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In this paper, we have argued that much of the existing literature on civil war has suffered from taking an overly structural and state-centric view of conflict, or focused exclusively on group characteristics rather than organizations. Ultimately, intrastate conflicts consist of dyadic interac- tions between a government and one or more non-state insurgent actors. We have examined a simple model of dyadic interaction and its implications for conflict duration and outcome. We argued that strong insurgent groups should be more likely to mount effective challenges or obtain concessions from governments. We also expected that factors making it more difficult for states to launch decisive blows against insurgents should make conflict more likely to last longer. Moreover, we have argued that meaningful political alternatives to violence should increase the chances of a faster settlement. We believe that our empirical results provide strong support for many of our conjectures, and more generally, illustrate the possibility of making progress in studies of civil war by including information on non-state actors and their interactions with states. We make no claim, however, that the factors that we have concentrated on here are the only relevant dyadic conflict attributes in the study of civil war, and encourage additional re- search on dyadic characteristics of civil war and further use of our data.

Lack of attention to attributes of non-state actors is certainly not the only form of exces- sive state-centrism in existing cross-national studies of civil war. In particular, we believe that much of the empirical literature on civil war also suffers from a geographic aggregation bias. The characteristics that may motivate groups to take up arms are often inherently local, and may not bear any resemblance to national level aggregates. This can easily be seen in the context of many measures of ethnic heterogeneity and fractionalization. Minority groups seeking independence such as the Achenese in Indonesia are often a trivial fraction of the national population, and will

not exert much impact on ethnic fractionalization measures at the national level. Instead, looking at power relations between groups promises to improve upon our understanding of conflict proc- esses (see Buhaug, Cederman, and Rød 2008; Cederman and Girardin 2007). In future research, we wish to take into account how such local characteristics can influence dyadic interaction.

We also think that it is limiting to treat states as isolated entities, and ignore their rela- tionship with actors outside the country and processes transcending international boundaries. We have shown elsewhere that transnational factors such as conflicts in neighboring countries, inter- state rivalry, ethnic ties, and migration, influence the risk of civil war, even when we control for the main country characteristics believed to be associated with conflict (see AUTHOR). Such external features are also likely to influence dyadic interactions. For example, we would expect that insurgent groups that can mobilize resources among diasporas and maintain bases outside the boundaries of the state will be more impervious to repression. Even when states possess the technical capacity to repress, crossing international boundaries in efforts to retaliate against in- surgents creates additional risks (AUTHOR). We have collected data on the external dimensions of civil war, and will explore the impact of such linkages on outcomes at the dyadic level in fu- ture research.

Finally, there are many other possible approaches to disaggregating the units of analysis. In particular, we believe that the study of civil war can benefit from greater use of survey data at the micro level to understand mobilization, types of participation, and attitudes at the individual level, and how these influence war as an outcome at the macro level. Research using survey data has already found its place in conflict studies (see MacCulloch 2004, Humphries and Weinstein 2008).

Academic interest aside, we believe that our results have considerable relevance for poli- cies seeking to contain civil wars or limit their consequences. Leaving aside normative questions about whether rebellions (at least in some occasions) may originate from legitimate grievances, our results suggest that counterinsurgency strategies using military might alone are far less likely to be effective than is often assumed. Weak rebels in the periphery have defied vastly more pow- erful governments, and increasing government capabilities alone may not lead to shorter con- flicts. Most importantly, our results show that government victories become less likely as a con- flict wears on, even if the rebels appear to be significantly weaker. Therefore, governments fight- ing insurgencies must pursue alternative strategies. Rather than an exclusively military solution seeking to shore up governments in “weak states”, efforts to encourage non-violent dispute reso- lution mechanisms and enhance government responsiveness may ultimately be more effective in improving the prospect for peace.

Endnotes

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We thank ***.

1

Although conflict is usually studied as a dyadic phenomenon, disputes are of course not neces- sarily limited to only two parties, and extra-dyadic ties or relationships to other actors can clearly influence the risk of disputes (see Gleditsch and Gartzke 2007).

2

Other examples of dyadic analyses of conflict include DeRouen and Bercovitch (2008) on con- flict recurrence, Nilsson (2008) on conflict termination, and Svensson (2007) on mediation and negotiated settlements.

3

The most common goals are demands for territory/autonomy or political power/government. The specific demands are not important for our discussion here per se, although they tend to be associated with different types of potential rebels (i.e., peripheral groups vs. rival actors in the center) and therefore different patterns of conflict.

4

For example, the UK Broadcasting Act was amended in the late 1980s to prohibit direct broad- cast of statements by individuals seen as supporters of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and the 1972 Anti-Radical Decree in the Federal Republic of Germany barring individuals from public sector employment if associated with organizations considered opposed to the constitution, even if these had not engaged in violent activities.

5

For a description of the MAR data, see Gurr (1993) and the MAR codebook (ND). The MAR data list some groups that do not seem to be meaningful actors (e.g., “foreigners” in Switzer- land), and omit many groups not considered to be “at risk” (such as Scots in the UK). Some re- searchers have argued that the MAR data suffer from a selection bias since groups that are politi-

cally active are more likely to be considered “at risk”, while “latent” groups that have not mobi- lized are less likely to be included in the sample (see, e.g., Christin and Hug 2004).

6

We here examine instances of violent conflict arising over incompatibilities rather than the in- compatibilities themselves, which may endure in the absence of violence. Although the term conflict is sometimes used to denote latent conflict (e.g., Gleditsch 2002), the empirical civil war research tends to focus on violence rather than alternative actions that may arise over the under- lying incompatibilities.

7

See: http://www.pcr.uu.se/database/index.php (access date 2 February 2008)

8

We refer to the overview in (AUTHOR) for information on the sources uses, as well as the spe- cific summaries of each individual conflict. Although we do not use these data in the analysis for this paper, the NSA data also include point estimates for the total number fighting under the command of the insurgents, as well as alternate “low” and “high” estimates. Moreover, the in- formation in the raw data often includes several graded categories of characteristics relative to the government (e.g., low, medium, and high), but we focus here on the codings actually used in the analysis.

9

The presence of a legal political wing is weakly positively correlated with democratic institu- tions (Spearman’s rank correlation is 0.09), however, insurgents do not have a legal political wing in the vast majority of conflicts in states with democratic institutions.

10

There are two reasons for this. First, some conflicts in the ACD contain multiple rebel groups, without separating the onset and termination of conflict between the government and each indi- vidual group. Second, the ACD assigns all conflicts in a country over control of the government the same incompatibility and ID code. For example, two coups in Venezuela thirty years apart

are considered the “same” incompatibility, but for our purposes it would clearly be inappropriate to treat these as the same conflict dyad. The exact dates of entry and exit for some conflict actors remain unclear, and for these we used 1 January as the start date and 31 December as the end date.

11

Moreover, most of the existing work on duration has been limited to wars that generate at least 1000 casualties, either in a year or over the course of a conflict. Since the casualty threshold used to identify conflicts here is considerably lower, the patterns found for large wars may not hold and vice versa.

12

Moreover, since many successful coups will not generate sufficient casualties to reach the threshold for civil wars, the coups classified as civil wars may have an overrepresentation of failed challenges that are relatively easier for a government to repress.

13

Duration could also be influenced by third parties even when these do not participate as com- batants (Gleditsch and Gartzke 2007), but we leave this complication aside in this analysis.

14

We refer to Box-Steffensmeier and Jones (2003) and Kalbfleisch and Prentice (2002) for fur- ther details on the Cox proportional hazard model and its relationship to other event history anal- ysis models.

15

We have also considered possible interactions between territorial control and military strength. Our results do not indicate that the effects of covariates for military strength vary with degree of territorial control, which in turn suggests that it is not a problem to interpret the effects of the two dimensions of power as additive.

16

Another possibility is that democratic states that find themselves in civil war may find it more difficult to enact effective military measures to defeat or contain insurgents than other states less constrained by public opinion.

17

The proportional hazards assumption in the Cox model implies that the effect of each inde- pendent variable must be constant over time. Tests for non-proportionality in Models 1 and 2 in- dicate that some of the covariates may violate this assumption. Based on the recommendations of Box-Steffensmeier et al. (2003), we have estimate models with interaction between these covari- ates and the natural log of time to correct for non-proportionality. Although there is some evi- dence the effects of some features here may weaken over time (e.g., legal political wings, GDP per capita, and extra-territorial conflict), we do not report these results here since the implica- tions do not change qualitatively and the non-proportional hazard estimates are easier to inter- pret. These results are available on request.

18

In some cases, conflicts involving stronger rebels may end up in stalemate situations where the rebels are able to obtain what they want without a formal agreement or a decisive military vic- tory. This scenario is particularly likely in secessionist conflicts. King (2001) discusses several “quasi-states” such as Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where rebels have gained de-facto independence even though their control is not formally recognized by the gov- ernment.

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