Abstract
This paper argues that UN military interventions are geographically biased. For every 1,000 kilometers of distance from the three permanent Western UNSC members (France, UK, US), the probability of a UN military intervention decreases by 4 percent. We are able to rule out several alternative explanations for the distance finding, such as differences by continent, colonial origin, bilateral trade relationships, foreign aid flows, political regime forms, or the characteristics of the Cold War. We do not observe this geographical bias for non-military interventions, providing evidence that practical considerations could be important factors for UNSC decisions to intervene militarily. In fact, UNSC interventions are also more likely in smaller and poorer countries – both of which are indications of less costly interventions and higher chances of success, everything else equal.
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Notes
For a brief summary of the recent immigration waves from Syria to Italy, consider (BBC2 2014).
What the UN means by “intervention” is not entirely clear, as there exists no single definition. Higgins (1995) provides a deeper discussion.
There are, of course, different ways to measure the intensity, such as the fraction of conflict years with over 999 battle-related deaths, etc. Our results are robust to using different measurements.
The predicted probabilities are calculated as \(prob(Interv)=\frac {1}{1+e^{-logit(p)_{i}}}\) following Greene (2003).
We use the list of participating nations in the UCDP data set to identify conflicts in which the permanent members officially participated.
As with other time-varying variables, using values from one year prior to the conflict does not affect our conclusions.
Table A.3 in the online appendix provides correlations between all distance measures used.
Using the individual distances to France, the UK, or the US produces almost identical results. Thus, the importance of geographical distance cannot be traced back to the distance to one of these countries alone.
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Acknowledgments
We thank seminar participants at the NIW (Hannover, Germany), the Universidad de Los Andes, the Southern Methodist University, and the University of Memphis for their valuable comments and discussions. We are especially grateful to Pedro Amaral, David Bardey, Theodore Breton, Leopoldo Fergusson, Alan Finkelstein Shapiro, Andrew Hussey, Louis Jaeck, David Kemme, James Lake, Mark Mullenbach, Albert Okunade, Ömer Özak, Timothy C. Salmon, Fabio Sánchez, Hans-Peter Schmitz, William T. Smith, David Stadelmann, Stephan Thomsen, Hernán Vallejo, Andrés Zambrano, and Hernando Zuleta for helpful comments and discussions.
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The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations – great or small – to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century. Adlai E. Stevenson
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Duque, J.C., Jetter, M. & Sosa, S. UN interventions: The role of geography. Rev Int Organ 10, 67–95 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-014-9199-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-014-9199-z