Waning Hegemony and the Rise of Regional Actors in Civil Wars

• In Event: The Influence of Global Dynamics on Local Wars

Abstract

How has the waning hegemonic order changed patterns of external involvement in civil wars? This paper focuses on a major shift in the 2010s in how the United States approached civil wars as its hegemony experienced increasing challenges—stung by its failures in Iraq, recognizing a need to limit its large-scale missions in civil wars, facing increasing great-power tensions and new concerns about arenas of geostrategic rivalries such as sub-Saharan Africa. Whereas the early years of the War on Terror and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq saw the United States take a direct role in partnership with largely Western allies, as of the 2010s it shifted to working “by, with and through” local partners. Regional states became much more involved than they had previously been in U.S.-sponsored coalitions of external supporters in civil wars, with Saudi Arabia in Yemen, Chad in Mali, and Kenya in Somalia as prime examples. Moreover, these regional states enjoyed increasing military training from the United States to underpin their efforts. At the same time, the U.S. has supplemented a number of these efforts with its own light-footprint deployments. U.S.-involved interventions have turned into co-productions of the United States and regional partners. In turn, these external states have approached civil wars with their own agendas and interests, adding complexity and decentralization in comparison to previous multilateral coalitions of largely extraregional states, mostly Western. All this, at a certain level, is fairly well known from case studies and (to a degree) some large-N patterns. This paper documents multiple dimensions of this shift in quantitative patterns, leveraging data on external support in civil wars, military training, deployments and drone strikes. Waning hegemony has thus added complexity to external support patterns in civil wars, creating new intersections that armed groups can navigate.

Authors

• Theodore D. McLauchlin, Université de Montréal

• Lee Seymour, Université de Montréal