This dissertation addresses the question of how political contention escalates to civil war. More specifically, it examines two subsidiary questions: why do some protest waves evolve into insurgencies while others do not; and why do some insurgencies escalate into civil wars while others do not. Students of civil war generally argue that a country's structural attributes affect the likelihood of the outbreak of a civil war. Nonetheless, these studies fail to address the process of escalation in which the intensity of a conflict increases and becomes more violent. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on the escalatory and non-escalatory dynamics of protest waves and insurgencies to understand the process which transforms lower forms of conflict into higher ones. As such, it treats civil war as an outgrowth of domestic contention. I use Tarrow's dynamic protest wave model to develop models for conflict escalation and non-escalation. I argue that radicalization and militarization are the main causal mechanisms driving the escalation process from a protest wave to an insurgency and from an insurgency to a civil war respectively. I then examine two cases of escalation in Kashmir and two cases of non-escalation in Assam. Time series analysis is used to analyze the original empirical evidence collected through content analysis. The quantitative results indicate that while the state's repressive tactics typically increase conflict intensity in general, the most critical factor for explaining conflict escalation is the external support received from foreign actors. Overall, this study demonstrates that treating civil war onset as a sequence of dynamic interactions between political groups and states provides a more comprehensive understanding of how civil wars start.
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