Fighting and Bargaining Across Two Centuries of International ConflictEric Min, University of California, Los Angeles Research Grant, 2020 How do the outcomes of fighting on the battlefield impact states’ willingness to engage in diplomacy and seek peace? Over the last two hundred years, two-thirds of wars between countries have ended through a negotiated settlement that stops conflict short of complete military victory or defeat. Nonetheless, scholarship has failed to adequately address when, why, and how belligerents choose to engage in diplomacy during war, much less the question of what factors account for the outcomes of these negotiations. One of the major obstacles to such research is the lack of systematic data on the battlefield activity that undoubtedly shapes actors’ decisions to continue or stop fighting. This project addresses this shortcoming by creating a dataset of over two thousand individual battles that took place in all interstate wars between 1816 and 2003. For each battle, the dataset contains information on start and end dates, outcomes, participants, casualties, and location. The data endeavor involved a dozen research assistants poring over several hundred distinct encyclopedias, books, and other historical sources. To date, the result represents the most comprehensive and thoroughly researched quantitative effort to track the ebbs and flows of violence during interstate wars. These data permit an analysis of the shifting fortunes of fighting both within and across almost a hundred wars. The battle data help challenge assumptions held by many scholars and practitioners that it “cannot hurt” for third-party actors and institutions to promote diplomacy during war, and that negotiations are most likely to produce peace when belligerents find themselves in a costly stalemate. Pairing this battle data with a recently published dataset on wartime negotiations paints a complex picture of how diplomacy is used in conflict. In particular, I am able to identify a set of conditions under which belligerents are likely to negotiate sincerely (in good faith, with intentions of finding peace) and a set under which they are likely to negotiate insincerely (in bad faith, with intentions of using diplomacy to promote the war effort by creating propaganda and stalling for time). I demonstrate that an international environment that applies high pressure to belligerents to negotiate will permit parties to talk regardless of their sincere or insincere intentions. Meanwhile, battlefield activities that strongly favor one side will increase the chance that negotiations that do take place are sincere. Therefore, the combination of strong external diplomatic pressures and indeterminate battlefield activity enables insincere negotiations that may fuel war rather than end it. The idea—and empirical evidence—of insincere negotiations makes two significant contributions. In the scholarly realm, this result contradicts a long-standing belief in the field of international relations that wartime diplomacy is a mechanical process that has no strategic value beyond ending wars. On the policymaking front, the battle data help challenge assumptions held by many scholars and practitioners that it “cannot hurt” for third-party actors and institutions to promote diplomacy during war, and that negotiations are most likely to produce peace when belligerents find themselves in a costly stalemate.
