Civil War
major counteroffensive on 11 November, and forced Uganda to withdraw from the Kagera
Salient. At that point, however, Nyerere made it clear that Tanzania would not be satisfied
until Amin was deposed. Tanzania threw its support behind the rebel Uganda National
Liberation Forces, and provided military backing in an all-out attack on Amin. On 7 April
1979, rebel and Tanzanian forces captured Kampala, and forced Amin to flee to exile, first
to Libya and later Saudi Arabia.
The events in Uganda in 1978-9 demonstrate some of the weaknesses in the existing lit-
erature on conflict within and between societies. First, researchers have overemphasized the
distinction between internal and external conflict, neglecting how international crises often
develop out of internal issues, as well as how insurgencies emerge and evolve in the shadow
of international hostilities. Second, researchers have disregarded the political considerations
and incentives underlying insurgencies, overlooking how leaders’ responses are shaped by the
perceived challenges to their hold on power as well as how rebels mobilize and react on the
basis of their perceptions about the prospects to unseat rulers or gain political concessions.
These weaknesses in the existing literature have not gone unnoticed. Thus, Sambanis
(2002, 226), in his recent review of the quantitative literature on civil war, laments the
“relative dearth of studies on the links between international and internal war” and argues
strongly in favor of an approach that integrates both. “To date,” Sambanis notes, “we have
no integrated theory of war (international and internal) and the closest we come to such
[an] integrated approach is in studies that focus on one type of war while controlling for
the occurrence of the other type of war.” In contrast to this earlier research, we seek to
improve our understanding of the relationship between both forms of conflict by integrating
internal and international conflict within a framework which focuses on the incentives of
individual leaders to remain in power. We therefore model the endogeneity between internal
and international conflict as well as the endogenous relationships between the tenure of
leaders and both forms of conflict.
2
Convention