Civil War
of civil war.
H. 2: Prevalence of International Conflict
The risk of civil war increases the proba-
bility of international conflict.
If international conflict affects civil war while civil war also affects international conflict,
then models of one type of conflict that simply control for the other type of conflict as a
fixed or pre-determined right hand side covariate are methodologically suspect and likely
to produce biased results due to simultaneity. To date, however, the potential endogeneity
of internal and international conflict has been completely ignored in almost all empirical
studies (Sambanis, 2002, 238). Moreover, since some factors that predict conflict between
states may also increase the risk of civil war directly, we should distinguish between direct
effects of covariates on one form of conflict and their total effects, including indirect effects
due to increasing the risk of the other form of conflict.
Since a full analysis of the relationships in Figure 1 requires more space than available
here, our main focus in this paper is on the potential endogenous relationship between civil
war and international conflict. However, as is clear from Figure 1, we do not believe that
either type of conflict can be adequately studied without considering how a leader’s concern
over the risk of loss of office influences his conflict behavior as well as the effects of such
conflict on his tenure. Failure to control for the potential endogeneity between tenure and
both forms of conflict could bias our inferences about the relationship between internal and
international conflict. In the following section, therefore, we briefly outline why one should
expect the risk of loss of office to be endogenous to both internal and external conflict.
2.2
Conflict and tenure linkages
We start with the relationship between the loss of office and international conflict—segment
B in Figure 1—which has received by far the most attention in existing research. The long
8
Convention