Regional Stability Preferences and Intervention as a Tool for Con-

Potential third party interveners often publicly tout the importance of intervention in order to contain a civil conflict from enveloping its surrounding regional environment. For example, given the explosive potential for the conflict in Kosovo to have infectious effects on the greater Balkan region, the Clinton administration sought foremost to

1_{It is not my contention in this dissertation that the decisions of a third party over intervention are} based wholly on the third party’s interest in the regional consequences of a civil conflict. In fact, third party states may have a number of incentives for involving themselves in a foreign civil war. These may include, but are not limited to, interests in ending the war’s hostilities, pillaging resources, gaining control over territory, or improving the likelihood that the side supported prevails. My argument is simply that potential interveners very often have interests that go beyond a narrow focus on the civil war state to a broader set of geopolitical consequences. I therefore separate the role of the contagious properties of civil wars from other explanations of intervention in order to clarify the role of such factors in the intervention decision making process.

contain the conflict within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, evidenced by the US National Security Council’s defined goals in the crisis to “promote regional stability and protect our investment in Bosnia; prevent...[a] renewed humanitarian crisis; [and] preserve US and NATO credibility (Gellman, 1999, A31).” Also, given the types of states that most often choose to intervene, third party interests in the containment of war hostilities is a generalizable phenomenon. The vast majority of intervening states are either neighbors of the civil war state or global powers with force projection capabilities beyond their geographic region. It is not often the case that global powers wish to intensify the spread of civil war instability throughout the regions in which the wars take place. Major powers, by definition, define their security and foreign policy interests globally. Attempting to manipulate a civil war in ways that make it regionally intractable is not likely to be a common intervention goal of major powers. Nor, for that matter, is it likely that major power interveners would have the ability to spread a civil war to particular states in the civil war state’s region and not others. Intervention to exacerbate a conflict’s hostilities is likely to raise the costs of the conflict for the entire regional context not simply for particular members of the region with whom an intervener may have an adversarial relationship. Third parties that neighbor the civil war state are also likely to prefer regional stability over infectious outcomes. As Rosh (1988) and Maoz (1996) make clear, a state’s security is closely tied to its regional environment. Intervention to exacerbate regional instability could only serve to increase the threat faced by the intervening neighbor state. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that third parties use intervention in foreign civil wars as a means of containing these conflicts from infecting their regional environments.

In addition, I do not contend that intervention is the only foreign policy tool avail- able to third parties. Instead, it is one of several. For example, in the initial stages of the conflict in Kosovo, the UN feared conflict spillover into neighboring areas, especially

for Albania and Macedonia given their large ethnic Albanian populations. Therefore, preventive forces were deployed along the borders in order to contain the spread of the conflict. This is an alternative to intervention. However, the preventive effort was quickly discarded given the extraordinary costs of patrolling what was a largely under- developed area given the considerable number of troops needed to effectively control the border. One can imagine that any effort to patrol the borders of substantially larger civil war states, like the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for example, would be practically impossible for any state that is not solely interested in containing the conflict from crossing its own contiguous border. Additionally, since civil wars take place almost exclusively in less developed nations, the ability to effectively patrol a border as a means of containing a civil war is diminished given the lack of transportation corridors and the prevalence of isolated and underdeveloped border re- gions. This very phenomenon is currently playing out in the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region. Chad shares a very long border with Sudan. Chad’s inability to contain the war from spilling across its border has made containment through preventive measures practically impossible. Although it has not yet been verified, there is speculation that Chad has chosen to support the rebels fighting in Darfur given its own inability to seal its border from the spillover effects of the war through preventive measures. Chadian Army General Mahamat Itno makes many of these points when commenting on the threat of conflict spillover from Darfur into Chad when he states that “Sudan wants to export the war in Darfur to us here. They want to use the Janjaweed they armed to terrorize Darfur, to terrorize our population.” However, General Itno acknowledged the difficulty in containing the conflict by patrolling the border region when he stated, “It is a long border. We cannot be everywhere at once (Polgreen, 2006, A1).” Therefore, my contention is that intervention as a foreign policy tool of third parties offers the most dramatic form of affecting a civil war congruent with a third party’s containment

interests whereas the use of preventive measures are often difficult to effectively im- plement. Below I introduce an expected utility model that sheds light on the decision processes of potential interveners with regard to their interests in the containment of civil war diffusion.