Taking Sides in Revolutionary Times: Explaining Major Power Interventions in Regime Conflicts

Abstract

When armed insurgents, mass civil resistance movements or internal coups threaten the survival of a regime, major powers can often tip the balance for or against the incumbent regime by providing military aid to one side of the conflict. Superpower interventions are likely to have an even greater impact on regime conflicts — not only because of the considerable military resources they bring to bear in conflicts between weak actors, but also because they can rally the international community for or against incumbent leaders. This paper introduces a larger project that aims to evaluate the explanatory power of different explanations for side-taking in regime wars. Specifically, we examine military interventions into regime wars by the Britain, the United States, France, the Soviet Union/Russia, and China since the end of World War II. We begin by asking the extent to which major powers have supported the status quo in regime wars, whether some major powers are more status-quo oriented than others, and how this has changed over time. We then outline our plans for the larger project, which is to explain broader patterns in hegemonic side taking. Scholars have offered a number of explanations for foreign military interventions in civil wars, including security threats, alliance commitments, ideological affinities, ethnic ties, resource concerns, and the interests of powerful domestic constituents (including sectors or corporations). Here, we outline our plans to construct a dataset that will be used to determine which of these arguments has the greatest explanatory leverage in predicting intervention bias by great powers — namely, when interveners sometimes support the incumbent regime and other times regime challengers. A secondary aim is to assess whether different major powers follow different repertoires of side-taking and whether these repertoires have changed over the past sixty-odd years.

Keywords: Regime Conflict, Military Intervention, Foreign Policy