Ashley Leeds: A Separate Peace? Withdrawal Bargains and Civil War Intervention

The Moynihan Institute's Study of Global Politics series welcomes Brett Ashley Leeds from Rice University. Leeds will present “A Separate Peace? Withdrawal Bargains and Civil War Intervention,” co-written by Jesse C. Johnson (University of Texas - Austin), Scott Wolford (University of Texas) and Conner Joyce (Rice University).

Paper Abstract: Civil wars become international conflicts when outside states provide support to rebel groups.  Sometimes, external intervention is driven by affinity for the rebel group and a desire to achieve the rebel group’s goals.  Sometimes, however, external intervention is driven by tensions on other issues, for example, international rivalry, territorial disputes, or regional leadership. We develop a game-theoretic model to understand the conditions under which a government may break a rebel-external state coalition through bargaining on an international issue. We provide evidence of the empirical relevance of our theory through statistical analysis of civil conflicts, along with an examination of early Libyan intervention in the Chadian civil war. Our argument provides new insight on the connections between domestic and international conflict and the outcomes of internationalized civil wars.

Brett Ashley Leeds is Radoslav Tsanoff Professor of Political Science at Rice University. She is currently co-editor-in-chief of International Organization. Leeds’s research focuses on the design and effects of international agreements (particularly military alliances), and also on connections between domestic politics and foreign policy. She is the co-author of Domestic Interests, Democracy, and Foreign Policy Change (with Michaela Mattes, Cambridge Elements in International Relations series, 2022). 

In 2008, Leeds received the Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association, which is presented annually to a scholar in international relations within ten years of Ph.D. who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the study of International Relations and Peace Research. In 2019, Leeds won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conflict Processes Section of APSA in recognition of scholarly contributions that have fundamentally improved the study of conflict processes.

She served as president of the International Studies Association during 2017-18, president of the Peace Science Society during 2018-19, and as chair of the Rice University Department of Political Science from 2015-2025.