Violence at Home or Abroad

From the civil wars in Colombia, Nepal, and Syria, to the revolutions in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and the fervent uprisings of the Arab Spring, recent decades have vividly demonstrated that rebellion is in the air. “Su Ruolin builds on and integrates insights from theories about diversionary war, the aggressiveness of regimes established by rebels, and the constraints of international structure to advance a novel argument about the decisions of such regimes’ leaders to initiate interstate wars. The originality of Su’s theoretical claims and the multi-method approach to testing them result in a book that offers an important contribution to the study of conflict that demands the attention of those interested in both comparative politics and international relations.” —Avery Goldstein, David M. Knott Professor Emeritus of Global Politics and International Relations, Inaugural Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, University of Pennsylvania “This book exemplifies the innovative fusion of the classic level-of-analysis approach in international relations. It convincingly explains how prior rebellion experience can shape leaders’ preference for initiating international conflict as a response to domestic unrest. Ruolin's rigorous research design provides both strong quantitative and qualitative evidence for her theory. This book is a must-read for any scholar interested in the interaction between internal and international conflicts.” —Chong Chen, Associate Professor of International Relations, Tsinghua University From the civil wars in Colombia, Nepal, and Syria, to the revolutions in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and the fervent uprisings of the Arab Spring, recent decades have vividly demonstrated that rebellion is in the air. In this groundbreaking study,…