Civil war and the transnational diffusion of domestic violence

While there are many causes of war, one particularly powerful finding in both the civil and interstate war literatures is that violence tends to spread from conflict-ridden states to other proximate countries. Similar to the proliferation of infectious diseases, violence often follows an epidemiological process by which hostilities spread from one country to another. Focusing on civil wars, in this chapter I review the literature addressing the contagious properties of civil war, highlighting the many advances made in the study of intrastate conflict. As I show, many of the infectious characteristics of ongoing conflicts have been uncovered in recent work. However, I argue that research has been somewhat myopically focused on explaining the contagion outcomes of civil war. Far less emphasis has been placed upon determining the effect that spreading civil violence has on explaining a wide range of international relations phenomena. This chapter attempts to initiate more research in this vein by proposing a measure that captures the likelihood that a civil war will spread to neighboring states. By conducting a very simple statistical analysis, I am able to create a measure which records the estimated risk of civil war infection for each state in the international system for every year in the post-Cold War period. I propose that this measure could then be used as a predictor of a range of international relations phenomena. As recent research has indicated, the risk of being infected by proximate intrastate violence can have a powerful effect on interstate interactions, and I expect that the proposed measure will be valuable to future international relations scholarship.