The fighting in some civil wars primarily takes place in a few stable locations, while the fighting in others moves substantially. We posit that rebel groups that do not primarily fight for a specific ethnic group, that receive outside military assistance, or that have relatively weak fighting capacity tend to fight in inconsistent locations. We develop new measures of conflict zone movement to test our hypotheses, based on shifts in the conflict polygons derived from the new Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED) developed by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). Our empirical results provide support for the suggested mechanisms, and we find that groups which have neither strong ethnic ties nor sufficient military strength to compete with government forces in conventional warfare fight in more varied locations. These findings improve our understandings and expectations of variations in the humanitarian footprint of armed conflicts, the interdependencies between rebel groups and local populations, and the dilemmas faced by government counterinsurgency efforts.3

This research note develops a new explanation of postwar peace duration: periods of peace following wars last longer when the war ends in foreignimposed regime change+ This study tests this hypothesis on a new data set~an expansion of Fortna's~2004! data! of all periods of peace following interstate war cease-fires, over the period 1914-2001+ It also tests for other possible factors affecting postwar peace duration, including international institutions, the revelation of information during war, third-party intervention during war, postwar changes in the balance of power, regime type, past conflict history, and others+ The article finds strong support for the central hypothesis that peace lasts longer following wars that end in foreign-imposed regime change+ This pacifying effect diminishes over time when a puppet is imposed, but not when a democracy is imposed+ There are other results, including that the strength of a cease-fire agreement has almost no impact on peace duration+ International Organization 62, Fall 2008, pp+ 717-36

We explore how the domestic political institutions of states in the neighborhood of international disputants affect the incentives for third-party conflict management. Existing scholarship has argued that as the number of democracies in the international system increases, disputants are more likely to want and find third-party conflict management. We propose two alternative explanations for the connection between democratization and changing patterns of conflict management that consider more localized mechanisms. We posit that neighboring democratic leaders, with stronger incentives to deliver public benefits, will be more willing to push for their involvement as third parties, particularly when the disputes are sufficiently salient to affect regional security dynamics yet not so difficult that protracted engagement is likely. We also posit that, since international organizations (IOs) tend to be more engaged in democratic communities, IOs will be more active peacemakers in disputes, especially intractable and violent ones, that occur in heavily democratic regions. Using event history analysis of the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) data, we find support for these arguments. Disputants with many democratic neighbors are more likely to experience third-party conflict management by democracies-this effect is increasing in the salience and decreasing in the intractability of the dispute-and IOs-this effect is increasing in the intractability of the dispute. Counter to expectations based on a logic of norm diffusion, third-party conflict management is not more likely among democracies that are in dispute with each other nor when the proportion of democracies in the international system increases.

Third-party conflict management, particularly legal dispute resolution (arbitration and adjudication) and mediation, can help improve the willingness of disputants to make asymmetric concessions by ameliorating commitment problems and providing political cover. In both regards, and especially pertaining to commitment problems, mediation has substantial limitations when compared to legal dispute resolution. We develop these arguments and test the observable implications on the Issue Correlates of War data. To get traction on the mechanisms at work, we distinguish between challenger concessions and defender concessions, positing that challenger concessions face the primary hurdle of political cover while defender concessions face the primary hurdle of commitment problems. We find that legal dispute resolution strongly increases the propensity for concessions by both challengers and targets, even major asymmetric concessions. Mediation, on the other hand, only helps increase minor challenger concessions. Also consistent with expectations, mediation best enables asymmetric challenger concessions in the highly salient cases that need the most political cover, and legal dispute resolution best enables asymmetric concessions when there has been a history of failed conflict management attempts that perpetuate mistrust.