The Many-Pronged Spear: External Military Intervention in Civil Wars in the 1970s

When external powers intervene in a civil war, this fact seldom remains unknown to the world. There is an abundant documentation of at least the large-scale civil wars which have taken place in modern times. How ever, students of international politics have been fairly slow to make use of this material in order to try to discover the overall patterns.One point of missing knowledge concerns the anatomy of the intervention itself. In this article I am deal ing with the variety of the forms of incursion from abroad. If one distinguishes between various forms (in struments) a more detailed picture of the phenomenon can be arrived at. But differentiation also opens up possibilities of a new kind. Aspects such as the level of intervention and the combination of instruments can be brought into the picture, for instance.A framework for the analysis of military intervention is outlined and an analysis with reference to seven civil wars during the 1970s is presented. The focus is upon hypotheses and questions of different kinds, re lating to scholarly discussions about the nature of external involvement, the interveners, and to aspects of escalation.