Patrick M. Regan

Third-party Interventions and the Duration of Intrastate Conflicts:

Recent research has begun to focus on the role of outside interventions in the duration of civil conflicts. Assuming that interventions are a form of conflict management, ex ante expectations would be that they would reduce a conflicts expected duration. Hypotheses relating the type and timing of outside interventions to the duration of civil conflicts are tested. The data incorporate 150 conflicts during the period from 1945 to 1999, 101 of which had outside interventions. Using a hazard analysis, the results suggest that third-party interventions tend to extend expected durations rather than shorten them. The only aspect of the strategy for intervening that reduces the likelihood that a conflict will end in the next month is that it be biased in favor of either the opposition or the government. In effect, neutral interventions are less effective than biased ones.

Greed, Grievance, and Mobilization in Civil Wars:

Greed, grievances, and mobilization are generally offered as explanations for rebellion and civilwar. The authors extend arguments about the precursors to nonviolent protest, violent rebellion, and civil war. These arguments motivate a series of hypotheses that are tested against data from the Minorities at Risk project. The results of the analysis suggest, first, that the factors that predict antistate activity at one level of violence do not always hold at other levels; second, the response by the state has a large impact on the subsequent behavior of the rebels; and third, the popular notion of diamonds fueling civil unrest is generally not supported. The authors draw inferences from their results to future theoretical and policy development.

Diplomacy and Other Forms of Intervention in Civil Wars

Much of the empirical literature suggests that outside interventions tend to lengthen the expected duration of civil wars; conversely, the policy community often acts as if it holds the opposite expectation for the outcome of intervention. The authors argue that the divergence can be found in how models of intervention are specified in the literature. They propose a model with two novel contributions. First, they incorporate mediations as the key to resolving the strategic problems that the civil war parties face. Second, they account for the decaying effect of interventions over time. Their results suggest that diplomacy is critical for understanding the duration of civil conflicts. They find that mediation has a dramatic effect on the expected duration of a civil war and that when controlling for diplomatic efforts, economic interventions can also reduce the expected duration.

Threat and Repression: The Non-Linear Relationship between Government and Opposition Violence

An understanding of the causes of political repression has continually eluded researchers for the past decade. We argue that much of this can be tied to the theoretical specifications of the models employed. We developed a decision-theoretic model that predicts the level of repression used by governments to suppress political opposition. We believe that analysis of repression needs to include the political contexts in which states operate. In particular, we theorize and find that the nature of the threat posed by an opposition group influences the impact of both the domestic and international factors on the governments decision to repress. We argue that the international and domestic costs associated with a given level of government repression are best represented by separate, non-linear functions of the level of demand made by a dissident opposition group. From this model we deduce an equilibrium level of repression for any given demand; we then empirically test these predictions against original data generated from 18 Latin American countries during the years 1977-86. We find that as the nature of the threat posed by an opposition group moves from minor to extreme, the marginal increment of government repression decreases. Analyses of these data support our theoretical propositions, and suggest that both non-linear approaches and the inclusion of opposition group demands provide a useful tool for studying state repression.

In the Nick of Time: Conflict Management, Mediation Timing, and the Duration of Interstate Disputes

This paper develops a theoretical argument linking time and the timing of conflict management efforts to dispute duration. We test competing hypotheses on conflict data drawn from disputes in the post-1945 period. Our analysis demonstrates that the effects of mediation vary substantially over the course of a dispute. Specifically, we note that mediation has a curvilinear relationship with time and the ending of disputes. Mediation efforts that occur soon after disputes begin have the best chance of reducing expected future dispute duration. Following this initial period, subsequent mediation efforts lead to longer rather than shorter disputes. After a long period, mediation again leads to shorter rather than longer disputes. We also find that there should be consistency in the mediators used to manage a conflict rather than shifting personnel to interject new ideas.

Choosing to Intervene: Outside Interventions in Internal Conflicts

Recent scholarly and policy attention has been devoted to understanding outside interventions in civil conflicts. Using a decision theoretic model to develop the constraints faced by decision makers, I derive hypotheses about the conditions under which we would expect to observe outside military or economic interventions in civil conflicts. These hypotheses are then tested against data on intrastate conflicts and associated interventions during the post-World War II period. The evidence suggests that both domestic and international considerations influence the decision to intervene, with highly intense conflicts being unlikely to attract outside actors and those with humanitarian crises quite likely to do so. A confounding result suggests that the greater the number of shared borders, the less likely will be an outside intervention.

Women's Access to Politics and Peaceful States*

The article examines the relationship between women in society and the use of force by the state in the international arena. The arguments build on a conception of power relationships found in gender studies and feminist theories, and focus on how the internal distribution of political power at a societal level (as opposed to a state level) will influence the willingness of the ruling elite to engage in militarized interstate disputes and war. That is, the article explores the extent to which fertility rates directly and indirectly - through womens employment and political office - are associated with the use of force by a state. The authors draw on public opinion literature, which shows that womens attitudes toward the use of force differ from those of men, to argue that the more women have access to the political process the more constrained will be the state in its use of force. The results of the analysis demonstrate that at the dyadic level, contiguous pairs of countries with low birthrates are less likely to go to war, while, more generally, the lower the birthrates the less likely is a country to become engaged in the more violent of militarized disputes. Our results suggest that policies to promote family planning might be one effective form of managing the amount of interstate violence.

Diplomatic Interventions and Civil War: A New Dataset

Recent research in the civil war literature has focused on how and when external actors intervene. However, to date, systematic data have not existed on diplomatic efforts in conflict management. This article fills this gap and introduces a dataset on 438 diplomatic interventions in 68 conflicts stretching from 1945 to 1999. The authors briefly outline previous research on third-party interventions in civil wars, describe the dataset in some detail, including some initial patterns in the data, and describe how this dataset contributes to research into conflict processes. The authors also demonstrate how diplomatic interventions can be incorporated into other research agendas by merging this dataset with Doyle & Sambaniss peacekeeping data and replicating their analysis to examine the role of external diplomacy on peacebuilding success. These data on interventions, moreover, can be merged with commonly used datasets on intrastate conflicts, which promises a wide range of application in civil war studies. Developing a greater understanding of when and how civil wars end, scholarship needs to take into account efforts to arrive at diplomatic solutions. And if, as the results demonstrate, externally driven diplomacy facilitates the termination of civil wars, then the policy implications are quite important.

U.S. Economic Aid and Political Repression: An Empirical Evaluation of U.S. Foreign Policy

The U.S. Congress has mandated that foreign aid be used in a manner that distances the U.S. from regimes which consistently violate the human rights of their populations, and promotes more acceptable human rights records in recipient countries. There has been considerable scholarly attention devoted to the first of these congressional mandates, though as yet little effort has been made to evaluate the effectiveness of U.S. foreign aid programs in actually changing human rights behavior This essay is a first attempt at evaluating the impact of changes in economic assistance on changes in the amount of political abuse perpetrated by those on the receiving end of the assistance programs. Although others have shown that Carter and Reagan distributed their respective aid programs differently, the findings presented below demonstrate that economic aid has no discernable effect on the human rights records of the recipients; this result holds across both the Carter and Reagan administrations.

Substituting Policies during U.S. Interventions in Internal Conflicts A Little of This, a Little of That

The conditions under which states substitute across a range of foreign policy options have remained largely an unexplored area of international relations. The ability to substitute policies is evident in the response by the United States to instability in other countries. In this article, the author explores the conditions under which the United States changes its intervention strategies in civil conflicts and the type of interventions that are substituted once the decision to change has been made. He argues that the decision to change policy is rooted in domestic political risks, while the specific strategy for intervening will be a function of capabilities. Using data on U.S. interventions in the post-World War II period, the author demonstrates that domestic factors are associated with the likelihood of a change from the status quo. The specific policy option chosen, however, appears to be a result of both capabilities, which are rooted in the relationship with the target country and the amount of public attention given to the conflict in the media.