Taking Sides in Wars of Attrition

Abstract

Third parties often have a stake in the outcome of a conflict and can affect that outcome by taking sides. This article studies the factors that affect a third party's decision to take sides in a civil or interstate war by adding a third actor to a standard continuous-time war of attrition with two-sided asymmetric information. The third actor has preferences over which of the other two actors wins and for being on the winning side conditional on having taken sides. The third party also gets a flow payoff during the fighting which can be positive when fighting is profitable or negative when fighting is costly. The article makes four main contributions: First, it provides a formal framework for analyzing the effects of endogenous intervention on the duration and outcome of the conflict. Second, it identifies a “boomerang” effect that tends to make alignment decisions unpredictable and coalitions dynamically unstable. Third, it yields several clear comparative-static results. Finally, the formal analysis has implications for empirical efforts to estimate the effects of intervention, showing that there may be significant selection and identification issues.

The Logic of Violence in Drug War

“…Compare, for example, the period of peace under a pact engineered by the Mexican drug trafficker Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo(Osorno 2009, 239) with the first decade of the Mexican drug war, which was nearly as deadly as the first decade of the war in Iraq.2 In interstate or civil war, third parties participate in (e.g.) mediation and peacekeeping(Fey and Ramsay 2010;Kydd 2003) or by directly taking sides(Powell 2017); these roles do not provide a formal analogue for the government's role in illegal markets.3 In other words, we characterize the conflict over routes(and profits) as using a repeated contest model. In the Setup section, we discuss how a repeated contest model captures the dynamics of drug-market violence.4 In doing so, we endogenize the stakes of the conflict: Bueno de Mesquita (2020) recommends "a political economy approach that takes seriously the two-way relationship between economic and conflict outcomes" (28).…”

Toward a holistic networks approach to strategic third-party intervention: A literature review

“…Perhaps as a result, alignment is not as predictable as other scholars may have assumed. Clearly, internal actors have agency; in anticipation of an intervention internal actors may make changes to their strategy that disincentivize such external involvement (Powell, 2017). Plus, rebel actors may attempt to mitigate power asymmetries by engaging in suicide terrorism, which undermines the likelihood of government-side external intervention (Butcher, 2016).…”

Rationalist Explanations for Two-Front War

“…One approach to such simpli…cation is to focus on a particular form of war such as war fought by one against N parties, as often found in rebellions and revolutions (Alt, Calvert, and Humes 1988; Bueno de Mesquita 2010; Fearon 2011; Ginkel and Smith 1999;Nakao 2015Nakao , 2018Roemer 1985;Weingast 1995), or war intervened by a third party (Altfeld and Bueno de Mesquita 1979; Gartner and Siverson 1996;Powell 2017;Smith 1996). In this article, we explore a particular form of war-two-front war, where a state at the center is fought by two enemies at opposing peripheries.…”