In this insightful book Roderic Alley debates whether conflict within states has emerged as the Achilles Heel of the international community. Utilizing a variety of case materials, the book finds internal conflict posing serious, potentially debilitating challenges to existing institutional, policy and analytical practices in international relations. It will greatly interest senior undergraduates, post-graduates and scholars of international relations, comparative politics, development studies, international law and security and defence studies.

Internal conflicts threaten many countries and regions globally. The first part of this book examines the sources of internal conflicts and the ways these may affect neighbouring states and the international community. The second part covers specific problems, policy instruments and key actors.

The main aim of this book is to inquire into the system of norms regulating the `internationalization' of internal conflicts. The traditional distinction between international and internal conflict, which entails different legal consequences, is in practice very difficult to detect due to the presence, in many instances, of elements typical of both situations. Through a careful and extraordinarily useful examination of all relevant cases of `internationalized' internal conflict since 1956, the validity of the traditional framework of rules concerning foreign intervention in internal conflict is reassessed. At the same time, the applicability to these situations of the rules typical of international conflicts are analyzed with a view to providing the existence of a continuum between the two situations, not only as a matter of fact but also with respect to their legal regulation.

Internal security crises, from environmental disaster, extreme poverty and deprivation, armed conflicts, or ethnic or religious conflict, provide sites of opportunity for those seeking to internationalize conflicts. Domestic conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia have started as internal problems, but have taken on regional and international dimensions as parties to the conflict within the country and sympathetic external forces have joined forces with each other for mutual gain. This book examines the international dimension to internal conflicts and asks: under what conditions do domestic conflicts become opportunities for regional or global actors to become involved? Why have some countries been able to successfully deal with this problem while others have not? Who are the actors who seek to internationalize conflicts? Why and with what means do they become involved and how do their agendas get internalized/localized? Cases include: the separatist movements in the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Aceh (Indonesia); and the civil wars in Rwanda/Congo, and Sierra Leone/Liberia, Lebanon, and Iraq. This book finds that a combination of greater democratization internally, coupled with constructive outside mediation efforts, can produce conditions necessary to prevent conflicts from escalating or diffusing, and can facilitate peace-building. Several chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Asian Security.