Keeping threat at arm’s length: counter-revolutionary interventions by third-party states in support of governments

ABSTRACT During the 1970s the military juntas in South America engaged in a cross-national campaign of repression, code-named Operation Condor, targeted against leftist militant groups inspired to action by the Cuban Revolution. This case illustrates an understudied motivation for third-party intervention in domestic conflict: counter-revolution. We therefore formulate a theory in which revolutions shock the international system by empowering new revolutionary regimes that, in turn, inspire dissidents abroad to take up arms. Status quo elites in foreign states seek to staunch this diffusion of revolution by engaging in international repressive campaigns, manifested as third party intervention in civil conflict. We test this expectation on a global sample of intervention opportunities for the period 1975–2004, and assess the threat that revolutionary regimes pose to status quo governments in two ways: (1) the geographic proximity of a revolutionary state to pairs of status quo states; and (2) the geographic proximity of internal-armed conflicts featuring rebels that are supported by a revolutionary states. We find evidence that status quo states respond to the proximity of a revolutionary state, but not to the proximity of support for rebels.