Managing International - Civil Militarized Conflicts (I-CMC): Empirical Patterns

ABSTRACT

This study examines international-civil militarized conflicts (I-CMCs), those that lie at the intersection of violent intra- and interstate conflict. The data compilation identifies I-CMCs and the different conflict management approaches specifically used to manage them (i.e., negotiation, mediation, legal, peacekeeping, sanctions, and military intervention). We describe the patterns of conflict management in I-CMCs over the period 1946–2010, with respect to both serious civil and interstate conflicts. Among the key findings are that conflict management in general is very frequent (about 18 attempts per interstate confrontation and much more for serious internal conflict) and mediation is by far the most frequent approach.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version was presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association-Midwest, 2019. The authors would like to thank Yahve Gallegos, Josh Jackson, and George Williford for their research assistance and John Ishiyama for his comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. This statistic derives from the ‘compromise’ outcome classification that the Correlates of War Project codes in militarized interstate disputes (MIDs), here applied only to the MIDs associated with a civil conflict as defined in our case selection discussion below (Palmer et al. 2015).

2. Conflict management outcomes lie beyond the scope of this study, especially given space constraints. Nevertheless, one must understand the use of conflict management before further investigating whether those uses ‘succeed’ (however defined). In this sense, our study sets up future work on the outcome of conflict management efforts within I-CMCs. We discuss future research on outcomes in the conclusion.

3. Because MIDs vary in severity (e.g., threats versus displays versus uses of force), future research might explore the relationship between MID severity and conflict management in I-CMCs.

4. The beginning time point depends not only on data availability of all conflict management attempts (see the data sources noted below), but also on the empirical reality that the existence (e.g., peace operations) or significant frequency (e.g., mediation) of some conflict management strategies only appears after World War II. The endpoint of the analysis derives from the data on MIDs and the issues within them.

5. Using MIDs to define the universe of conflict cases, as opposed to civil conflicts, not only ensures that we have the full universe of cases, but also gives us a better idea of the range of I-CMCs – largely because the threshold for a conflict’s inclusion in the data is lower (threat, display, or use of force, rather than battle deaths).

6. Available online at: https://ucdp.uu.se/. Last accessed 28 January 2021.

7. For more details about the collection of these data, see Jackson et al.(2021).

8. Palmer et al. (2015). The MID dyadic data are available online at: https://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/MIDs. Last accesed 28 January 2021.

9. For other attempts to capture the international elements of civil conflict, see Högbladh et al. (2011); San-Akca (2016).

10. We do not have specific data on the conflicts below this threshold. Our analysis can therefore only get at their association with conflict management attempts indirectly, via the MID-paticipating states associated with them.

11. See also Owsiak et al. (2021), which uses multidimentional scaling to compare and contrast these strategies along a dozen different dimensions.

12. Coding rules and other explanations are given in each of the sources and are compatible with one another within categories.

13. Peace operations include those conducted by the United Nations, as well as regional and multinational ones.

14. This reinforces why we build the data structure from the interstate side first. The lower severity threshold for MIDs allows us to search for all instances of civil conflict associated with them, including low-level civil conflict. To start with civil conflict first requires either (i) the arbitrary severity threshold found in existing datasets (e.g., >25 battle-deaths) or (ii) a larger data collection effort that gathers threats, displays, or uses of low-level military force between governments and one or more rebel groups.

15. We use the Correlates of War Project’s regional classifications. Cross-regional dyads almost exclusively involve major-minor state dyads. For the interstate analysis, we code these in the region of the major power. For the civil conflict analysis, we code these based on the location of the state experiencing the civil conflict. Accordingly, some of the data in Tables 1 and 2 will not match each other exactly with respect to regional focus.

16. Three civil conflicts in Serbia (Yugoslavia), two in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and one in Croatia.

17. Only states can be parties to a case in most international and regional courts. Rebels often lack standing to bring a matter to court. Third-party states might also lack standing, given that they cannot make legal claims against the civil conflict host state.

18. We also ran an analysis for the post-9/11 period separately (2002–2010). The low numbers of observations – especially for serious civil conflicts – inhibit meaningful comparisons; nevertheless, mediation seems somewhat less likely (though still about 50%) after 9/11, while a commensurate increase in peacekeeping and military intervention also occurs. Because our dataset includes specific dates for the conflicts, as well as the conflict management efforts within them, other scholars can advance and test for different temporal distinctions in the future (with, of course, the appropriate theoretical grounding).

19. Because the global totals also include the region under comparison, the gap is actually greater than what we report here.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by a grant from the United States Institute of Peace, as well as from the Ashbel Smith Professor Fund at the University of Texas-Dallas.