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States in an international dispute sometimes choose to attack their enemies with their own military forces, but other times choose to empower the other side's insurgent groups. What explains the decision to act through rebel proxies rather than engage a rival directly? Theories and empirical analyses of international conflict have adopted a state-centric bias, ignoring the substitution between direct uses of force and indirect action through rebel organizations. This paper examines the decision to delegate conflict to rebels through the lens of principal-agent theory. While states support rebel groups in order to forgo some of the costs of conflict, they also lose a degree of foreign policy autonomy. Moreover, delegation differs from intervention in that external parties are central to the onset of the conflict, rather than becoming involved subsequently. Preliminary evidence of conflict delegation is presented, along with a number of empirically testable propositions. Contemporary conflicts, such as in Sudan, Chad, and Iraq, display elements of delegation to insurgents. Finally, the consequences of delegation from the rebel's perspective are explored. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic strife and civil war frequently produce large population dislocations and refugee flows across national boundaries. Mass refugee flows often entail negative consequences for receiving states, particularly in developing countries. Moreover, civil violence frequently extends across national boundaries as 'internal' conflicts are not constrained by borders. This paper argues that refugee flows between states may significantly increase the likelihood of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) in that dyad. Refugee-receiving states are more likely to initiate MIDs as they intervene to prevent further externalities, and refugee-sending states initiate MIDs as they violate borders in pursuit of dissidents. Moreover, this research challenges conventional theories of international conflict that focus almost exclusively on distributional issues between states. These propositions are tested in the first-ever quantitative analysis of the relationship between refugees and MID initiation, 1955-2000. Results confirm that refugees significantly increase the probability of international conflict in a dyad. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has looked for factors explaining intrastate conflict within the country ex-periencing conflict. However, the fact that so many civil wars display transnational dimen-sions and often spur conflict between states suggests that the decisions actors make about the onset and settlement of conflict can be strongly influenced by international factors. In this pa-per, we extend our previous work on dyadic analyses of civil war interactions to how transna-tional linkages influence the prospects for settlement and conflict duration. We develop a se-ries of hypotheses on how specific transnational linkages to actors in a civil conflict dyad can make conflict more or less difficult to resolve. We test our hypotheses using new data on transnational linkages of the state and insurgent actors for the intrastate conflicts in the Upp-sala armed conflict dataset. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on factors contributing to domestic rebellion. Civil wars and insurgencies have usually been attributed to domestic factors. However, studies have found out that transnational relations also contributed to the emergence of all social-revolutionary crises and have invariably helped to shape revolutionary struggles and outcomes. The ability of opposition groups to use extraterritorial bases in neighboring countries has an important impact on rebellion.

While third-party interventions in civil wars have attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years, most studies have overlooked the implications of such foreign interference for interstate conflict behavior. Furthermore, interventions have usually been defined as direct military or economic transfers to combatants. This paper argues that offering rebels sanctuaries on neighboring state territory is an important form of assistance to opposition groups because it allows them to escape repression costs. Moreover, rebel bases on external territory significantly increase the risk of interstate armed conflict. While all forms of foreign assistance to rebel groups can provoke a violent confrontation between states, sanctuaries in neighbors are especially likely to provoke conflict because of proximity among states. This hypothesis is tested through a statistical analysis of interstate armed conflicts during the latter half of the 20th Century and an examination of several cases. Results demonstrate that while all forms of third-party aid to rebels increase the odds of an international dispute, sheltering rebels has a particularly large effect. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional dichotomy between intrastate and interstate conflict, each considered to be explained by domestic and international factors respectively, has recently been challenged by research showing how international factors can shape a country?s risk of internal conflict. In this paper, we consider how conflict within societies may give rise to disputes between states. We show empirically that countries that experience civil conflict are considerably more likely to become engaged in disputes with other states. We identify a number of ways by which conflict within countries may lead to conflict between states, focusing on how the issues raised in tension between states have are linked to conflict within societies. We show examples of each of these linkages, using examples from the narratives for the new Militarized Interstate Dispute data. Our analysis suggests that internal conflict is an important overlooked source of conflict between states, and we discuss how greater attention to conflict within states can help improve the study of conflict between governments. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]