Foreign Powers and Intervention in Armed Conflicts by Aysegul Aydin

Author:Aysegul Aydin [Aydin, Aysegul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Security (National & International), Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780804782814
Google: Xii5tgAACAAJ
Amazon: 0804782814
Goodreads: 13789909
Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
Published: 2012-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

6

IN CIVIL WARS

Piracy goes to the heart of national security and economic interests. America has always been a seafaring nation, and securing the world’s sea-lanes has been a source and a symbol of our strength. In the face of instability and humanitarian crises around the world, our ability to project our naval power to help ensure the free passage of goods and humanitarian aid is as important as it’s ever been.1

A GENERAL THEORY OF INTERNATIONAL intervention not only brings together previous research, but it might also facilitate an analysis of intervention in different international settings. Relevant to the framework presented in this book is civil war intervention, as discussed in Chapter 2. Most cases of civil war intervention violate international law; the U.N. Charter unequivocally opposes attempts to interfere in the domestic affairs of another nation with the exception of those that fall within the humanitarian doctrine. Yet a more contemporary interpretation of international law requires that scholars and practitioners take into account the reality on the field in line with the arguments of the “new interventionism” literature.2 Civil war intervention constitutes a vast literature on its own and has made considerable progress in the post–Cold War period with increasing attention to humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping.3 There is substantial agreement on the fact that several core characteristics of civil wars, such as the time frame of their existence and the legal status of civil war belligerents, render this type of aggression as a distinct international phenomenon. Proper attention should be paid to the confounding factors in the civil war context. Understanding alignments in international conflicts requires examining state-to-state relations between external actors and belligerents. In civil wars, interstate relations are not the complete story: External actors frequently intervene to support the rebel side against governments. In this context, it is also necessary to understand how interveners relate to armed nonstate actors who operate within the borders of other states and aim to undermine the sovereign authority of their government.

This chapter highlights whether the book’s framework can shed light on interveners’ motivations in civil war intervention. The following sections test the intervention model developed in Chapter 4 against this particular type of intervention. Next, the chapter draws from the qualitative work in Chapter 5 and discusses U.S. policies as it has sought to influence civil wars and international conflicts linked through transnational rebellion in less-developed areas of the world.

MOTIVATION

Civil war intervention is relevant to the framework of this book on an important dimension. Economically minded external states aim at managing the deleterious effects of internal fighting on economic activity and cross-border transactions with intervention. U.S. interventions in the Nicaraguan and El Salvadoran civil wars in the 1970s and British intervention in the Nigerian civil war (1967–1970) have been associated with economic concerns of intervener states.4 As the nature of aggression has changed from interstate to intrastate, which generated a new breed of global problems in the post–Cold War era, civil wars have emerged as sites of poor and deteriorating economic conditions in far corners of the international economic system.

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