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Ending External Interventions: Success, Failure and Exit Dilemmas
A record number of armed conflicts puts the lives of millions at stake. The majority of these conflicts have involved external interventions to foster peace and security, but they are heavily contested and often occur without long-term exit strategies. The project thus investigates the ending of external interventions into armed conflict. It focuses on sanctions, peacekeeping missions and military operations to study exit dilemmas and post-exit legacies related to these different types of intervention.
Leibniz Association, 2026-2031
Head
Research Questions
To shed light on these issues, the project will therefore address three sub-questions: (1) When do external interventions succeed, fail and end? (2) What are the causes and processes of ending external interventions? (3) What are the long-term political and economic consequences of ending external interventions for conflict states?
Contribution to International Research
The project seeks to address three important limitations of prior work. First, success, failure, and exits are often depicted as finite moments, rather than as just one step in a much broader set of actions that precede exit and an equally broad set of support efforts that follow. Second, research on conflict interventions tends to focus on their effectiveness without examining how the success or failure of interventions relates to their termination. Third and finally, even nascent research on termination typically stops when interventions end. Hence, their long-term legacies remain poorly understood. To address these gaps, the project will examine the politics of intervention in three interrelated work packages: WP1 identifies instances of intervention exits following success or failure. WP2 studies pre-exit causes and processes and WP3 investigates post-exit legacies.
Research Design and Methods
WP2 will investigate the reasons for ending external interventions to theorize the multifaceted nature of exit dilemmas. Empirically, it will combine (a) cross-national analyses, (b) interviews and (c) survey experiments. Large-N analysis will account for factors in conflict countries, factors that influence interveners’ decisions to exit or not and intervention characteristics while interviews and survey experiments will allow for a more in-depth analysis of exit dilemmas as perceived by interveners and those “intervened upon.”
WP3 will combine quantitative analyses and process-tracing for two specific country cases to be selected based on the large-N analyses. Statistical analyses serve to identify broader patterns in the trajectories of countries previously subject to interventions. In-depth case studies can also account for the political and socio-economic context that structures the relations between interveners and actors in countries where interventions occurred.