1.1 Background and Contribution
In national and international affairs, if an insurgent attacks and the government unsuccessfully cannot protect its citizens, the international community may not intervene, or may intervene successfully or unsuccessfully. The international community is defined as an individual foreign government (e.g. US), a combination of foreign governments, or various alliances such as NATO or the UN. Common objectives of international intervention, defined as military intervention, are to stabilize the country, to get access to resources, or ideological, idealistic or humanitarian objectives. For example, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad for the Tuareg people attacked and removed president Amadou Toumani Touré in Mali January 16-March 22, 2012 (Arves, Cunningham, & McCulloch, 2019). The French military and forces from the African Union states intervened successfully January 11-February 8, 2013.
The phenomenon involves three players, i.e. an insurgent, a government, and the international community. To extract the strategic features between the three players, this article develops a rent seeking model where the rent sought by each player is weighted against the player’s unit cost of fighting. Each player seeks a rent relative to its current status quo situation. For example, in Mali the Tuareg people perceived getting limited access to natural resources, public goods, and power, in addition to feeling excluded. Hence, they launched an insurgent attack. The government protected unsuccessfully, losing privileges and power. The international community was accustomed to the stability before the attack and preferred to restore the situation prior to the attack. Weighing the economic and humanitarian benefits of intervention against the costs, the international community intervened successfully.
To understand the logic of such situations, this article builds a four-period model of the three players, i.e. the insurgent, the government, and the international community. The research questions are to determine how potential intervention by the international community impacts whether an insurgent attacks, impacts the interaction between the insurgent and the government, and impacts the interaction between the insurgent and the international community if intervention occurs. The international community’s choice of whether to intervene is an exogenous probability, which contrasts with the more common approach of assuming an intervention, and assessing its success versus failure.
The insurgent can be any group opposed to the government, which may or may not incorporate terrorist elements. The insurgent may choose to attack or not in period 1. If attacking, which occurs in period 2, the government may protect successfully or not in period 2. If not protecting successfully, the international community may choose to intervene or not in period 3, and may intervene successfully or not in period 4. The article illustrates linkages between the four periods impacting how the three players interact.