Negotiation in War

Abstract: What role do negotiations play in the midst of interstate wars? Extant scholarship has largely treated negotiations as being irrelevant to understanding a conflict's trajectory, or as being a direct reflection of hostilities on the battlefield. Neither view is supported by historical readings or empirical patterns of intra-war diplomacy. I present an alternative view of negotiations as being instrumental. Diplomatic bargaining not only occurs in response to battlefield outcomes, but is also used deceptively by disadvantaged belligerents to stall for time, manage political pressures, and regroup militarily. Using two new daily-level datasets of battles and diplomatic activity, I show that negotiations in post-1945 wars extend conflict when the war initiator has an advantage in fighting, occur in response to lop-sided battle outcomes, dampen the intensity of combat, and are associated with subsequent improvements in the war target's success on the battlefield. This framework of instrumental negotiations shows that the effect of intra-war diplomacy is conditional on the state of hostilities, and has substantial implications on our understanding of war termination and conflict resolution.

About the Speaker: Eric Min is a CISAC Predoctoral Fellow for 2016-2017 and a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University. His research is focused on interstate diplomacy, information gathering and sharing during crises, and applications of machine learning and text analysis techniques to declassified documents related to conflict and foreign policy.