The Benefits of Low-Intensity Internal Conflict:
Government Actors as Obstacles to Peace
Sandra R. Leavitt
Doctoral Candidate, Comparative Politics, Department of Government
Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057
ABSTRACT
Much of the literature that discusses the incentives for protracted intrastate conflict has focused on rebel
leaders, militia, and warlords who want war to continue so as to continue collecting gains in status,
power, and resources. While an important start for explaining the escalation and perpetuation of internal
conflict, this literature has been too limited in scope. Rarely are government actors viewed as spoilers.
Instead, governments are depicted as providers of stability and stationary bandits, where systemic
pressures to attract foreign direct investment and generate legitimacy compel states to seek peace and
stability.
This paper argues that government actors—whether politicians or military leaders, incumbents or
opposition—can have strong incentives to instigate, perpetuate, and escalate communal conflict within
their borders and tests various hypotheses regarding government-actor incentives that have been
purported by political scientists. Drawing on research of state-Muslim minority conflicts in China,
Burma, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, I identify conditions under which government actors
are most likely to benefit from and thus generate internal conflict. Concentrated minorities living in the
periphery are most often affected because states can contain the conflict, limit its impact to a politically
less-significant population, and more easily manipulate knowledge of the conflict and its dynamics. The
paper discusses the benefits that governmental institutions and individual state actors accrue as a result
of low-intensity conflicts, how governments frame these conflicts, and how conflicts are used to
consolidate power and protect interests. Strategies used include conflict, neglect, and persuasion.
Paper Presented at the 2007 International Studies Association Annual Convention
Chicago, March 2, 2007 • MAR Panel: Low-Level Ethnic Conflict (FC17)
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Convention