The Internationalization of Communal Strife (Routledge Revivals) by Manus I Midlarsky

Author:Manus I Midlarsky [Midlarsky, Manus I]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, General
ISBN: 9781317645221
Google: vZm3AwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 22507837
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

PROCESSES OF INTERNATIONALIZATION

7

FACTORS RELATED TO THE CONTAGION AND DIFFUSION OF INTERNATIONAL VIOLENCE

John A. Vasquez

The use of violence in both domestic and interstate disputes is not uncommon. More typically than not, violence associated with a dispute tends not to spread. Nevertheless, sometimes violence does spread and, when it does, an entire region or the global political system can be engulfed by war. What factors seem to be associated with the spread of violence? This chapter reviews the scientific findings on interstate war to see how this body of research might shed light on this question and help identify some of the processes by which domestic disputes become internationalized. Since the research on which this analysis is based deals primarily with interstate war since 1815, the identification must be seen as tentative until further research tests the extent to which the findings can be generalized to other kinds of cases. Elsewhere (Vasquez, forthcoming), I have pieced together much of the evidence on interstate war to construct an explanation of the onset and expansion of war. Here, I draw upon that evidence to develop a general list of the main factors affecting the spread of violence.

This exercise attempts to take the propositions in one area of inquiry to see if they might be generalized to another area. Such an attempt must always be done cautiously because the cases of violence in the two domains differ on a number of characteristics. Nevertheless, it is not clear that the factors making violence spread differ by whether disputes are domestic or interstate. Ultimately, this is an empirical question, but three arguments can be made for an exploratory investigation based on the assumption that an understanding about how interstate violence spreads may help elucidate the question of how communal violence becomes internationalized.

The first is that a unified theory of conflict and violence should explain the use of violence in a variety of contexts; that is, the causes and dynamics of conflict and violence at the individual, group, and interstate levels should not be seen as so fundamentally different that they require radically different theories. Instead, one would like to construct a basic theory that, with the proper adaptations and caveats, could be applied in the different contexts.

The second argument is that the cases that are trying to be explained are instances of communal violence that become internationalized. They spread from the domestic domain to the international domain and therefore findings about how war spreads from one state to the next (or how a dyadic war becomes internationalized) become theoretically relevant. One way of minimizing overgeneralization will be to confine this analysis to communal violence that has already become a full-fledged civil or revolutionary war between an identity group and a recognized state (see Small and Singer 1982: 204–20 for possible operational criteria). This is legitimate because our interest is not so much why communal violence spreads to include more of the same group or other groups in a state, but why international actors become involved in the dispute.

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