Civil war mediation and integration into global value chains

ABSTRACT

How does the globalization of production affect interstate behavior? While scholars have paid significant attention to the effect of global value chains on trade and political economy, there has been substantially less focus on the interaction between globalized production and conflict behavior. However, the changing economic landscape has the potential to alter the decision calculus of leaders on a variety of issues, including conflict mediation. In this research note, I argue that when deciding how to allocate scarce mediation resources, major powers pay attention to the position of potential beneficiaries in the global production network. In particular, among states involved in intrastate conflicts, those that are more heavily involved in the production and sale of intermediate inputs are more likely to receive mediation from major powers. I test this argument using data on intermediate trade and civil war mediation between 1991 and 2011. The results of the analysis are consistent with the theory, suggesting that major powers are more likely to provide mediation for producers of intermediate goods, but not for consumers.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil war
• global value chains
• mediation
• trade

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ See https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/wts2017_e/wts2017_e.pdf.

² According to the World Bank. See: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS.

³ Böhmelt (2010) does look at trade with outside parties, but this is still in terms of bilateral trade relationships. There has been a lack of attention paid to the larger market presence of war-torn countries.

⁴ According to Johnson and Noguera (2012), trade in intermediates now makes up the bulk of international trade.This is especially true in OECD countries.

⁵ I focus on major powers—which account for a disproportionate number of mediation attempts—because they have more mediation opportunities, different incentives, and greater leverage than other actors. Major powers are able to mediate more conflicts than others because they can “project their resources throughout the international system” (Frazier 2006: 273). Second, while mediation appeals to regional powers because of concerns about regional stability, major powers are more likely to care about other issues, including trade. Therefore, this analysis is more relevant to major powers than to other potential mediators. Third, major powers have greater leverage (Crocker, Hampson, and Aall 1999), making them, ceteris paribus, more likely to be successful when they mediate. Finally, as Bercovitch et al. (2000) note, international mediation is primarily the domain of the great powers anyway.

⁶ While the DeRouen et al. data cover the period from 1946 to 2011, I am limited by the availability of other variables. Moreover, given the changes in the nature of production over the past century, the shorter time span seems more appropriate.

⁷ An additional analysis with any mediator as the dependent variable can be found in the supplementary appendix.

⁸ The basis for the CWM data set is the UCDP Conflict Termination data (Kreutz 2010). While it focuses on mediation, the data include all civil wars that meet the requisite conditions, and not only those that experienced mediation.

⁹ Major powers are coded according to the Correlates of War project (see http://www.correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/state-system-membership, and include the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, China, Germany, and Japan). Coding for OECD countries, rather than major powers, does not affect the substantive results, and is available in the appendix.

¹⁰ Available at https://wits.worldbank.org.

¹¹ Because some dyad-years have zero intermediate trade, I add one before taking the natural log.

¹² I operationalize integration by using trade with major powers in this analysis because I am looking at the decision by major powers to intervene in conflicts. However, a case could be made that total intermediate trade is equally important, as it captures the potential size of the market. A major power might be willing to intervene to put an end to a future trading partner’s war if that state has a large enough market. However, within the data, the major powers tend to be states’ primary trading partners for intermediate goods, and alternative operationalizations that use total trade in intermediates produce substantively identical results.

¹³ A series of robustness checks are included in the appendix.