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"What Do We Know About Civil War Duration? A Bargaining Perspective" published on by Oxford University Press.

Civil wars occur in some countries at some times and not in other countries at other times. This articleexamines how the potential for large-scale external intervention can prevent civil wars. The authorargues that intervention by external states in civil war can be so overwhelming that it reduces one side's probability of victory to essentially zero. When dissidents expect this type of intervention on the side of government, they anticipate no chance of achieving success through violence and do not initiate civil wars. When governments anticipate this type of intervention on their behalf, they feel protected from internal threat and are less constrained in their dealings with their populations. This repression increases grievances, leading dissidents to engage in strategies of dissent other than civil war. The authortests three implications of this argument-that states in more hierarchical relationships will experience civil war at lower rates, be more repressive, and experience other forms of dissent at higher rates-and finds strong support for it.

What explains the effect of external intervention on the duration of civil war? The literature on intervention has made some progress in addressing this question, but it has been hindered by an assumption that states intervene in civil wars either to help one side win or to facilitate negotiations. Often, however, external states become involved in civil war to pursue an agenda which is separate from the goals of the internal combatants. When states intervene in this fashion, they make wars more difficult to resolve for two reasons. First, doing so introduces another actor that must approve any settlement to end the war. Second, external states generally have less incentive to negotiate than internal actors because they bear lower costs of fighting and they can anticipate gaining less benefit from negotiation than domestic insurgents. Through Cox regressions using data on the goals of all interventions in civil wars since World War II, this article shows that when states intervene with an independent agenda, they make wars substantially longer. The effect of independent interventions is much larger than that of external interventions generally, suggesting that the established finding that external interventions prolong civil war is driven by a subset of cases where states have intervened in conflicts to pursue independent goals.