Civil War Diffusion and Regional Motivations for Intervention

Abstract

Third-party states consider the regional destabilization consequences of civil wars when deciding to intervene. However, previous work implicitly assumes that potential interveners base their intervention decisions solely on their links to the civil war country. This approach is unlikely to reflect the regional concerns of interested parties. When a civil war is increasingly likely to infect its surrounding region, potential interveners with strong interests in those states neighboring the conflict will be more likely to intervene to contain the violence. Thus, relationships outside the civil war state-intervener dyad are causally associated with intervention. To test these arguments, the author accounts for the contagious properties of civil wars and the regional interests of third parties, constructing dynamic measures to represent the contagion threat posed to third party regional interests. Analyses of these measures support the argument that third parties are increasingly likely to intervene as the risk of diffusion increasingly threatens their regional interests.

“Oil above Water”

“…The risk of transnational spread of a civil war can make states with strong interests in a region intervene to contain the conflict (e.g. Salehyan & Gleditsch, 2006;Gleditsch, 2007a,b;Kathman, 2011). We argue that external actors may also have vested economic interests in conflict outcomes that could motivate intervention.…”

International Migration and Military Intervention in Civil War

“…In fact, the risk of conflict spill-over into neighboring countries features prominently in the literature; accordingly, the transnational spread of civil war can affect the incentives of neighboring states to contain conflict (e.g. Regan, 1998;Salehyan and Gleditsch, 2006;Gleditsch, 2007;Kathman, 2011).…”

“…Finally, although we do not want to restrict our analysis to third-party interventions in support of either the rebels or the government, the appendix shows that our results do not change when considering only interventions biased toward the government or the opposition. 15 We do not consider a fixed effects specification as this would induce selection bias (Kathman, 2011;Regan, 2002). Specifically, including fixed effects would lead to the omission of all those third-party states that ultimately decide not to intervene.…”

“…Our set of control covariates follows those previous studies we discussed in the literature review above (e.g., Koga, 2011;Kathman, 2011;Mitchell, 1970;Finnemore, 2004;Weiss, 2012;Regan, 1998;Lemke and Regan, 2004;Aydin, 2008;Findley and Marineau, 2015). Hence, we include the polity2 scores of the Polity IV data for both the potentially intervening country (Third-Party Democracy) and the country at war (Conflict Democracy).…”

“…influence on cross-border investment (Leblang, 2010) and the likelihood of (civil) conflict in their target state (see, e.g., Regan, 1998;Salehyan and Gleditsch, 2006;Gleditsch, 2007;Kathman, 2011) or country of origin (Miller and Hencken-Ritter, 2014). Evidently, migrant communities are potentially powerful actors in international politics.…”