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Overall, findings from the existing studies regarding the role of third-party involvement, including military, economic, and diplomatic interventions, provide mostly inconsistent results with respect to the outcome of civil conflicts. The impact of interventions with regard to the duration of conflict is better conceptualized and tested compared to the discussions on the outcome.

More specifically, despite a multitute of research on military interventions, it is not yet clear how military interventions affect the results of internal conflicts. There are contesting conclusions from a variety of scholars in the field. Similarly, the question is not yet resolved for diplomatic interventions either. As to economic interventions, there seems to be a greater concern because there is not even adequate scholarly work to evaluate the consequences of sanctions especially in the context of civil wars.

Based on the existing literature discussed above, there are three main gaps on the role of third parties in civil wars that can be addressed with this project. First, the existing research typically focuses on a single type of intervention and examines it independent from other interventions types that take place in the very same conflicts. A research in this manner, to say the least, generates misleading results regarding the effects of intervention type of interest because it

simply omits the impacts of other intervention types, as well as the interplay between these interventions in the same conflict.

Relatedly, the idea of interdependence between intervention types in the same conflict is not sufficiently studied in the literature. Interdependence here refers to the notion that prior intervention in a conflict informs subsequent ones in the same conflict. Given the scholarship’s attention only on a single intervention type, examining interdependence between interventions stays way out of sight in the literature. However, any research without considering the dynamics of interdependence might suffer from underestimation or overestimation problems for the effects of a given intervention type due to the likely associations amongst external interventions.

To illustrate with a striking example, say, researchers are willing to understand the role of UN diplomatic interventions in the ongoing Syrian Civil War, and they are disregarding the effects of Russian military intervention in the same conflict. It is evident, at least for Syrian case, that there are consequences of Russian military intervention on the onset and the outcome of UN diplomatic intermediaries. An analysis short of this association between the Russian military intervention and UN mediations would seemingly be missing a good deal of information regarding the role of external interventions in the Syrian conflict.

Other existing research introducing multiple interventions in their studies provide more intuitive findings. In the studies of Regan and Aydin (2006) and Lektzian and Regan (2016), for example, statistical significance of intervention variables change once a variable for other intervention type is included in the analysis.

An interdependence framework could enable us to construct interventionary patterns based on the systematic association between different intervention types. The patterns can allow integrating multiple interventions together by sequencing them according to their probabilities

about which intervention types are more likely to come after certain initial intervention type. Most importantly, this might help us test the effectiveness of interventionary patterns, consisting of multiple intervention types. Using these patterns constituting both structural and diplomatic interventions, we can explore, for example, whether a conflict becomes “ripe”–referring to Zartman’s proposition–through structural interventions, so that mediation afterwards can kick in the process for conflict settlement.

Finally, the scholarship on external interventions lacks a comprehensive theoretical framework to account for the effects of various third-party attempts in civil wars. Short of such general theories encompassing multiple interventions, the literature is producing inconsistent findings regarding the impacts of interventions. A theory that aims to explain the causal mechanism about how different interventions synergistically impact the outcome of a civil conflict might also provide us with more insights about how international community can contribute to ending these disputes. The theory could vest practitioners with appropriate roadmaps knowing what the consequences will be out of certain strategies, even constituting multiple intervention types.

The survey of literature also informs us about some particular lessons to be adopted in intervention research. First, a dyadic analysis specifying state and each rebel group is the most appropriate unit of analysis when studying the role of external interventions in the case of civil wars since interventions typically target particular parties in a given conflict. Secondly, especially early literature on military interventions reveals that the intensity of conflict needs to be included in the analysis. Third, a set of individual characteristics, including the power distribution between parties and conflict type, are essential to integrate into models. Fourth, the idea of asymmetry needs to be incorporated into any theoretical framework in the context of civil wars. It seems to be one

of the central points of controversy in the literature about studying the effects of foreign involvement. Finally, research would benefit more if they use a more granular dependent variable disaggregating conflict outcomes into more specific categories, including negotiated settlement and victory by each side. Each of these outcome categories might be differently affected by any external treatments and thus needs to be incorporated into the analysis.

Consequently, this project aims to address these main gaps in the literature by providing a comprehensive explanation for the role of external interventions in civil wars. To that end, it will begin by investigating the interdependence between third-party attempts and thus provide a theoretical and empirical framework to integrate multiple interventions in the same conflict. Using interdependence framework, it will construct interventionary patterns constituting multiple interventions by sequencing them according their probable orders. Finally, the project will attempt to present a theory of intervention that can account for the impact of multiple intervention types and eventually test the effectiveness of each interventionary pattern in terminating civil conflicts.