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Transnational Rebels: Neighboring States as Sanctuary for Rebel Groups
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 June 2011
Abstract
To what extent do international factors affect domestic conflict processes? How do external conditions affect the state's repressive capabilities and the opportunities for opposition groups to mobilize, launch an insurgency, and sustain it? This article argues that because state strength is limited by international boundaries, rebel groups often organize transnationally in order to evade repression. External bases, refugee communities, and characteristics of neighboring states are expected to increase the likelihood of civil war onset and continuation. Importantly, external mobilization is difficult for states to monitor and verify, a factor that exacerbates bargaining problems and increases the probability of armed conflict. These claims are tested through a quantitative analysis of civil conflicts from 1951 to 1999. Results suggest that weak neighbors, rival neighbors, and refugee diasporas contribute to rebellion and that conflicts endure longer when rebels have access to external bases.
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References
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56 I thank Bela Hovy of the UNHCR for providing me with these data. However, the UNHCR does not keep track of figures for Palestinian refugees. Therefore, these data are supplemented with figures from the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. Palestinian refugees are counted as originating from the state of Israel.
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59 Lagging refugees one year and including a peace years indicator presents a high hurdle and may understate the effect of refugees if conflict and refugee militarization occur simultaneously or unfold quickly. In addition, civilian populations may anticipate future conflict and flee before fighting begins. Endogenous relationships are difficult to disentangle and will require finer temporal units and alternative methodologies. This will be left for additional research.
60 In alternative models separate variables were created for refugees in rival states, civil war states, and all others. This analysis does not yield significant results, although there is a high degree of collinearity among the variables.
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62 See Gleditsch (fn. 53).
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65 Countries with special indeterminate codes ( -88, -77, -66) are assigned a value of zero, according to the standard practice in the literature and the recommendation of the Polity project.
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69 This approach is analogous to the dynamic probit used by Elbadawi and Sambanis (fn. 3), among others. In the dynamic probit model, a lagged dependent variable and interaction terms between each IV and the lagged DV are included on the right-hand side. A major advantage of the transition model is presentational. It is easier to interpret a sample broken into two different sets than it is to compare coefficients between interacted and nomnteracted variables.
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71 There is a debate in the statistics literature on the utility of using tests of statistical significance for apparent populations. Normally, significance testing is used to give a measure of how confident the analyst or reader can be that the relationship in the sample holds true for the population to which one is generalizing. In the current study nearly all country-years since 1945 are analyzed, so the sample size approaches the entire universe of cases that the theory addresses. In this case, then, standard errors are not used to understand true population parameters but rather are used to determine the consistency of the statistical relationship in the observed data. They reveal how often the expected (probabilistic) relationship between the DV and IV occurs in practice. For a discussion, see Berk, Richard A., Western, Bruce, and Weiss, Robert E., “Statistical Inference for Apparent Populations,” SociologicalMethodology 25 (1995Google Scholar); and Bollen, Kenneth A., “Apparent and Nonapparent Significance Tests,” Sociological Methodology 25 (1995CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
72 For details, see Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan (fn. 43).
73 For methodological reasons, this variable was lagged. Because data on extraterritorial bases were collected onlyforcountry-years where the value of the dependent variable equals 1 (that is, when there i s a civil conflict), the model cannot be estimated with the variable itself because there is no variation on the DV. However, including lagged values of the extraterritorial bases variable eliminates this problem, and lagged values are very highly correlated with current values: R=.95.
74 The three coefficients fail to reach joint significance in a likelihood ratio test: p>chi-squared = .15
75 Results are available from the author.
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