Explaining the Spread of Ethnosectarian Conflict: Syria's Civil War and the Resurgence of Kurdish Militancy in Turkey

Ethnic civil wars tend to spread to adjacent countries, yet the processes whereby diffusion takes place remain obscure. Quantitative studies point to a wide range of factors and dynamics that drive ethnosectarian conflicts across international borders with no consensus regarding the causal potency of these variables or the ways in which they interact with one another. Surveying the most influential theories that have been advanced so far clarifies the logic of disparate arguments and offers hypotheses that can be tested against particular cases. The civil war in Syria represents one notable instance in which fighting along ethnosectarian lines provoked a revival of political violence in a neighboring state, the Turkish Republic. Applying existing theories to this empirical case clarifies promising directions for future research.