The Mercurial Commitment: Revisiting the Unintended Consequence of Military Humanitarian Intervention and Anti-atrocity Norms

Abstract

Why do some rebel groups, who expect third parties to militarily intervene on their behalf, commit provocative violence while others do not? If armed conflict is costly, an incumbent government that faces increasing demands from a rebel group that is backed by a third party should offer a concession that the rebel is likely to accept. Existing theories have been unable to fully explain why some rebel groups still provoke the government, despite the possibility of government concessions. I argue that the expected impact on the local balance of power caused by humanitarian intervention tends to be temporary and that this temporariness of the expected shift in power causes a commitment problem. It generates a "now-or-never" effect and leads the rebel to commit provocative violence to induce the government retaliation and humanitarian intervention before the "window of opportunity" closes. I demonstrate this by developing a simple game model in which a rebel group, the government and an intervening party interact. Simple comparative statics suggest that decreasing the cost of international intervention can have a pacifying effect by making the potential rebel and the incumbent government more resilient to fluctuation of feasibility of intervention. NATO’s intervention in Libya aptly illustrates the core logic of the theory.