ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses internal conflicts and their international impacts from different issues-based perspectives. It begins by briefly remarking upon the difficulties encountering a more fruitful alignment between studies of international relations and internal conflict. In the immediate post-Cold War aftermath, some realist interpretations related the anarchical dilemmas of international political life replicated to internal conflict settings. Overall, while assisting in some security appraisals of internal conflict, realist approaches beg too many questions about statehood and anarchy to offer consistent analytical guidelines. While stock-in-trade approaches help to amplify some international aspects of internal conflict, they reveal problems of congruence. Wars within states amplify persisting difficulties confronted by international relations inquiry about the accommodation of state, nation and identity differences within philosophies of order. International relations analysis thus has some distance to travel before it can offer a comprehensive account of why the external impacts of intra-state conflict matter.
