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Policymakers frequently claim that military assistance to rebels can force governments into negotiations. Many seem convinced that providing material assistance to rebels involved in a civil war can create a ‘ripe moment’ that is favorable for negotiations and thus offer an attractive path towards a negotiated settlement. However, this widespread belief has never been systematically assessed. This article evaluates this claim using global data on negotiations in all intrastate armed conflicts from 1975 to 2009. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the article demonstrates that external state support to rebel groups does not increase the prospect of negotiations. Neither sustained pressure, support provided by great powers, nor direct military intervention increases the probability of negotiations being initiated. Instead, the results suggest that external support is likely to reduce the likelihood of negotiations between the warring parties, especially if the state sponsor is a great power. The study contributes to our understanding of civil war processes by demonstrating that military assistance hinders rather than promotes the onset of negotiations.

Why do some armed conflicts that have ended experience renewed fighting while others do not? Previous research onconflict recurrence has approached this question by looking at domestic factors such as how the war was fought, howit ended or factors associated with its aftermath. With the exception of the literature on third-party securityguarantees, the influence of outside actors has often been overlooked. This article explores the role of external statesand suggests when and how their involvement is likely to affect the probability of renewed warfare. The mainargument is that the legacy of outside support creates an external support structure that affects the previouscombatants’ willingness as well as their opportunities to remobilize. This means that armed conflicts with externalstate support will experience a greater likelihood of recurrence compared to other conflicts which did not see externalsupport. The theory is tested using Cox proportional hazards models on global data of intrastate armed conflicts1975–2009. The findings suggest that external support to rebels increases the risk of conflict recurrence in the shortterm as groups receive or anticipate renewed assistance. The results also indicate that it is more important for rebelgroups to have had enduring support over the years in the previous conflict rather than access to multiple statesponsors. External support provided to governments is not associated with conflict recurrence.

Why do some states terminate their sponsorship of rebel movements while others are persistent in their provision of support? In the past, most research on external support to insurgents has focused on why states choose to sponsor rebel groups and particularly how this affects conflict duration. However, we know little about the termination of such support. This is surprising given that support has been shown to make armed conflicts more intractable and tremendous efforts are made in condemning and sanctioning such behavior. This study constitutes the first large-N analysis of support termination, employing survival analysis on global data of state support to rebel movements between 1975–2009. Surprisingly, the findings indicate that only some of the factors that explain support provision can offer insights into its termination. In particular, support is more likely to be terminated when no ethnic kinship bonds exist between the rebel movement and the government of the supporting state. Many decisions to withdraw support also seem to coincide with the transition from the Cold War. Threats and sanctions from other states appear largely ineffective. The study contributes to our understanding of the international dimensions of civil war and the role and motives of third parties.

The provision of external state support to non-state actors in civil wars is a dynamic process. The calculus of state sponsors varies over time, which means that assistance provided to the armed opposition fluctuates. This is rarely recognized in existing research, which has focused more on the initiation of support and its subsequent effects on conflict dynamics. While we know many of the motives behind decisions to provide support, we know less about why state sponsorship of rebels changes over time. To address this, I propose a theoretical argument that is able to account for policy adjustments over time. The theory builds on the notion that leaders change their support commitment when there is adverse feedback and that support increases as long as the causes of policy failure can be attributed to external actors, while cutbacks occur when failure is attributed to the state sponsor’s own actions. The latter prompts domestic audiences to act in order to force leaders to back down. Process tracing is used to explore the value of this framework in within-case analyses of the United States’ support commitments to insurgent groups in Nicaragua during the 1980s and in Syria during the 2010s. The study demonstrates the utility of focusing on shifts in leaders’ perceptions rather than structural features of the international system or rebel behavior to understand temporal variation in external support.