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TRANSNATIONAL REBELS: NEIGHBORING STATES AS SANCTUARY FOR
REBEL GROUPS
Idean Salehyan, PhD Candidate
University of California, San Diego
Introduction
Civil wars and insurgencies have usually been attributed to domestic factors. Class conflict,
ethnic divisions, state instability and weakness, and natural resource dependence—among
others—have all been offered as factors motivating or enabling conflict to emerge. However,
over 25 years ago, Theda Skocpol (1979) remarked: “Transnational relations have contributed to
the emergence of all social-revolutionary crises and have invariably helped to shape
revolutionary struggles and outcomes.” Despite this observation, for decades most scholarly
research ignored international influences on conflict behavior or treated it as secondary to
domestic politics. Only recently have scholars begun to look more systematically at the
international aspects of civil violence (see e.g. Elbadawi and Sambanis 2000; Gleditsch 2002;
Regan 2000; Saideman 2001; Salehyan and Gleditsch 2004; Walter 2002).
External interventions, third party security guarantees, and conflict externalities have all
come to the forefront as the study of conflict has permeated the International
Relations/Comparative Politic divide. Examples of internationalized civil war are many: the
United States and the USSR backed rival factions in civil wars in Latin America, Asia and Africa
during the Cold War; NATO peacekeeping prevented the spillover of violence from Kosovo to
Macedonia; and refugees from Liberia helped to spark a civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone.
The observation that many civil wars are influenced by external factors raises several interesting
questions. How do regional and international factors affect the strategic relations between
Convention