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Civil Wars and Foreign Powers: Outside Intervention in Intrastate Conflict. By Patrick M. Regan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 172p. $39.50.
Roy Licklider, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Patrick Regan focuses on two important questions: When do states intervene in civil wars, and under what conditions is this intervention likely to end the violence? The book is an admirable attempt to use serious social science analysis to respond to the concerns of policymakers, who are without much basic information in this new and challenging arena.
The analysis is based largely on logit analysis of 138 intrastate conflicts from 1944 to 1994. (The number is somewhat larger than in other studies because Regan drops the minimum number of casualties from 1,000 to 200.) In 89 of these cases there was at least one unilateral intervention; in all, there were 194 such interventions. (Multilateral interventions are evaluated separately.) He judges that only about 30% helped stop the fighting.
Regan found that states were more likely to intervene during the Cold War than afterward, when conflicts were less intense, and when there was a humanitarian crisis. Interestingly, intervention was less likely...