ABSTRACT
Civil war is the dominant form of contemporary violent conflict (e.g. Harbom and Wallensteen 2005). Military interventions in various shapes, sizes, and objectives have become a frequent feature of these wars. According to Daniel Byman and Taylor Seybolt, however, military interventions with the intention to bring about lasting peace in communal civil wars actually fail or even backfire far more often than they succeed (2003: 33). There are still many problems to overcome for these measures to be effective, and the knowledge of how and when military interventions can be used might not be sufficiently developed.
