Enseñanza como aprendizaje por experiencia

A more detailed survey of literature is provided in the previous chapter and thus only a brief summary of relevant parts will be presented here underlining the implications of gaps in the literature on the existing research.

Foreign interventions in civil wars might take place in many forms during the life of a conflict. However, in contrast with the realities of civil war contexts in which various numbers and types of outside interventions are introduced in the same dispute, such as the case in the Syrian conflict, the previous studies have typically treated each external intervention in an isolated manner without considering the role of previous attempts on the occurrence of subsequent ones.

The overwhelming majority of current research on the third-party interventions in civil wars has focused exclusively on a single type of outside involvement, including military interventions (Regan 1996, Balch-Lindsay, Enterline, and Joyce 2008, Cunningham 2010, Gent 2008), economic sanctions (Hultman and Peksen 2015, Marinov 2005, Escribà-Folch 2010, Gershenson 2002, Strandow 2006), and diplomatic interventions (Bercovitch and DeRouen 2004, Frazier and Dixon 2006, Clayton and Gleditsch 2014, Svensson 2007a).

The key problems in failing to incorporate multiple intervention types into the analysis are as follows: First, on the very basic level, the current research on intervention remains considerably short of understanding the actual dynamics behind the role of external parties in civil wars.

Although this isolated research provides insights about the impact of each intervention strategy, the historical record suggests that civil wars sometimes receive multiple interventions, including various combinations of military, economic, and diplomatic practices within the same conflict.

Thus, focusing only on a single type independent from and at the expense of other ones is contrary to the very nature and the realities of civil wars.

Second, the typical scholarship is conceptualizing the role of a single intervention type without considering the existence of other intervention forms. Such a conception treats other intervention types within the same conflict as non-events. More specifically, theoretical frameworks that focus on an individual type, such as military intervention, inherently equate

diplomatic or economic interventions with nonintervention (Corbetta 2015) even though the latter ones are also introduced in the very same conflicts. Pointing to the problem in 1969, Rosenau remarked that ‘‘If one is interested in military intervention, operationalization may be accomplished in terms of the movement of a specified number of troops into or near the target society. Such a definition does not encompass other forms of intervention, but the omission of these does not mean that other forms do not occur’’ (Rosenau 1969, 156). The introduction of Iranian proxy forces in the Syrian Civil War, for example, seems somewhat to be a function of a weakening Assad regime in the face of international economic sanctions and thus be connected to the sanctions imposed.

Third and relatedly, from an empirical standpoint, such a disregard for integrating multiple intervention types might lead to spurious findings for the effects of any particular intervention type. Alternatively, such an analysis is likely to produce biased inferences by overemphasizing or underestimating results about the statistical and substantive significance of any intervention type of interest.

Fourth, according to the extant research, each type of intervention strategy has its own distinctive effect on civil wars. Military interventions, for example, are typically viewed to provide structural leverage for a targeted side, thereby tipping the balance of power towards the supported party (Regan 2000, Hultquist 2013, Sullivan and Karreth 2015). Economic interventions are mostly seen to play into the dynamics about information asymmetries between disputants (Escribà-Folch 2010, Strandow 2006). As for diplomatic interventions, the utility of such endeavors is considered to be relevant mostly within the framework of overcoming commitment problems in the context of civil wars (Walter 1997, Svensson 2007a). For example, research that seeks to comprehend the effectiveness of diplomatic intervention in civil wars might suffer from

inconsistent findings due to its failure to incorporate the existence of a military intervention and its influence within the same conflict. This is mainly because external military involvements are somewhat viewed as enforcement mechanisms for alleviating commitment problems and thus might boost the chance of diplomatic attempts. Consequently, the research on foreign involvement would benefit from integrative frameworks in which various intervention types are integrated together to assess their synergistic impacts on conflict outcome.

Nevertheless, as reported in the literature chapter, there are few studies in the literature addressing the possibility that multiple intervention types are employed within the same conflicts.

Regan (2000) explores the impact of foreign military and economic engagements on terminating civil conflicts. Regan and Aydin (2006) investigate the role of mediations to understand the effectiveness of military and economic interventions on the duration of civil conflicts. Lektzian and Regan (2016) inquire about the role of military interventions in complementing economic sanctions with respect to conflict duration. However, this strand of studies, albeit valuable contributions to the field, accounts only for particular intervention types of their interests without addressing the general idea that multiple interventions in any form within a conflict are interrelated.

Consequently, explanations focusing on a single intervention type and treating each third-party participation as a neatly independent event might preclude us from comprehending the role of external involvement in civil wars. An interdependence framework that integrates multiple intervention types in a given conflict might enable us to move beyond the limitations of previous literature on interventions and thus provide us with a broader scope of the mechanism how foreign parties influence civil wars.