Recent research has begun to focus on the role of outside interventions in the duration of civil conflicts. Assuming that interventions are a form of conflict management, ex ante expectations would be that they would reduce a conflict's expected duration. Hypotheses relating the type and timing of outside interventions to the duration of civil conflicts are tested. The data incorporate 150 conflicts during the period from 1945 to 1999, 101 of which had outside interventions. Using a hazard analysis, the results suggest that third-party interventions tend to extend expected durations rather than shorten them. The only aspect of the strategy for intervening that reduces the likelihood that a conflict will end in the next month is that it be biased in favor of either the opposition or the government. In effect, neutral interventions are less effective than biased ones.

Greed, grievances, and mobilization are generally offered as explanations for rebellion and civilwar. The authors extend arguments about the precursors to nonviolent protest, violent rebellion, and civil war. These arguments motivate a series of hypotheses that are tested against data from the Minorities at Risk project. The results of the analysis suggest, first, that the factors that predict antistate activity at one level of violence do not always hold at other levels; second, the response by the state has a large impact on the subsequent behavior of the rebels; and third, the popular notion of diamonds fueling civil unrest is generally not supported. The authors draw inferences from their results to future theoretical and policy development.

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Much of the empirical literature suggests that outside interventions tend to lengthen the expected duration of civil wars; conversely, the policy community often acts as if it holds the opposite expectation for the outcome of intervention. The authors argue that the divergence can be found in how models of intervention are specified in the literature. They propose a model with two novel contributions. First, they incorporate mediations as the key to resolving the strategic problems that the civil war parties face. Second, they account for the decaying effect of interventions over time. Their results suggest that diplomacy is critical for understanding the duration of civil conflicts. They find that mediation has a dramatic effect on the expected duration of a civil war and that when controlling for diplomatic efforts, economic interventions can also reduce the expected duration.

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