An umbrella of legitimacy: Rebel faction size and external military intervention

Published date01 September 2018
DOI10.1177/0192512116678098
Date01 September 2018
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512116678098
International Political Science Review
2018, Vol. 39(4) 515 –530
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512116678098
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An umbrella of legitimacy:
Rebel faction size and external
military intervention
Levente Szentkirályi
University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
Michael Burch
Eckerd College, USA
Abstract
How may the legitimacy of rebel groups shape the decisions of third-party states to support insurgencies
militarily? In aiming to better understand how the (group-level) attributes of insurgencies motivate
interventions on their behalf, we argue that the size of rebel forces serves as a proxy for a revolution’s
perceived legitimacy within the international community. Specifically, we maintain that the larger the
insurgency, the greater the insurgency’s perceived legitimacy and, thus, the more likely intervention on its
behalf becomes. This analysis challenges previous studies that have confined the causal salience of faction
size to relative capabilities or strength, and it also underscores the controversial policy implications of this
finding.
Keywords
Rebel group, faction size, legitimacy, military intervention, responsibility to protect
Introduction
Mass protests and armed conflict have shaken North Africa and the Middle East since the start of
the Arab Spring in early 2011. The revolutionary violence that still persists in Yemen, Bahrain,
Egypt, and Syria threatens to incite disorder and hostility in neighboring countries like Iran, Israel,
and Pakistan, whose existing and developing nuclear weapons capabilities in this volatile environ-
ment present a threat to global security. With the United Nations (UN) Security Council continuing
to strive to determine how best to facilitate an end to the hostilities against dissidents, it is unclear
whether external military intervention, as occurred in Libya in 2011, will be forthcoming. This
Corresponding author:
Levente Szentkirályi, Department of Political Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0333, USA.
Email: szentkiralyi@colorado.edu
678098IPS0010.1177/0192512116678098International Political Science ReviewSzentkirályi and Burch
research-article2017
Article
516 International Political Science Review 39(4)
uncertainty should compel us to re-examine why third-party states sometimes intervene in rebel-
lions within other countries, and why the plights of oppressed insurgents sometimes go unheeded.
Despite the burgeoning literature on why and how third-party states intervene in support of
insurgencies, most extant research programs have aimed to understand the effects of intervention
on the outcomes of these disputes, and their analyses have focused on state-level determinants.
This paper takes a different approach: it explores how certain attributes of insurgencies themselves
motivate interventions on their behalf, and it contends that the size of the rebel group, as a matter
of the insurgency’s perceived legitimacy in the international community, is an important determi-
nant of external intervention.
While diverse forms of intervention exist, we are particularly interested in the decision of third-
party states to intervene militarily – for example, to deploy ground forces or to fire weapons in the
country in which the domestic conflict occurs (Meernik, 1996: 394; Pearson et al., 1994: 209). This
narrow construal demarcates the clearest instances of intervention, since the supply of arms and
equipment and the movement of military personnel are not easily concealed. With broader notions
of ‘support’or ‘aid,’ it is easier for states to covertly grant assistance to rebels, to engage in clan-
destine interventions, and to deny having provided aid if their involvement were revealed (Andreas,
2004: 34–35, 49). Since employing a broader conception introduces bias into the analysis by
obscuring when interventions actually occur, non-military forms of support – including, for exam-
ple, providing economic aid, imposing sanctions, or fostering diplomacy and mediation – are not
considered here. Also, as detailed below, we narrow our focus to multilateral military interventions
involving at least two states.
Accordingly, we argue that the probability of ‘rebel-biased’ multilateral military interventions
(those in support of insurgents) increases with larger rebel forces: for faction size signals to poten-
tial interveners that the insurgency is legitimate. It is the same umbrella of legitimacy that vindi-
cates challenges to state authority by larger rebel groups that also provides third-party states the
justification to intervene against the established government: a justification that is generally absent
with smaller rebellions. This conclusion challenges existing scholarship on the causal salience of
rebel group size, which has treated size as a rough measure of the insurgency’s relative strength or
capabilities.
Alternative explanations of the influence of rebel group size
Beyond having the capacity to intervene, potential interveners must also have strong incentives to
risk the costs of intervention (Gent, 2008: 719; Gleditsch and Beardsley, 2004: 400). For instance,
if another third-party state would likely retaliate against the intervening country, the probability of
intervention decreases (Newell, 1980: 252). Similarly, protracted conflicts and longer durations
that a potential intervener would be involved in a dispute also reduce the likelihood of intervention
(Regan, 2000; Regan and Aydin, 2006). And if an intervention would exacerbate the repression of
rebels, third-party states would be reluctant to intervene to avoid greater violence against those
they seek to aid (Betts, 1994).
Nevertheless, there are occasions when third-party states are drawn into foreign intrastate dis-
putes, since domestic conflicts invariably produce negative externalities (like refugee flows across
borders) and are, thus, rarely confined by geopolitical boundaries (Gleditsch and Beardsley, 2004;
Salehyan and Gleditsch, 2006). This is confirmed by scholars who claim that external intervention
becomes more likely as geographical proximity to an intrastate conflict increases, or when intra-
state conflicts escalate to ‘regional security dilemmas’ (Gent, 2008; Regan, 2000). In any event,
once a state provides some form of external support, diminishing marginal returns of further

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