“Humanitarian” Intervention in Syria Will INCREASE Civilian Deaths
August 28, 2013
As a conflict actor weakens relative to its adversary, it employs
increasingly violent tactics toward the civilian population as a means
of reshaping the strategic landscape to its benefit. The reason for this
is twofold. First, declining capabilities increase resource needs at
the moment that extractive capacity is in decline. Second, declining
capabilities inhibit control and policing, making less violent means of
defection deterrence more difficult. As both resource extraction
difficulties and internal threats increase, actors’ incentives for
violence against the population increase. To the extent that biased
military interventions shift the balance of power between conflict
actors, we argue that they alter actor incentives to victimize
civilians. Specifically, intervention should reduce the level of
violence employed by the supported faction and increase the level
employed by the opposed faction. We test these arguments using data on
civilian casualties and armed intervention in intrastate conflicts from
1989 to 2005. Our results support our expectations, suggesting that
interventions shift the power balance and affect the levels of violence
employed by combatants.
In fact, they find that military interventions in favor of the rebel
faction (as opposed to pro-government or neutral interventions) tend to
increase government killings of civilians by about 40% (see Figure 2
below from p. 656).
From their conclusion:
Supporting a faction’s quest to vanquish its adversary may have
the unintended consequence of inciting the adversary to more intense
violence against the population. Thus, third parties with interests in
stability should bear in mind the potential for the costly consequences
of countering murderous groups. Potential interveners should heed these
conclusions when designing intervention strategies and tailor their
interventions to include components specifically designed to protect
civilians from reprisals. Such strategies could include
stationing forces within vulnerable population centers,
temporarily relocating susceptible populations to safe havens that
are more distant from the conflict zone, and supplying sufficient ground
forces to be consistent with such policies. These actions could fulfill
broader interests in societal stability in addition to interests in
countering an organization on geopolitical grounds. Successful policies
will thus not only counter murderous factions but will explicitly seek
to protect civilian populations.
The full paper is here (gated).
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