The Internationalization of Internal Conflicts: Threatening the State

Internal security crises, from environmental disaster, extreme poverty and deprivation, armed conflicts, or ethnic or religious conflict, provide sites of opportunity for those seeking to internationalize conflicts. Domestic conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia have started as internal problems, but have taken on international dimensions as parties to the conflict within the country in question and sympathetic external forces have joined forces with each other for mutual gain. There are different ways that scholars have studied internal conflicts, by looking at the issue of strong vs. weak states, by examining ethnic/religious/separatist agendas, contestation over resources, or through other mostly internal politics analysis. This project looks at the international dimension to internal conflicts and asks: under what conditions do domestic conflicts become opportunities for regional or global actors to become involved? Why have some countries been able to successfully deal with this problem while others have not? Who are the actors who seek to internationalize conflicts? Why and with what means do they become involved and how do their agendas get internalized/localized? Cases include: the separatist movements in the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Aceh (Indonesia); and the civil wars in Rwanda/Congo, and Sierra Leone/Liberia, Lebanon, and Iraq. This book was originally published as a special issue of Asian Security