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1	Reconciling Ex Ante Expectations with the Ex Post Reality: A Look at the Effectiveness of Third-Party Diplomatic Interventions in Civil Wars Benchimol, Matthew 01 January 2015 (has links) Research has begun to focus on the role third-party diplomatic intervention plays in the length of civil conflicts. Diplomatic interventions by a third-party actor are assumed to help resolve or alleviate violence over time. Is this really the case? Hypotheses relating to these aspects of civil wars are proposed to test this long-standing assumption. This thesis uses statistical analysis to observe the relationship between diplomatic interventions and civil war duration and then observe the relationship between duration and civil war violence. The data incorporates approximately 150 civil wars from 1945 to 1999, 101 of which had outside interventions. This thesis finds that, contrary to ex ante expectations, diplomatic interventions are a significant contributing factor to civil war length. Furthermore, longer civil wars are not associated with more civil war intensity in the aggregate, suggesting that longer civil wars do not mean more violent or intense ones. Civil war civil wars bargaining intervention diplomatic intervention third party intervention mediation civil war violence conflict resolution conflict management decision theory International Relations Political Science