Military Intervention and the Destabilization of Target States

Abstract

Conflict in nations around the world have often warranted involvement from external actors, either on behalf of or in opposition to the current regime. Foreign military intervention (FMI), regarding the development and evolution of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) over the years, has created power vacuums and destabilized the target states. In the post-Cold War era, intra-state conflict has replaced inter-state conflict as the dominant form of organized violence. In 2014, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) reported that there were 40 active armed conflicts and 11 of which were labeled as wars, and while the number of armed conflicts in the world has decreased since the end of the Cold War, the number of internationalized armed conflicts is on the rise, giving the impression that the world is becoming ever more violent (Pettersson and Wallensteen, 2015). A fundamental component of liberalism is democratic peace theory, which states that liberal states (democracies) do not go to war with one another. Although democracies do not go to war with one another, this may not make them more peaceful than non-democracies (Navari 2008). This use of military force could further be utilized depending on the regime type of the recipient state, and intervention can be viewed as the new, liberal face of conflict in the post-Cold war era.