The geopolitics of civil war intervention

The regional interests of third party interveners are critical determinants of intervention in civil war. Foreign policymakers often tout the importance of regional stability when justifying their intervention decisions, as civil wars have shown a distinct tendency to be geographically contagious. Third parties observe these regional diffusion properties and consider a war's likelihood of infecting its regional context when deciding whether or not to become involved. As a third party becomes increasingly able to contain a civil war's hostilities from spreading into a region of foreign policy value to the potential intervener, intervention to contain the conflict becomes increasingly likely. I draw on theories of war diffusion and intervention to construct a model of intervention decision making, focusing on third party interests in the containment of conflict hostilities. Hypotheses derived from this model are then tested on the population of potential interveners for all civil wars in the post{World War II period. The empirical results support the theoretical arguments put forth in the intervention model, as third parties are shown to intervene in confiicts that threaten the third party's regional stability interests. In addition, the relative effectiveness of intervention as a tool for containing civil war hostilities is empirically tested. The findings indicate that interventions increase the likelihood of regional contagion in the short{term, but decrease its likelihood in the longterm. The theoretical and empirical advances of this dissertation represent the first study to directly address how the contagious properties of civil conflicts affect intervention phenomena

Armed Intervention and Civilian Victimization in Intrastate Conflicts

Abstract Research has begun to examine the relationship between changes in the conflict environment and levels of civilian victimization. We extend this work by examining the effect of external armed intervention on the decisions of governments and insurgent organizations to victimize civilians during civil wars. We theorize that changes in the balance of power in an intrastate conflict influence combatant strategies of violence. As a conflict actor weakens relative to its adversary, it employs increasingly violent tactics toward the civilian population as a means of reshaping the strategic landscape to its benefit. The reason for this is twofold. First, declining capabilities increase resource needs at the moment that extractive capacity is in decline. Second, declining capabilities inhibit control and policing, making less violent means of defection deterrence more difficult. As both resource extraction difficulties and internal threats increase, actors' incentives for violence against the population increase. To the extent that biased military interventions shift the balance of power between conflict actors, we argue that they alter actor incentives to victimize civilians. Specifically, intervention should reduce the level of violence employed by the supported faction and increase the level employed by the opposed faction. We test these arguments using data on civilian casualties and armed intervention in intrastate conflicts from 1989 to 2004. Our results support our expectations, suggesting that interventions shift the power balance and affect the levels of violence employed by combatants

Trade Potential and UN Peacekeeping Participation

The determinants of a country's UN peacekeeping troop contribution have been persistently studied. Trade, as a crucial self-interest motivation, is one of the important explanatory variables in the extant literature. However, the existing literature presents mixed results on the influence of trade on peacekeeping troop contributions. To capture the effect of trade on contributions precisely, we need to model expectations about future trade volume in a better way. Countries are pressured by the economic and political risks caused by the trade disruption and lobby groups to send peacekeeping troops to enable future trade or secure future investments. Therefore, trade potential, rather than realized trade, drives peacekeeping troop contributions. A gravity model is used to measure the trade potential between the UN peacekeeping mission countries and contributors, and test its relationship with the UN peacekeeping participation. Based on this measurement and a dyadic troop contribution dataset covering the period from 1990 to 2012, this article demonstrates that the counter-factual predictive trade volume is a relevant predictor of UN peacekeeping troop contributions

Civil War Contagion and Neighboring Interventions

Extant models of civil war intervention have difficulty accounting for the intervention decisions of third-party states that share a border with an ongoing civil war. This is troubling, as contiguous third parties account for a large proportion of interventions. I demonstrate that the tendency of civil wars to spread geographically pose neighbor states with threats to their well-being that are faced by no other type of intervener in the international system. Destruction, regime stability, even state survival are threatened by the prospect of civil war infection. I argue that neighboring third parties are thus motivated to intervene in an attempt to thwart war diffusion across their own borders. Through an analysis of civil war prevalence, I generate a measure of each state's yearly likelihood of being infected by a proximate civil war's hostilities. I then use this measure to explain neighboring interventions in civil wars of the post-WWII period. The results support my theorized expectations

Reliability, Reputation, and Alliance Formation

In this paper, we examine how the past alliance behavior of nations affects the likelihood that these states will be involved in alliance formation. We contend that nations evaluate the reputations of potential allies when searching for alliance partners. Reputation information is processed by governments along with other immediate concerns. By introducing a model and developing subsequent measures of reputational alliance histories, we improve upon our current understanding of the factors that drive alliance formation. Using alliance reputation data derived from the ATOP project (1816–2000), we find support for the hypothesis that a reputation for upholding one's agreements significantly improves the likelihood of membership in future alliances