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Abstract
In international conflict research, the “issues approach’’ began as an inductive process of categorizing what issues wars were fought over (e.g., dynastic succession, national honor, natural resources). This research program highlighted the central role of territorial disputes in contemporary interstate conflicts and has yielded an extensive body of conflict scholarship. In civil conflict research, scholars first focused on structural explanations for civil wars (e.g., economic inequality, regime type) while contemporary research increasingly focuses on group-level rebel characteristics (e.g., group strength, ideology type, centralized command structure). In this dissertation, I introduce the issues approach to civil conflict scholarship and demonstrate that accounting for the specific issues being fought for by rebel groups (e.g., secession, ideological regime change, land reforms, or judicial policies) affects a host of civil conflict processes. In the first chapter, I lay out a theory for why specific issues affect civil war outbreak, levels of violence in civil wars, duration of conflicts, and peace settlements. I argue that certain issues have varying levels of salience attached to it by rebel groups and governments, and this psychological commitment affects the costs of war the actors are willing to pay. In the second chapter, I examine rebel group alliance formation and find that groups are more likely to ally with groups that are fighting for a similar issue. For example, secessionist groups tend to ally with other secessionists, even when they are targeting different governments. In the third chapter, I show that higher salience issues such as ideological regime change (Communist revolutions, for example) lead groups to fight longer and more intensely. In the final chapter, I examine how civil wars end and find that issues with the highest salience are the least likely to end in a peace agreement that resolves the underlying dispute. This is especially problematic for policymakers since these high-salience issues are precisely the same issues that lead to long, intense civil wars. I introduce a new dataset for civil conflict scholars that will allow us to incorporate specific issues being fought over into our explanations of civil conflict processes, and I show why these findings are important for researchers interested in modeling and forecasting civil conflict events.