D.M. Gibler and S.V. Miller. External Threats, State Capacity, and Civil War. Paper. Online Appendix.
We argue that the development path of a state plays a consequential role in its future likelihood of experiencing a civil war. States that have endured salient external threats in the past are more likely to have built the capacity to deal with domestic threats as well. States with populations that have consistent state identities and governments that are militarily capable of deterring or repressing dissent are least likely to experience civil wars, and both of these factors increase over time in the wake of salient external threats to homeland territories. We identify salient threats as both latent and realized claims against state territories and find that the presence of a territorial claim by a contiguous neighbor substantially reduces the likelihood of civil war onset in the state. More importantly, a further decline in civil war proneness occurs in the years following the territorial claim, which isolates state capacity as the prime cause of the reduction in conflict. Our tests on a sample of all states from 1945 to 1999 are robust to multiple model specifications.
We argue that the development path of a state plays a consequential role in its future likelihood of experiencing a civil war. States that have endured salient external threats in the past are more likely to have built the capacity to deal with domestic threats as well. States with populations that have consistent state identities and governments that are militarily capable of deterring or repressing dissent are least likely to experience civil wars, and both of these factors increase over time in the wake of salient external threats to homeland territories. We identify salient threats as both latent and realized claims against state territories and find that the presence of a territorial claim by a contiguous neighbor substantially reduces the likelihood of civil war onset in the state. More importantly, a further decline in civil war proneness occurs in the years following the territorial claim, which isolates state capacity as the prime cause of the reduction in conflict. Our tests on a sample of all states from 1945 to 1999 are robust to multiple model specifications.