The Influence of Global Dynamics on Local Wars

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Contemporary civil wars involve a wide array of international and transnational actors. At the same time, the structure of international politics appears to be shifting significantly. How are shifts in the global order affecting patterns of outside support to armed groups in civil wars and the narratives around them? And how are armed groups themselves exercising their own agency over these shifts, adapting their strategies to new international circumstances and indeed creating some of these circumstances themselves?

This is the first of two panels that explores these themes. The presentations are chapters of a collective project led by Theodore McLauchlin and Marie-Joëlle Zahar analyzing how changes to international politics are shaping external and local action in civil wars. The project brings together macro analyses of contemporary changes to patterns of external intervention by states and the UN (on the one hand) and case studies that analyze the strategies of local actors as they face these changes. Much existing scholarship and public commentary in this field focuses on a single global change or narrative, such as the return of great power competition. Typically this kind of work uses a top-down analytical approach, analyzing how global changes shape local conflicts, with the agency of local actors treated above all in terms of how local agents deviate from what outside principals want. In contrast, we argue for a multiplicity of trends and narratives and for a renewed emphasis on local actors as significant, autonomous actors in the changing international politics of civil wars.

As a whole, the project finds that there are multiple overlapping and intersecting trends and narratives, including great-power competition, conflicts over transnational jihadism and the War on Terror, and a wide array of regional alignments and narratives. In this context, the volume collectively argues for understanding the international politics of civil wars in terms of co-production of alignments and narratives by local and international actors. Armed groups exercise significant agency at the interstices of different international changes, and are able to forward their own conflict narratives.

This first panel's papers demonstrate how the project bridges macro and micro. It begins with two macro contributions. Anderson and Stein provide a large-scale quantitative analysis of patterns of external military assistance in civil wars, examining how hypothesized axes of international rivalry (such as great-power rivalry and the war on terror) are reflected in this external assistance. Spatafora and colleagues turn their attention to the UN in particular, analyzing how agenda-setting at the UN Security Council responds to patterns of external assistance. The panel then continues with case studies that link the internationalization of civil conflicts to how particular conflicts are discussed. As patterns of international involvement in civil wars are changing, with contested narratives about what is going on in the international politics of civil wars, the line between civil and international conflict is itself a contested narrative. Carayannis' paper on the DR Congo war argues that analysts struggle to place either as a traditional civil war or in the various neologisms that have emerged to describe it. Arel and Driscoll's work on the Donbas conflict (2014-2022) analyzes how even the designation of the conflict as a civil war is a contested process of narrative construction in which local and international actors participate. These are papers dealing with two major conflicts on two continents and two very different geopolitical contexts, but which both raise similar questions about the border between civil war and international conflict. Finally, Zahar (one of the project's two leads) provides a concluding synthesis of the book's findings and arguments as well as reflections for scholarship.

This is a distinguished group of authors, well balanced as to gender and academic rank. Together, their contributions advance knowledge about the changing international politics of civil conflict by placing trends in intervention, narratives about war and intervention, and local and international actors' strategies in dialogue.

We have recruited a highly qualified senior-junior team of discussants: David Cunningham, who has published influential research on the international politics of civil conflict, and Renanah Joyce, who is pioneering the study of security assistance in conflict settings.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security 

Individual Presentations

• The Global to the Local: International Change and Military Aid to Civil Wars - Noel Anderson, University of Toronto; Arthur Stein, Université de Montréal

• How the Language of Civil War “Works” in the Russo-Ukraine Conflict - Dominique Arel, University of Ottawa; Jesse Driscoll, University of California, San Diego

• The International Politics of the Congo Wars - Tatiana Carayannis, CUNY, Graduate Center

• Back to the Future? Global Tensions and the (Proxy?) Dynamics of Local Wars - Marie-Joelle Zahar, Universite de Montreal

• Waning Hegemony and the Rise of Regional Actors in Civil Wars - Theodore D. McLauchlin, Université de Montréal; Lee Seymour, Université de Montréal

Chair

• Theodore D. McLauchlin Université de Montréal

Discussants

• David E. Cunningham University of Maryland, College Park

• Renanah M. Joyce Georgetown University