Framework

Operating at the intersection of International Relations, Conflict Studies, and Strategic Management Studies (corporate political activities, CPA), the primary focus lies on the analysis of competing theories that include economic interests in the political decision-making process to intervene in a civil war. Whereas current IR scholarship hardly harnesses economic explanations or uses them in an ad-hoc manner, this study juxtaposes hypotheses derived from the realist and liberal school of thought and tests their empirical validity. Whereas realists emphasize state competition and a focus on FDI, liberal accounts concentrate on the link between CPA and political decision-making. It is expected that different forms of FDI increase the probability to intervene into a civil war. Furthermore, I hypothesize that CPA will be used to induce home states to intervene with different political instruments into civil wars on behalf of the corporation. Both sets of arguments will be tested quantitatively using a dyadic dataset to account for the motivation of the intervener based on existing economic links.

Bio note

Kamil Klosec is a Doctoral student in the field of International Relations at Charles University, Prague Topic: “Transnational factors and their effect on civil wars: insurgents, natural resources and third states' profit”. He has a double master degree on Arts in Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz, Germany, in International Administration and Conflict Management and Master in International Security Studies at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic and a B.A. in Political Science and Business Administration, University of Mannheim (Germany).

He was a research Assistant at the Peace Research Center Prague, project: „Frozen Conflicts“ and has published an article on Catalysts of violence: How do natural resource extractive technologies influence civil war outbreak and incidence in sub-Saharan Africa?. The Extractive Industries and Society. DOI: 10.1016/j.exis.2018.02.003 (2018).