Third party intervention and strategic militarization

Codified at the 2005 United Nations World Summit, the doctrine ofResponsibilityto Protectarticulates an ideal of international interventions motivated by compassionfor victims and a desire to bring stability to hot-spots around the world. Despite thisconsensus, practitioners and scholars have debated the importance of unintended con-sequences stemming from the expectation of third party intervention. We analyze howthird party intervention shapes the incentives to arm, negotiate settlements, and fightwars in a parsimonious game theoretic model. Among the unintended consequences wefind: interventions that indiscriminately lower the destructiveness of war increase theprobability of conflict and increasing the cost of arming makes destructive wars morelikely. Other interventions, however, can have much more beneficial effects and ouranalysis highlights peace-enhancing forms of third party intervention. From a welfareperspective, most interventions do not change theex anteloss from war, but do havedistributional effects on the terms of peace. As a result R2P principles are hard to im-plement because natural forms of intervention create incentives that make them largelyself-defeating.