Committed sponsors: external support overtness and civilian targeting in civil wars
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/13540661221084870 |
| Author | Arthur Stein |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221084870
European Journal of
International Relations
2022, Vol. 28(2) 386 –416
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661221084870
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Committed sponsors: external
support overtness and civilian
targeting in civil wars
Arthur Stein
University of Montreal, Canada
Abstract
Does the overtness of external support to rebels affect civilian targeting in civil wars?
Conflict studies increasingly scrutinize how insurgent sponsorships shape rebels’
behavior. However, the influence of external sponsors’ decisions to publicly acknowledge
or deny their support on rebel conduct is largely neglected. This article introduces
a new dataset on the overtness of external support to rebels in civil wars between
1989 and 2018. It then assesses whether the overtness of support is correlated with
insurgents’ propensity to target civilians. I hypothesize that overtly supported rebels are
less likely to target civilians than covertly supported rebels. This hypothesis stems from
how supply-side factors—the way state sponsors expectedly act after having allocated
their support—impact insurgents’ structure of incentives around relations with non-
combatants. Statistical analyses yield strong support for my hypothesis. Moreover,
further analyses show that support overtness influences civilian targeting independently
from sponsors’ characteristics, such as political regimes or foreign aid reliance. Thus, in
addition to the type of material aid insurgents receive, variation in whether support is
covert or overt shapes how rebels treat civilians.
Keywords
Civil wars, external support, overtness, rebel groups, civilian victimization, quantitative
analyses
Introduction
Rebel sponsorship is central in contemporary international interactions (Grauer and
Tierney, 2018). As state sovereignty has become a normative pillar of the international
system (United Nations, 1945), most state adversaries keep their bellicose sponsorship
Corresponding author:
Arthur Stein, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC H3T 1N8, Canada.
Email: arthur.stein@umontreal.ca
1084870EJT0010.1177/13540661221084870European Journal of International RelationsStein
research-article2022
Article
Stein 387
covert.1 Devising plausibly deniable actions lowers sponsors, “potential security, eco-
nomic, and reputational costs” (O’Rourke, 2020: 120; Poznansky, 2019). Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez’s refusal to admit supporting the Colombian FARC in the 2000s
is an example of covert support (The Economist, 2008). The secrecy of external support
is sometimes a collusive one. Both external sponsors and local targets are aware of such
operations, but “keeping the public and other governments in the dark” allows them to
control potential conflict escalation (Carson, 2020: 3). However, states overtly admit to
materially supporting insurgents in some cases. They even, sometimes, openly justify the
provision of aid by appealing to the rightfulness of rebels’ ethos. Syrian-acknowledged
support to Hezbollah is an example of overt support (Oweis, 2007).
While the literature has increasingly scrutinized the determinants of sponsorship
overtness, it has largely overlooked how this variable defines civilian targeting by rebels
in civil wars. Salehyan et al. (2014: 635) have shown that, overall, rebel sponsorship is
associated with more coercive rebel–civilian interactions. However, recent studies have
nuanced these findings. Some articles have found no significant links between support
and coercive insurgent–civilian interactions (Fortna et al., 2018; Grant and Kaussler,
2020). Another article has found that sponsorship can promote constructive rebel–non-
combatant relationships (Huang and Sullivan, 2020). These contradicting findings thus
call for further disaggregation of different forms of external interventions in civil
conflicts.
This article hypothesizes that overtly sponsored rebels are less likely to target civil-
ians than rebels who receive mere covert support in civil wars. I contend that this is
because supply-side factors—the way states expectedly act after having allocated their
support—determine insurgent incentives regarding the targeting of non-combatants. My
central assumption is that, as shown in the literature, sponsors do not want to face poten-
tial reputation and material costs associated with known aid to brutal rebels. The first
consequence is that overt support is expected primarily to groups that are not engaged in
widespread atrocities before being supported. Further down the conflict timeline, for the
same reputational and material considerations, the second consequence is that sponsors
providing overt assistance will expectedly monitor insurgent behaviors more closely
than sponsors providing covert support. From these supply-side factors emerge the
expectation that rebels receiving overt support face a restrictive structure of incentives
that promotes restraint toward civilians. Engaging in civilian targeting would deprive the
group of access to significant political and material resources. Conversely, rebels receiv-
ing mere covert support face a more permissive structure of incentives regarding civilian
targeting. In this situation, rebels are less reliant on civilians’ voluntary cooperation due
to access to external resources, and at the same time, are not severely constrained in their
behavior by strict monitoring from sponsors.
To test my hypothesis, I introduce a new dataset on the overtness of external support
to rebellions for each rebel group-year observation between 1989 and 2018. Overtness is
coded using press articles, non-governmental organizations (NGO) and international
organizations’ reports, and academic articles. Descriptive data show that overtness is an
exception and that covertness remains the norm in the post–Cold War period. I use this
original data to establish that, compared with covert support, overt sponsorship nega-
tively and significantly correlates with both the occurrence and the degree of civilian
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