Understanding Persistent Interventions in Civil Wars

• In Event: International Influences on Security Forces

Abstract

Why do some international actors who intervene militarily in civil wars continue their military engagement after the war has ended, while other actors end their intervention and withdraw all military forces at the conclusion of the war? In analyzing this puzzle, I introduce a new theoretical concept: persistent intervention. Defined as the continuation of an external state’s military intervention after the civil war ends, the concept of persistent intervention sheds light on the connections between wartime and post-conflict period. Political science research has mostly theorized about wartime and peacetime separately; while external interventions in civil wars are considered to be mostly biased and strategic, peacetime interventions involving the same external actors would mostly fall under peacekeeping or post-conflict reconstruction.
Diverging from this segmented approach, this study presents empirical evidence on the variation in the persistence of interventions. Drawing on a novel dataset of post-war military interventions in all intrastate conflicts that ended in the post-Cold War era as well as in-depth analysis of several cases in the Middle East and North Africa region, I compare persistent military interventions to non-persistent ones. I find that interveners with the availability and access to political and economic gains of the intervention drive the decision to keep troops in peacetime. The domestic elites’ desire to protect these predatory gains from the intervention leaves some interveners entangled in the civil war country, where leaving too soon might devalue and destabilize the investments. Findings also have implications for external involvement in peace agreements and peacekeeping operations.
This study makes two main contributions to the existing knowledge of foreign interventions in civil wars. First, empirically, it follows up military interventions to see the nature of the intervener-target country relations once the war ends. This is an important gap in the literature, as almost all major datasets stop tracking interventions if there is no active conflict. And theoretically, it reframes the argument on the domestic predatory state causing violence and spoiling peace by expanding it to the foreign predatory actor who sees the civil war as a window of opportunity for extraction of resources but ends up being entrapped in its intervention.

Author

• Sevdenur Koru, Temple University