CHOOSING TO INTERVENE - OUTSIDE INTERVENTIONS IN INTERNAL CONFLICTS

Recent scholarly and policy attention has been devoted to understandin g outside interventions in civil conflicts. Using a decision theoretic model to develop the constraints faced by decision makers, I derive h ypotheses about the conditions under which we would expect to observe outside military or economic interventions in civil conflicts. These h ypotheses are then tested against data on intrastate conflicts and ass ociated interventions during the post-World War II period. The evidenc e suggests that both domestic and international considerations influen ce the decision to intervene, with highly intense conflicts being unli kely to attract outside actors and those with humanitarian crises quit e likely to do so. A confounding result suggests that the greater the number of shared borders, the less likely will be an outside intervent ion.