Why Rivals Intervene

Rivals – states with acrimonious, militarized histories – often intervene on opposing sides of civil conflicts. These interventions are known to exacerbate and prolong civil wars, but scholars have yet to fully understand why states engage in them, given the significant costs and countervailing strategic interests. Why Rivals Intervene argues that rivals are driven by security considerations at the international level – specifically, the prospect of future confrontations with their rival – to intervene in civil conflicts. Drawing on a theory of rivalry which accounts for this strategic rationale, John Mitton explores three case studies: Indian and Pakistani intervention in Afghanistan, Israeli and Syrian intervention in Lebanon, and US and Soviet intervention in Angola. The book examines a range of evidence, including declassified memoranda, meeting transcripts, government reports, published interviews, memoirs of political leaders, and other evidence of the thought process, rationale, and justifications of relevant decision-makers. The book claims that the imperatives for intervention are consistent across time and space, as rivals are conditioned by a history of conflict to worry about future confrontations. As a result, Why Rivals Intervene illuminates an important driver of civil conflict, with implications for how such conflicts might be solved or mitigated in the future. At the same time, it offers new insight into the nature of long-standing, acrimonious international relationships.

This Handbook is the first volume to comprehensively examine the challenges, intricacies, and dynamics of proxy wars, in their various facets. The volume aims to capture the significantly growing interest in the topic at a critical juncture when wars of many guises are becoming multifaceted proxy wars. Most often, proxy wars have wide-ranging implications for international security and are, therefore, a critically important subject of inquiry. The Handbook seeks to understand and explain proxy wars conceptually, theoretically, and empirically, with a focus on the numerous policy challenges and dilemmas they pose. To do so, it presents a multi- and interdisciplinary assessment of proxy wars focused on the causes, dynamics, and processes underpinning the phenomenon, across time and space and a multitude of actors throughout human history. The Handbook is divided into six thematic sections, as follows: Part I: Approaches to the Study of Proxy Wars Part II: Historical Perspectives on Proxy Wars Part III: Actors in Proxy Wars Part IV: Dynamics of Proxy Wars Part V: Case Studies of Proxy Wars Part VI: The Future of Proxy Wars By bringing together many leading scholars in a synthesis of expertise, this Handbook provides a unique and rigorous account of research into proxy war, which so far has been largely missing from the debate. This book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, security studies, foreign policy, political violence, and International Relations.

This book examines the motivations of military interventions in civil wars, with a focus on the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) and the arms trade. The book assumes a state-centric view of international relations, whereby states remain the dominant actors on the world stage. It breaks away from the conventional wisdom that military interventions for economic interests are a product of domestic corporate lobbying and instead argues that states intervene to protect (but not advance) existing corporate investments for national strategic interests. The work introduces new concepts of military interventions – proxy interventions and indirect interventions – which are determined by arms trade relationships between the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and recipient countries, and utilizes insights from principal-agent theory, whereby the permanent members of the UNSC delegate military interventions in civil wars to other countries. The book concludes by examining the transformative effect of FDI on the willingness of a state to intervene militarily in a civil war, focusing on the case of China in Sub-Saharan Africa. Provided that the current positive trends in FDI and arms trade persist, we are likely to see more and not fewer military interventions in the future. This book will be of much interest to students of civil wars, military interventions, security studies and International Relations.

If you were to examine an 1816 map of the world, you would discover that half the countries represented there no longer exist. Yet since 1945, the disappearance of individual states from the world stage has become rare. State Death is the first book to systematically examine the reasons why some states die while others survive, and the remarkable decline of state death since the end of World War II. Grappling with what is a core issue of international relations, Tanisha Fazal explores two hundred years of military invasion and occupation, from eighteenth-century Poland to present-day Iraq, to derive conclusions that challenge conventional wisdom about state death. The fate of sovereign states, she reveals, is largely a matter of political geography and changing norms of conquest. Fazal shows how buffer states--those that lie between two rivals--are the most vulnerable and likely to die except in rare cases that constrain the resources or incentives of neighboring states. She argues that the United States has imposed such constraints with its global norm against conquest--an international standard that has largely prevented the violent takeover of states since 1945. State Death serves as a timely reminder that should there be a shift in U.S. power or preferences that erodes the norm against conquest, violent state death may once again become commonplace in international relations.

In this new edition of his highly acclaimed work, Jiri Valenta adds his assessment of Soviet military decisionmaking in the 1980s to his earlier analysis of decisionmaking and crisis management in the Soviet bureaucracy and Warsaw Pact. Comparing the events of 1968 to the Kremlin's very different reaction to reforms now under way in Czechoslovakia and the rest of Eastern Europe, Valenta shows that Soviet politics were never simple. The USSR's foreign policy response to the "Prague Spring," he contends, was the result of a complex political process conditioned by bureaucratic inertia, coalition politics, and East European pressures.

This book analyzes the civil war in Yemen and how intervening external actors have shaped the trajectory of the conflict. The work examines the conflict in Yemen as a testing ground for expectations about the autonomy and control of proxies by external patrons and the direct consequences for civilian victimization and duration of war. Like other proxy wars, the international dimensions of the war made the conflict in Yemen subject to the geopolitical interests of intervening powers. The longstanding power rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran over Middle East supremacy resulted in a competitive intervention in Yemen, where the initial belligerents of the civil war—the Houthi and the Hadi regime—were used as proxies by Tehran and the Gulf coalition led by Riyadh, respectively. Their intervention ultimately translated into a prolonged and destructive conflict. The often contradictory and self-interested patronage strategies by the coalition’s two central patrons, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, undermined their broader goal of containing Iran. However, Iran’s support for the Houthis enabled them to bait and bleed the Gulf coalition. Lastly, in an effort to balance against Iran, the United States underwrote the military campaign of the Gulf states with military hardware and personnel, thereby further prolonging the conflict and humanitarian disaster. This book concludes that intervention by external patrons both protracted the civil war and made it far more destructive for the civilian population. This book will be of much interest to students of proxy wars, Middle Eastern conflict, and security studies in general.

Richard III is undoubtedly the dominant personality in this collection of essays, but not in his capacity as king of England. Richard was Duke of Gloucester far longer than he was king. For most of his career, he was a subject, not a monarch, the equal of the great nobility. He is seen here in the company of his fellows: Warwick the Kingmaker, Clarence, Northumberland, Somerset, Hastings a the Wydevilles. His relations with these rivals, all of whom submitted to him or were crushed, show him in different moods and from various vantage points.

We see patterns of leadership throughout human history. Prehistoric leaders who, just as leaders do today, used power and influence to create co-operation amongst their group, have all played their part in our surviving, thriving and evolving as a species. Of course, leadership is infinitely more complex in the modern world, comprising of global teams, large anonymous networks and communications technology. But have our brains evolved as quickly as our societies? In this fascinating, enlightening and useful book, leadership development coach and change agent Graeme Findlay walks you through the evolutionary basis for the dramatic increases in leadership power from pre-history through to today. He explains how the brain function that made our primate ancestors successful still exists within us, and how this "inner primate" can sabotage your leadership effectiveness. He then proceeds to outline effective strategies for transcending this "inner voice" to empower your leadership. In the same way, he shows how you can tap into the motivations of the inner primate within members of your extended team, to better understand dynamics, and transform your leadership impact. With the inner primate dealt with, he moves on to explore the next two major evolutionary steps, personified as the gossip and the dreamer. Drawing from a wide variety of case studies, including Donald Trump, Kim Jong-Un, and Martin Luther King, as well as the author's own consulting experiences, this book consistently shows you how to apply evolutionary leadership theory to your own practice, to become a more aware, mindful, impactful, and successful leader.