political Science Department for helping administer the grant. All interviews conducted during the trip were approved by the MIT Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects, protocol number 1008003963. In the 2011-2012 academic year, Steve Miller, Steve Walt, and Susan Lynch at the International Security Program of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs provided me an excellent environment in which to finish writing my dissertation and share it with a wider audience. Finally, I must give a special acknowledgment to the Tobin Project (Sidharth Shah in particular), not only because they funded me for a portion of the writing process, but also because this dissertation idea was born in their conference room, as I argued with another participant in a Graduate Student Forum about the merits of U.S. military intervention in developing world civil conflicts. As I move on from graduate school, I hope to continue helping the Tobin Project any way I can in its mission to encourage policy-relevant social science research in the academy. Another key population that has suffered through the research and writing of this dissertation alongside me — and somewhat less voluntarily, I might add — is my family. In particular, my parents, Jim and Gwen Black, also read pretty much every word of this monster and provided a useful perspective on how the dissertation might be received outside of the ivory tower. Perhaps more importantly, my parents, brother Safford, and sister Carolyn helped create the environment that got me into an MIT PhD program in the first place. Finally, to Whitney, a fellow scholar who has shared my journey through the trials and tribulations of research, teaching, bureaucracy-slaying, rent-making — oh yeah, and marriage — this hard slog sure would’ve been less fun without you. My dissertation is dedicated to you with my love. 6 Table of Contents Chapter 1: The Puzzle of Substate Conflict Contagion…………………………….…7 Chapter 2: The State Action Explanation.……………………………………………43 Chapter 3: Explaining Actual Cases of Substate Conflict Contagion……………..…76 Chapter 4: Testing the State Action Explanation in Central America, 1978-1996…..198 Chapter 5: Testing the State Action Explanation in Southeast Asia, 1959-1980…….277 Chapter 6: Conclusion, Policy Implications, and Next Steps………………………...334 Chapter 7: Dissertation Appendix………………………………………………….....348 7 Chapter 1: The Puzzle of Substate Conflict Contagion The 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya was unusual in a number of respects.