Foreign Intervention In Civil Wars Discourages Democracy
The more foreign intervention there is in a civil war, the less likely the end result will be democratization, asserts a Texas A&M University researcher. When applying her findings to the ongoing Syrian Civil War, Professor Reyko Huang says, given the numerous outside players involved in the conflict, “post-war democratization is highly unlikely.”
Huang, a professor of international affairs at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, conducts macro studies of civil wars across the post-1945 period and focuses on rebel group dynamics.
“A civil war occurs when a government fights against a rebel group,” she explains. “Much of the literature is state-focused, but my study examines how the rebel groups are formed, where they get their funding and weapons, how they recruit, what they do to win popular support and whether or not they are politically organized.
“I ask: ‘Why are some countries more democratic after a civil war, while others become more autocratic?’”
What she finds is that civil wars in which the rebel groups are more politically organized and less dependent on foreign aid are more likely to result in democratic societies.
“Without foreign support, rebel groups have to depend more on the support of the people,” she explains. “The more the people are mobilized for the war effort, the more they will come to demand and expect changes favorable to themselves in the post-war regime. In turn, postwar political elites will want to meet these demands in some form in order to stay in power.”
She explains that while some rebel groups are violent toward civilians and interested in loot and profit, others are more politically organized, often providing the citizenry with social services such as schools and health clinics, and creating legislatures, laws and court systems.
One case Huang studied was the Nepalese Civil War (1996-2006), an armed conflict between the Nepalese government and a Maoist rebel group that wanted to overthrow the government and establish communism.
Huang travelled to Nepal after the conflict and interviewed war participants on both sides, along with civilians, journalists and researchers. She says that although the rebel group was aiming for a communist revolution, the result was that “there was actually a deepening of democracy after the war.”
Huang says the rebel group catered to those in Nepalese society who felt marginalized by the government and left behind socially and economically, who were mostly in rural areas of the country.
“The Maoists relied on these people for arms, funding, food, shelter and intelligence – they had no foreign support,” she says. “By depending on the people, the rebels made them more involved in the political movement propelling them to mobilize to produce change. Eventually, this momentum reached the capital, Kathmandu, and elites had to ‘give in’ to people’s demands for democracy in order to achieve peace and stability.”
Media contact: Lesley Henton, Texas A&M Division of Marketing & Communications.