Diplomatic Interventions and Civil War: A New Dataset

Abstract

Recent research in the civil war literature has focused on how and when external actors intervene. However, to date, systematic data have not existed on diplomatic efforts in conflict management. This article fills this gap and introduces a dataset on 438 diplomatic interventions in 68 conflicts stretching from 1945 to 1999. The authors briefly outline previous research on third-party interventions in civil wars, describe the dataset in some detail, including some initial patterns in the data, and describe how this dataset contributes to research into conflict processes. The authors also demonstrate how diplomatic interventions can be incorporated into other research agendas by merging this dataset with Doyle & Sambanis's peacekeeping data and replicating their analysis to examine the role of external diplomacy on peacebuilding success. These data on interventions, moreover, can be merged with commonly used datasets on intrastate conflicts, which promises a wide range of application in civil war studies. Developing a greater understanding of when and how civil wars end, scholarship needs to take into account efforts to arrive at diplomatic solutions. And if, as the results demonstrate, externally driven diplomacy facilitates the termination of civil wars, then the policy implications are quite important.

Cascades of Violence: War, Crime and Peacebuilding Across South Asia

“…As argued in Part I, Autesserre (2010Autesserre ( , 2014Autesserre ( , 2017) is insightful in showing that peacebuilding is also insufficiently responsive to local complexity. For all those flaws of oversimplification, this book has concluded that, on average, UN peace operations have contributed a great deal to creating a more peaceful world (Call 2012;Doyle and Sambanis 2000;Fortna and Howard 2008: 288-94;Gilligan and Sergenti 2008;Nilsson 2006;Quinn et al 2007;Riordan 2013;Sambanis 2008;Walter 2002), as has mediation of peace agreements (Human Security Research Group 2014: 174-5;Karstedt 2017;Regan et al 2009). Moreover, as Lise has shown, the failure rate can be further reduced for peace operations that learn and adapt after failure.…”

Scaling criminology: From street violence to atrocity crimes

“…Most important for scaling down are three results of this research. First, mediation-whether resulting in ceasefires or full or partial settlements-is successful in more than half of the cases, and only 4 per cent fail completely (Regan et al 2009). This is confirmed for regional conflicts in South-East Asia and Oceania, with a strong positive relationship between mediation and reduction of violence (Möller et al 2011).…”

Introducing the Civil Wars Mediation (CWM) dataset

“…The ICB dataset focuses on international crises and the ICM dataset focuses on civil and interstate wars. A new dataset by Regan, Frank & Aydin (2009) provides a valuable new contribution on diplomatic interventions in civil war but they treat mediation as only one aspect of non-military interventions, and they omit smaller civil wars with a fatality threshold below 200. Beber (2010), Eralp et al (2010), and Svensson (2007) have also generated useful civil war mediation datasets, but their coverage is presently limited to the post-Cold War era.…”