Thinking outside the (temporal) box to explain protracted intrastate conflict
| Author | Joel Blaxland |
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343320970272 |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Thinking outside the (temporal) box
to explain protracted intrastate conflict
Joel Blaxland
Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, Western New Mexico University
Abstract
Conflict duration has been one of the central and enduring questions driving civil war literature. Still not enough
attention has been given to the interdependency of conflict duration dynamics. In an effort to bridge the gap this
study introduces a new variable that positions conflict duration as a function of the duration of the pre-conflict phase.
I argue proto-insurgents are able to protract conflict due to good choices made before large-scale conflict erupted – or
during a period of time called ‘incubation’. After controlling for standard explanations, this study offers statistical
evidence that proto-insurgent incubation duration is statistically significant and positively related to conflict dura-
tion. This study further explores the usefulness of thinking outside of the standard temporal space of wartime by
moving beyond the widely accepted assumption that insurgents are empowered and constrained primarily by
wartime decisionmaking and the wartime environment in which they find themselves.
Keywords
conflict duration, intrastate conflict, prewar, temporality
Introduction
Conflict duration has been one of the central questions
driving the civil war literature for at least the last two
decades. Interest in the subject appreciated substantially
in the wake of Fearon’s (2004) ‘Why do some civil wars
last so much longer than others?’ and Collier, Hoeffler &
So
¨derbom’s (2004) ‘On the duration of civil war’. Off
the presses within days of each other, both probed causes
and branded culprits of protracted conflict. The former
found illicit economies like opium and cocaine as well as
the sons of the soil dynamic tended to produce conflicts
of longer duration. In addition to low per capita income
and high inequality, the latter found ethnic fractionaliza-
tion to be a significant predictor of protracted conflicts.
Since these impressive findings, other noteworthy studies
on the subject include Sobek & Thies (2015), which
studied the causal relationship between lootable
resources, state capacity, and conflict duration. Conrad
et al. (2019) investigated natural resources and conflict
duration. And Metternich (2012) and Wucherpfennig
et al. (2012) both assessed the impact of ethnicity on
conflict duration. While rigorous in method and
implementation, these and others have commonly stud-
ied protracted intrastate conflict using the same or sim-
ilar variables as those introduced by Fearon and Collier
et al. all those years ago. While some new pathways have
been forged on the conflict duration variable side of
things, scant attention has been given to the prospect
of the influential nature of pre-conflict factors on conflict
duration.
1
The inclusion of such variables could improve
our ability to predict protracted affairs and may capture
what appears to be a heretofore ignored component of
such conflicts. This study makes a modest attempt to
address this gap by introducing a novel variable – a vari-
able I call ‘incubation’ – that captures the length of time
Corresponding author:
joel.blaxland@wnmu.edu
1
Some newer variables include cross-border sanctuaries (Salehyan,
2009), rebel leadership change (Lutmar & Terris, 2019),
reconstruction spending (Berman et al., 2011), and rebel
governance and service provision (Arjona, Kasfir & Mampilly,
2015).
Journal of Peace Research
2021, Vol. 58(6) 1271–1283
ªThe Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343320970272
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