The Mysterious Absence of Military Intervention in Extra-Systemic Wars

• In Event: Realism: War, Participation, and Restraint?

Abstract

Military intervention affects how and if wars are fought, their outcomes, and duration. Yet, while military intervention is very common in both interstate and civil wars, it is extremely rare in extra systemic (i.e., colonial wars). This absence has received almost no attention in the literature and yet given the centrality of military intervention to the nature of warfare, this absence is important as it means the nature of extra systemic wars is likely to vary substantially from those of civil and interstate war because of the lack of military intervention. Further, recent research has shown that the discipline’s tendency to ignore extra-systemic wars can lead to blind spots when it comes to topics ranging from violence against civilians to how the international system is structured. Thus, understanding the lack of intervention in extra-systemic wars is worth exploring.

To that end, this paper proposes several possible explanation. First, it could be that the territories being contested in these wars are not valuable enough for other states to choose to intervene. Secord, the possibility that the lack of intervention is an artifact of how the Correlates of War dataset is coded is explored. Third, the possibility that British naval hegemony and the difficulty of power projection limits the ability of states to intervene is examined. Last, the fact that intervention is rare in the civil wars of great powers and that extra-systemic wars could be seen as a type of civil war is offered as a possibility.

Author

• Zachary Shirkey, Hunter College, CUNY