Third-party attitudes on civil conflicts: How the external states react to intrastate conflicts?

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2549553_(Table of contents)

This thesis aims to define and explore third party attitudes. Previous literature on third-party intervention that explores the motivations and methods of this phenomenon has overlooked the importance of the verbal clues and their impact on the civil war process. However, verbal indications are significant aspects that shape international relations; hence, the perceptions of conflicting actors depend on these external signals for their strategies in civil conflicts. This thesis, thus, bridges the gap between third party intervention and communication in international relations. Third-party attitude is the new measure that reflects how third parties position themselves towards an intrastate conflict. This dissertation introduces a novel definition and operationalization of this concept. This dissertation additionally analyses the critical determinants which change third party attitudes. The first empirical chapter introduces a case comparison and in-depth analysis of German, British and American attitudes on Turkey’s armed struggle with the PKK for the years between 2010-2019, which aims to detect the possible causal mechanisms. The second empirical chapter explores whether the hypotheses are supported with a time-series cross-sectional data covering American attitudes towards the European conflicts for the years between 1990-2019. The dissertation finds that the regional security dynamics and economic relations are the important factors that impact the likelihood of issuing involving and positive statements towards the conflicting states and nonstate actors