My research examines how states manage armed challengers through informal institutions and political bargains when military victory, formal peace, or direct state control are difficult, costly, or strategically undesirable. Combining original datasets, statistical analysis, archival research, and qualitative case studies, I ask big questions about informal and gray-zone relationships, informal political order, and powersharing across civil war, rebel governance, proxy warfare, and foreign intervention.

How do target states respond to efforts of foreign subversion? Existing research on proxy warfare and foreign subversion emphasizes how external sponsors support insurgent groups to undermine their foreign rivals. However, far less attention has been paid to how target states respond to the threat of proxy warfare. I argue that strategic rivalry can motivate target states involved in domestic conflicts to selectively end conflicts informally to deny foreign rivals access to viable proxies. Target states are then more likely to cease fighting informally in conflicts with rebels that are attractive as potential proxies. I utilize novel data on informal conflict outcomes across all civil conflicts (1960-2020) to estimate logistic and multinomial regression on a panel dataset of 2,158 observations. I find that transnational ethnic linkages and transnational ethnic presence of an armed group's constituency increase the likelihood that conflicts will end in informal cessation. These results highlight an overlooked mechanism through which rivalry shapes domestic conflict dynamics, emphasizing that foreign rivalry may not only increase the risk of conflict but also selectively facilitate informal conflict termination, allowing armed groups to obtain informal concessions they would otherwise not.