Escalate to De-Escalate? External State Support and Governments’ Willingness to Negotiate

Abstract

Policymakers sometimes argue that material assistance to rebels involved in a civil war can create a 'ripe moment' that is favorable for negotiations. Ripeness theory provides support for this idea. However, this notion has never been systematically assessed. This article evaluates this claim by using global data on negotiations in all intrastate armed conflicts from 1975 to 2009. Contrary to popular belief, the article demonstrates that external state support to rebel groups does not increase the prospect of negotiations. Instead, the results suggest that external support is likely to reduce the likelihood of negotiations between the warring parties, especially if the state sponsor is a great power. The study contributes to our understanding of civil war processes by demonstrating that military assistance hinders rather than promotes the onset of negotiations and by questioning the utility of ripeness theory as the most suitable framework for understanding this phenomenon.

Turning the Tables: Military Intervention and the Onset of Negotiations in Civil War

“…The analysis suggests that the presence of a direct military intervention supporting the rebels can absorb some of the legitimacy and reputational costs for the government in a conflict and make negotiations more likely. This finding is contrary to results on rebel-side interventions by others (Kaplow 2016; Pechenkina and Thomas 2020; Karlén 2020) but in line with similar findings by Findley (2013) and Grieg (2015).…”

“…The government, however, is often the side that needs to be convinced to negotiate (Bapat 2005; Asal et al 2019; Karlén 2020). The context of a civil war presents two particular barriers to negotiation from the perspective of the government: the potential reputational concerns and the risk of signaling weakness by agreeing to negotiate.…”

Forecasting peace agreement content: How conflict events predict the substance of peace settlements

“…Regime type (Phayal et al, 2019), the number of insurgent organisations (Nilsson, 2010) and state capacity (DeRouen et al, 2010) influence the conflict outcome. Moreover, international involvement affects the probability of negotiations and peace agreements in intrastate conflicts (McKibben and Skoll, 2020;Karlén, 2020;Maekawa, 2019).…”

External support in armed conflicts: Introducing the UCDP external support dataset (ESD), 1975–2017

“…External support has been found to impact all aspects of the civil war process from conflict onset (Cunningham, 2016; Regan & Meachum, 2014), to conflict duration (Anderson 2019; Aydin & Regan, 2011; Cunningham, 2010; Roberts, 2019; Testerman 2015), spill-over to interstate conflict (Schultz, 2010), civil war negotiations (Karlén, forthcoming), conflict outcome (Jones, 2017; Lyall & Wilson, 2009; Sawyer, Cunningham & Reed 2017; McKibben & Skoll, 2021; Keels, Benson & Widmeier, forthcoming), conflict recurrence (Karlén, 2017), and democratic transitions (Colaresi, 2014). It shapes the form of contestation (Jackson, San-Akca & Maoz, 2020; Petrova, 2019), its lethality (Heger & Salehyan 2007) as well as levels of civilian abuse (Salehyan, Siroky & Wood, 2014) and sexual violence (Johansson & Sarwari, 2019).…”