The complexity of civil wars and intervention has been on my mind a lot lately. I tend to look at everything through the lens of arms sales, and this is a really "good" time to think about these issues. Arms sales are in the news a great deal because of the ongoing proxy war in Yemen and the role that Western weapons are playing in that conflict as they are deployed by the different sides, especially by the Saudis.
In addition to proxy wars in Yemen and Syria, Libya is also the site of continued fighting. Earlier this week, government forces found US weapons in the hands of rebel forces. There is an ongoing investigation about the source of these weapons, but it appears at first blush that they were originally sold to UAE (LINK). This would be a violation of the terms of sale to UAE and of the UN arms embargo to Libya in general, so it's a pretty serious issue.
I have a graduate student who is working on an MA thesis about outside intervention in civil wars, and she sent me an article from Brookings about this phenomenon. The article itself is about the analogies that we use to discuss wars and how analogies and history are weaponized and politicized to make different points, and that they take on a shorthand meaning to represent a certain viewpoint about intervention: think Munich vs. Vietnam as an analogy. Toward the end of the article there is a sentence that stood out to me and got me thinking about arms sales and civil war intervention:
One way to think of this is that intervention on the part of the US government may not require physical intervention. Intervention in terms of providing equipment may be enough to tilt wars. This brings me back to some of the research on arms transfers that took place at the height of the Cold War. Arms sales from the US and USSR to the third world were a deep concern because of the idea that these weapons may have been fueling conflict in many areas of the world.
There are a lot of normative and empirical pieces to unpack when thinking about intervening in civil conflicts. The role that arms can play (on both sides) is one that still needs to be explored more systematically.
In addition to proxy wars in Yemen and Syria, Libya is also the site of continued fighting. Earlier this week, government forces found US weapons in the hands of rebel forces. There is an ongoing investigation about the source of these weapons, but it appears at first blush that they were originally sold to UAE (LINK). This would be a violation of the terms of sale to UAE and of the UN arms embargo to Libya in general, so it's a pretty serious issue.
I have a graduate student who is working on an MA thesis about outside intervention in civil wars, and she sent me an article from Brookings about this phenomenon. The article itself is about the analogies that we use to discuss wars and how analogies and history are weaponized and politicized to make different points, and that they take on a shorthand meaning to represent a certain viewpoint about intervention: think Munich vs. Vietnam as an analogy. Toward the end of the article there is a sentence that stood out to me and got me thinking about arms sales and civil war intervention:
"The proxy war problem highlights that, for the United States, ending civil wars is not merely a question of political will, but also a question of capacity. It is true that the US military is the most powerful in the world, but it is not the case that US military intervention will always tip the balance toward peace."I thought about this in terms of two papers by Kalyvas and Balcells (2010, 2014) and how they have examined the "technologies of rebellion" and their effects on the outcome of civil war. They find that conventional war (fought with technology on both sides) leads to deadlier wars, but wars that are shorter in duration and with longer-lasting outcomes.
One way to think of this is that intervention on the part of the US government may not require physical intervention. Intervention in terms of providing equipment may be enough to tilt wars. This brings me back to some of the research on arms transfers that took place at the height of the Cold War. Arms sales from the US and USSR to the third world were a deep concern because of the idea that these weapons may have been fueling conflict in many areas of the world.
There are a lot of normative and empirical pieces to unpack when thinking about intervening in civil conflicts. The role that arms can play (on both sides) is one that still needs to be explored more systematically.
