Third-party intervention as a cause of escalated violence against minorities
Arman Grigoryan (ETH Zurich)
The paper addresses the problem of escalated violence against minorities in the face of interventions or threats of interventions. The conventional wisdom on interventions, associated with the human rights tradition, implicitly rejects the very possibility of escalation as a result of interventions and criticizes third parties for inaction. An important tradition has emerged to challenge this view, maintaining that interventions generate a moral hazard, encouraging the potential beneficiaries of intervention to accept more risks and even to provoke the very violence interveners were supposed to protect them from. I challenge the moral hazard logic in this paper, arguing that interventions should affect the location, rather than the size of the bargaining range available to the disputants, leaving the probability of violent escalation unchanged. I focus instead on certain informational asymmetries to explain why and under what conditions interventions generate escalation. The logic is then illustrated with a case-study of the intervention in Kosovo.