Foreign military intervention is one of the most important political phenomena in the world today. As major wars have declined in frequency over recent decades and the efficacy of costly and time-consuming economic sanctions is questioned, foreign military intervention seems to have become a sine qua non of modern statecraft. Despite the growing prevalence of foreign military intervention, we still have little understanding of the type of impacts this typically lowscale force has in target countries. As the recent American involvement in Iraq underscores, FMI can have major ramifications in target states. This project takes an initial step toward understanding the effects that foreign military intervention has on developing states' governing institutions, their economic performance, and their citizens' quality of life. To date, no systematic, large N studies of foreign military intervention impact on target states have been undertaken. Given its growing frequency and importance, this is a noteworthy gap in the literature. Of course, a study of intervention impacts faces numerous obstacles. The literature on the rarer and much more heavily studied phenomenon of war underscores some of these barriers. Because of the inertia that typically characterizes research programs, the bulk of extant research on war focuses on its initiation. Many scholars hope that by grasping how wars break out, they can also learn how to prevent them. The result is that scant analytical energy has been spent into developing knowledge of war consequences. Broadly accepted theories on war impacts are scarce. Methodologically, there is little consensus on how far into the postwar period analysts should look for war impacts, or which of the myriad of different impacts should be given emphasis. Wars are obviously easier to spot and to study than foreign military interventions. They are larger and bloodier. They wreak greater havoc on national infrastructure and populations. If war impact studies are in their infancy, it might seem that the chances of building a systematic understanding of intervention consequences are remote. After all, intervention studies tend to follow the example set by the more prominent study of war. Except for a growing literature on third party interventions in civil conflicts, intervention studies also tend to focus on initiation. The investigators, however, believe that the study of intervention consequences is not only feasible, it is overdue. With a consistent, reliable operationalization of the concept of foreign military intervention and carefully collected data on the phenomenon, intervention impacts can be studied systematically. What's more, since intervention is more a varied phenomenon than war, they should be able to ascertain a range of different types of impacts and construct typologies. Unlike war, foreign military intervention can be launched in support of, rather than opposition to, target governments. It can be taken for humanitarian reasons, to rescue beleaguered nationals in troubled foreign lands, or simply to chase bands of rebels across borders. In other cases, it can challenge and even seek to oust the target government. Where they leave a measurable imprint, such varied military missions should have vastly different social, political, and economic ramifications for target societies. The most daunting obstacle for the project has yet to be addressed: data. The funding from the National Science Foundation is to update the most frequently used data on foreign military intervention, Pearson and Baumman's (1993) International Military Intervention (IMI) dataset. IMI is a broad measure of low-scale force that records all verifiable cases when national troops or forces move into another country's territory to pursue political, economic, or strategic objectives. The IMI data housed in ICPSR only covers the years 1946 to 1988. One of this project's PIs has extended the data to 1996. They have funding to extend it further to 2005. They will complete the update in one calendar year, starting 1 June 2005 and ending 31 May 2006. The data will be deposited at ICPSR. Its benefits will thus outlive the current project on intervention consequences. The data will have a broad impact on the fields of comparative politics and IR by providing a reliable, accessible dataset on the most prevalent type of military force in use today. Given the wide variety of activities recorded, scholars from across the globe can use the data to test a host of different theories and relationships. The intellectual merit of the project lies in the fact that it will help bring understanding to a phenomenon that will be prevalent and may have far reaching consequences in coming decades, foreign military intervention.
