How can neighboring governments provoke conflict in weaker states?

Neighboring governments can provoke conflict in weaker states by acting as "bad neighbors," deliberately making decisions to incite instability for political, economic, security, or ideological gain. These external actors often move beyond being passive observers to actively inflaming or prolonging violent struggles to advance their own strategic interests.12

Methods used to provoke or exacerbate these conflicts include:

• Proxy Support: Governments may provide financial, military, political, and moral support to specific ethnic groups or combatants. By supplying weapons, training, and economic assistance, they empower surrogates to continue fighting, which often reduces the incentive for those groups to pursue diplomacy or peace negotiations.23
• Stoking Internal Hostilities: External powers may deliberately incite tensions between different groups within a rival nation to weaken the state from within.3
• Exploiting Ethnic Kinship: Conflicts are more likely to escalate or spread across borders when an ethnic minority in a weak state has "kinfolk" in a neighboring country. External governments may mobilize these groups, using their shared homelands as a base for political or military struggle.24

Engaging in such interventions is ethically fraught, as it frequently leads to widespread human suffering, including famine, displacement, and the erosion of human rights.23