s Under what conditions do armed groups escalate their campaigns to civil war? Existing research suggests foreign states’ material support is critical to explaining armed groups' conduct during civil war and, thereby, war intensification, duration, and outcomes. Thus far, little attention has been paid to understanding whether and how foreign support influences whether armed groups fight civil wars in the first place, largely due to data limitations. Armed group-level datasets have included only those already engaged in significant civil war violence, which introduces selection bias that precludes investigating factors that influence which groups fight civil wars. Leveraging the new Armed Groups Dataset (AGD), which measures characteristics of armed groups engaged in lower-level violence, we conduct a preliminary empirical investigation into the explanatory role of foreign sponsorship in group-level variation in civil war. While foreign sponsorship and civil war are correlated, there is little evidence that sponsorship has substantial independent explanatory value in predicting civil war. Rather, the evidence is consistent with claims that armed groups’ organizational characteristics account for both access to foreign sponsorship and, independently, their likelihood of escalating civil war.

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外国对武装团体的赞助与内战

■ 武装团体在什么条件下会将其行动升级为内战？现有研究表明，外国的物质支持对于解释武装团体在内战期间的行为以及战争的加剧、持续时间和结果至关重要。到目前为止，很少有人关注外国支持是否以及如何影响武装团体是否首先发动内战，这主要是由于数据的限制。武装团体级别的数据集仅包括那些已经参与重大内战暴力的人，这引入了选择偏差，妨碍了调查影响哪些团体进行内战的因素。利用新的武装团体数据集（AGD）（衡量参与较低级别暴力的武装团体的特征），我们对外国赞助在内战中团体层面变化中的解释作用进行了初步实证调查。虽然外国赞助和内战是相关的，但几乎没有证据表明赞助在预测内战方面具有实质性的独立解释价值。相反，这些证据与以下说法是一致的：武装团体的组织特征既是其获得外国赞助的原因，也是其内战升级可能性的原因。