External Supporters and Negotiated Settlement: Political Bargaining in Solving Governmental Incompatibility

Abstract

External supporters have heterogeneous preferences over civil war outcomes depending on the issues at stake. In this article, the bargaining model and empirical study show that such preferences of external supporters need to be considered not only when analyzing the causes of support but also when analyzing how they affect a conflict. By adding an external supporter to a traditional conflict bargaining model as a strategic actor who receives a payoff from the political division, this article investigates how the preferences of external supporters influence the likelihood of a peace agreement in civil wars over a government. I demonstrate that a peace agreement is more likely to happen when the external supporters of the government side are not satisfied with the current political status quo of the supported state. The empirical analysis of political civil wars from 1976 to 2009 supports the implications of the bargaining model.

Sovereignty Rupture as a Central Concept in Quantitative Measures of Civil War

“… 21. For example, of the fourteen studies of civil war and armed conflict published by the Journal of Conflict Resolution between January 1 and August 2, 2018 that used cross-country data analysis (includes publication via “online first,” excludes articles the primary function of which was to present a new data set), ten used a twenty-five yearly battle-related death threshold (or lower) and four used the UCDP/PRIO ACD or a data set built on it but did not explain their criteria for what constituted a civil war. The former are Gleditsch et al (2018), Fisk (2018), Bohnet, Cottier, and Hug (2018), Prorok (2018), Otto (2018), Conrad et al (2019), Maekawa (2019), Wiegand and Keels (2019), Asal et al (2018), and Kim and Hong (2019). The latter are Blankenship (2018), Kim (2018), Lee (2018), and Roy (2018). …”

Forecasting peace agreement content: How conflict events predict the substance of peace settlements

“…Regime type (Phayal et al, 2019), the number of insurgent organisations (Nilsson, 2010) and state capacity (DeRouen et al, 2010) influence the conflict outcome. Moreover, international involvement affects the probability of negotiations and peace agreements in intrastate conflicts (McKibben and Skoll, 2020;Karlén, 2020;Maekawa, 2019).…”

State intervention, external spoilers, and the durability of peace agreements

“…Newman and Richmond (2006, 4) broaden this scope to include external actors who may or may not directly engage in violence but "support internal spoilers and spoiling tactics." Relatedly, more recent studies discuss the role of external supporters in shaping warring parties' interest in negotiations (Kaplow 2016) and settlements (Maekawa 2019).…”