Joining the Fray

Outside Military Intervention in Civil Wars

Zachary C. Shirkey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317110408
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

National leaders often worry that civil wars might spread, but also seem to have little grasp on which civil wars will in fact draw in other states. An ability to understand which civil wars are most likely to draw in outside powers and when this is likely to happen has important policy implications as well as simply answering a scholarly question. Joining the Fray takes existing explanations about which outside states are likely to intervene militarily in civil wars and adds to them explanations about when states join and why. Building on his earlier volume, Is this a Private Fight or Can Anybody Join?, Zachary C. Shirkey looks at how the decision to join a civil war can be intuitively understood as follows: given that remaining neutral was wise when a war began something must change in order for a country to change its beliefs about the benefits of fighting and join the war. This book studies what these changes are, focusing in particular on revealed information and commitment problems.

Chapter 1
The Puzzle and Importance of Military Intervention in Civil Wars

A conflict that already has claimed so many victims could spread like poison throughout the region, eat away at Europe’s stability and erode our partnership with our European allies.

Bill Clinton, 27 November 1995

As exhibited by Bill Clinton’s quote on Bosnia, leaders have long been concerned about the possibility civil wars could spread to involve additional, often neighboring, states. Of course, the great irony of Clinton’s and other Western leaders’ concerns about the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia is that the wars never spread to include any states other than the successor states to Yugoslavia until after those very leaders decided to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo. Still, in general the concern is valid and raises the question of why, in fact, do civil wars at times spread to involve additional states. Multiparty wars, both interstate and civil, are rare, but whether they are just outliers from bilateral wars or whether they are somehow the result of distinct causes has been debated.1 This book’s aim is to answer that question. Its central argument is that civil wars spread as a result of conscious decisions made by third parties who are reacting to information revealed by events within civil wars. Thus, such wars differ from bilateral conflicts because of how other states react to events within those wars, rather than because the wars are fundamentally different in nature.

Recent work in security studies in international relations has rightly focused on civil wars as these wars have been far more prevalent than interstate wars since 1945 and the biggest threat most states face is from internal groups.2 Much of this literature has explored why such wars begin, why they end and the durability of their peace settlements—all important and policy relevant topics. Why some civil wars draw in outside participants and why these outside participants join, however, has received less attention. This is unfortunate given that international concern about civil wars often focuses on whether the wars will spread and if they will destabilize entire regions.3 Additionally, the courses of civil wars are often shaped by the involvement of third parties.4 Thus, understanding the processes which lead to civil war expansion is just as important for crafting policy as understanding civil war initiation and termination.5

Concern about civil wars expanding is not without foundation as 60 percent of civil wars experience some level of outside involvement and three fifths of those experience involvement by multiple outside states.6 A number of studies have focused on outside involvement in civil wars, however, they have mainly examined the effects of such involvement rather than its causes or which states are likely to become involved. In this, it is the opposite of the literature on interstate wars which, with few exceptions, has focused on the causes of intervention and which states will intervene, rather than the effects of intervention. The civil war literature has found that outside involvement lengthens civil wars, regardless of whether that involvement was military, diplomatic, intentionally biased or attempted to be unbiased, though those states which have independent goals have the largest effect.7 This is consistent with the limited research on the effects on military intervention into interstate wars.8 Such intervention also affects both rebel and state capacity, both in terms of relative capabilities and the technology available to each side. Thus, it affects which side will win and the nature of the fight.9 Civil wars, therefore, are fundamentally shaped by the roles played by outside states.10 Finally, the manner in which civil wars are fought may be deliberately altered by the initial belligerents in order to affect the likelihood of outside involvement. Thus it may be impossible to fully understand how and why such wars occur, are fought and end without understanding the dynamics which affect whether they will expand. Indeed, Blainey (1988) argues that all decisions to wage wars are influenced by the prospect of whether outside intervention is likely or not and Shirkey (2009) claims all wars are shaped by the prospect that outside states will join. Thus, how and even whether a civil war is fought at all may, in part, depend on the prospects that outside intervention will occur. Thus is it vital to understand why some outside states become involved in the civil wars of other states.

Additionally, how such outside intervention will affect ongoing civil wars is not simply an academic concern. As the debate in 2011 over the wisdom of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) intervention in Libya shows, debates about whether or not to join such wars are part and parcel of many contemporary policy debates. Thus, understanding what drives states to join these wars can help both scholars and decision-makers understand modern policy outcomes.

Unfortunately, the field lacks a solid grasp of why states join ongoing civil wars. As Jentleson and Levite (1992, 16) put it, “Taking stock of what we know about why and when states initiate military interventions reveals in fact how little we know.” This lack of understanding on the part of the international relations field about the motives behind why outside states become involved in civil wars is, in large part, because the motives of joining states are not necessarily the same as those of the initial belligerents. Joiners may fight for reasons that have very little to do with the initial dispute.11 Bremer (1995) suggests that late joiners may even fight only certain members of the initial war in what could almost be seen as a private war within a given dyad.12 As Bennett and Stam (2004, 184) put it, “The strategic game for … joiners [is] not the same [as] considered by initiators. [It uses] very different information and projections.” Because of this, joining requires “a different game tree that awaits development.”13 This work aims to help meet that challenge by providing a theoretical explanation for why states join ongoing civil wars.

Much of the reason for this failure to understand why states join ongoing civil wars is that previous approaches have largely focused on country specific variables in order to explain the geographic spread of war. These country-specific approaches, of which much more will be said in Chapter Two, generally try to explain joining through geographic proximity, ethnic ties and the alliance structures of states not involved in the war in question. While such state specific characteristics help explain which states get drawn into civil wars, they offer little insight into which civil wars are more likely to experience outside involvement and when non-belligerents will enter a civil war. It seems likely that the key to these unanswered questions resides within the nature of the war itself.

What Causes Joining?

Napoleon Bonaparte famously said, “War is composed of nothing but surprises.”14 While this is clearly hyperbole, the point is important nevertheless. The outcome and course of a war are difficult to predict. Surprises in war change not only the course of the war, but also the way that non-belligerent states perceive that war. The information revealed by these events holds one of the keys to understanding why and when states join ongoing civil wars. Information revealed during the course of civil wars can cause third parties to decide to join those wars and it dictates the timing of their entry. Returning to the recent example of NATO intervention in Libya helps illustrate this. NATO was perfectly willing to remain on the sidelines while the rebels based in Benghazi appeared to be winning. After a series of defeats around Bin Jawad and Ra’s Lanuf, the rebels retreated in disorder. It appeared government forces would be able to take Benghazi—possibly resulting in a massacre—and allow Muammar Gaddafi to retain his hold on power. Thus, NATO responded to information revealed about the relative balance of military forces in the recent Libyan civil war and chose to join that war in order to alter the relative military balance of forces.15

Thus, this work will argue that information generated and revealed by wars, such as surprising battlefield results, is one of the factors that explains which states join ongoing civil wars, why they join, when they join and even why some civil wars experience outside involvement while others do not. It will argue that these processes are not random, but are the result of conscious decisions by political leaders and that these leaders are responding to events which occur within civil wars. Given this, political scientists should be able to understand why and when leaders decide to involve their states in wars while others choose to remain neutral and what events or forces lead them to make these decisions.

As will be shown in Chapter 2, revealed information changes the perceived costs and benefits of joining an ongoing civil war. This is crucial, as any rational change in a state’s decision to enter a war should be driven by a change in that state’s expected utility for joining. Prior to any significant new or revealed information, the expected utility of going to war will generally be the same for a given non-belligerent as it was for that same state at the outbreak of the civil war. Thus, unexpected battlefield results and surprising political events that occur in a belligerent are central to understanding why and when states will join ongoing civil wars. These sorts of events reveal information and change the expected utility for joining. Therefore, they logically should dictate the timing of state intervention.

Using revealed information to explain the spread of war is rooted in the wider learning and bargaining theory literature. As was argued above, without the presence of uncertainty and states’ ability to learn from information revealed by civil wars, there would be little reason for states to join civil wars well after they had begun. Rather, states would join very quickly or not at all. Thus, this work serves not only as an investigation of military intervention, but also as a test of bargaining theory in general. If bargaining theory fails to help illuminate why states become belligerents mid-war, it is unclear why it should help explain the initial outbreak of civil war. Thus, this work has important implications for the study of war in general and bargaining theory specifically, in addition to its obvious relevance to the literature on the spread of civil wars.

Another explanation of joining, arising out of the bargaining literature, is that of commitment problems. Commitment problems arise when a political actor, such as a government or rebel group, cannot credibly promise to abide by a given agreement or to avoid taking a given action at some future date. The existence of such a problem can make it impossible for two sides to strike or maintain a bargain. It is possible that civil wars can illuminate the existence of these sorts of problems. For example, through the actions of a rebel group it could become clear that the group cannot credibly commit to not be hostile to a neighboring state if the rebel group succeeds in seizing the government. This, in turn, could cause that neighboring state to join the war to eliminate the commitment problem by helping the government defeat the rebel group. Thus, commitment problems, like revealed information, should help explain which civil wars experience joining. Both should also explain which outside states join, when they join and why they join.

These hypotheses are able to explain much about outside states joining ongoing civil wars that the civil war literature has yet to adequately explain and despite both the revealed information and commitment problem hypotheses being rooted in the broader bargaining literature, the work addresses questions which rationalists have yet to adequately tackle. This is true for several reasons. First, most prior research on why states intervene in wars is not explicitly rationalist. Instead, it has focused on static correlations, such as alliances, great power status and geography—things which do not generally vary over the course of a war. While such correlates are most helpful in determining which states compose the subset of likely joiners, they do nothing to explain when those states will join, nor do they help us understand which wars are more likely to experience intervention. Additionally, because these factors cannot explain the timing of joining, it is not clear they can fully explain why states join. If a geographically proximate great power opts to not join a civil war in the war’s early stages, but does join later, how confident can we feel in saying it was that state’s geographic position and large amount of power that caused it to join given that those factors were insufficient to cause the state to join initially? Thus, no explanation of joining is complete unless it addresses timing.

Second, rationalist arguments have generally not been applied to why states join ongoing wars in general and civil wars in particular.16 On top of this, when rationalists have attempted to explain the spread of civil wars, it has been in more narrow ways, such as Fearon’s (1998) explanation of the spread of nested ethnic conflicts. Therefore, this work fills a gap in the literature by offering a general rationalist explanation for why and when states join ongoing civil wars. Given this, it is best to see the work’s contribution not so much as arguing against prior explanations, but rather synthesizing prior empirical non-bargaining based explanations of the spread of war with rationalist concepts that have yet to be broadly employed to explain intervention in civil wars. By doing this, the book is able to explain not only which states are most likely to intervene, but when and why they do so and also in part which wars are most likely to experience intervention. Despite this synthetic nature, the book does draw a sharp distinction with scholars who argue that joining is driven by processes which are wholly separate from those that explain war initiation.17 This work argues the contrary. The process which drives joining is the very same as that which drives war initiation and termination: interstate—and interparty—bargaining. The only difference in joining is the bargaining is between belligerent parties and non-belligerent parties rather than amongst either a set of belligerent parties or a set of non-belligerent parties.

Another difference between this work and most recent rationalist approaches is that it does not employ formal models. Avoiding formal models has a major plus in that it makes the book accessible to much wider audience. It does, however, raise questions of whether the work’s findings are comparable with those of other rationalist works. They are. Formal models are not necessary to have internally consistent logic, though of course they can be helpful in constructing such logic. Mathematics is a tool for insuring that logic is consistent, but logic can be consistent in the absence of mathematics. Scholars have made compelling rationalist arguments in the past without employing formal models. Schelling’s (1966) classic work on coercion, brinksmanship and nuclear strategy is an excellent example of such a work and many of the concepts he articulated have inspired formal modelers in the years since. Ultimately, both formal and informal logic rests on the soundness of its assumptions and its external consistency must always be validated by empirical evidence. Thus, the lack of form...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 The Puzzle and Importance of Military Intervention in Civil Wars
• 2 Why States Join Civil Wars: Revealed Information and Commitment Problems
• 3 The Hungarian Revolution (1848–49): Unexpected Defeats and Nagging Commitment Problems
• 4 The Lebanese Civil War (1975–90): Revealed Information, Commitment Problems or Pretexts?
• 5 The First and Second Congo Wars (1996–2003): Ethnic Ties, Refugee Flows and Commitment Problems
• 6 The Afghan Civil War (1978–2001): Invasion Versus Military Aid
• 7 Conclusions, Extensions, Implications for Policy and Avenues for Future Research
• Bibliography
• Index