Words of War: Does Negotiation End or Extend Conflict?

“In Words of War, Eric Min pulls back the curtain on when, why, and how belligerents negotiate while fighting.” – Cornell University Press

Negotiations during war have long been used to end wars and quell conflict. Over the last two centuries, two-thirds of interstate wars were ended using negotiated settlements. In his recent book, Eric Min, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, interrogates when and why talks occur and, more importantly, under what conditions they can lead to a peaceful resolution.

“Rather than thinking that it “cannot hurt” to promote diplomacy during war, or that we should just “give war a chance,”” writes Min, his theory “offers guidance about when and how diplomacy can be used to help settle wars—or when it can be exploited by belligerents to potentially win them.”

On May 28, Min led a virtual conversation for HFG on the role of third-party pressure on belligerents and the tradeoffs of using diplomacy to garner short-term vs. long-term peace.

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Eric Min is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA. He received his B.A. in International Relations at New York University, where he was valedictorian of the College of Arts and Science. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science at Stanford University and was also Zukerman Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Sciences at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Eric’s research focuses 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. His dissertation received the 2018 Kenneth Waltz Prize from the American Political Science Association’s International Security Section.