Where Do States Go? Strategy in Civil War Intervention

Abstract

While the extant literature on the UN peacekeeping missions has considered the dynamics of institutional decisionmaking, relatively less attention has been paid to how states choose the civil wars in which they are going to intervene. In this article, I compare state and IGO decisionmaking in civil war intervention and claim that states make strategic decisions and consider the behavior of other third-party states to judge the costs and risks associated with intervention. Event history analysis results for the post-WWII period suggest that the timing of civil war intervention is closely associated with the war’s intervention history. States become hesitant and wait for longer periods to take action in civil wars in which interventions that failed to influence combatant behavior have been attempted by other states. Civil wars that survive despite heavy third-party involvement discourage other states from undertaking intervention efforts.