Foreign Sponsorship of Armed Groups and Civil War

s Under what conditions do armed groups escalate their campaigns to civil war? Existing research suggests foreign states’ material support is critical to explaining armed groups' conduct during civil war and, thereby, war intensification, duration, and outcomes. Thus far, little attention has been paid to understanding whether and how foreign support influences whether armed groups fight civil wars in the first place, largely due to data limitations. Armed group-level datasets have included only those already engaged in significant civil war violence, which introduces selection bias that precludes investigating factors that influence which groups fight civil wars. Leveraging the new Armed Groups Dataset (AGD), which measures characteristics of armed groups engaged in lower-level violence, we conduct a preliminary empirical investigation into the explanatory role of foreign sponsorship in group-level variation in civil war. While foreign sponsorship and civil war are correlated, there is little evidence that sponsorship has substantial independent explanatory value in predicting civil war. Rather, the evidence is consistent with claims that armed groups’ organizational characteristics account for both access to foreign sponsorship and, independently, their likelihood of escalating civil war.