Third-party Peace Enforcement and Civil War Termination Bargaining

Type: 
Departmental Seminar
Audience: 
CEU Community Only
Building: 
Nador u. 9, Faculty Tower
Room: 
Room 309
Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - 3:30pm
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Date: 
Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm

Chair: Emel Akcali, IRES

This project provides a new approach to studying civil war termination bargaining and the implementation of negotiated settlement by combining three existing approaches of power and bargaining, strategic behavior, and third party peace operations within a common framework. Extending the basic bargaining model, I have added the feature of a reneging option for the stronger group after agreement is reached. This leads to the expectation that when groups expect the absence of an enforcement mechanism, the stronger group makes a bigger concession while the weaker group makes a more demanding offer than would be expected according to groups’ power dynamic. On the other hand, when groups expect that a third party peace operator will enforce an agreement, groups’ offers more closely reflect their relative power situation. I test the expectation using both a qualitative case study and large-n statistical analyses. In order to perform the statistical analyses, I first developed a unique data set, the Political Power-sharing Bargaining Dataset, 1989-1994, that adopts the bargaining participant as the unit of analysis, and includes detailed measures of warring groups' internal and external power, battlefield outcomes, third party peace enforcement, and the political power-sharing offers with respect to government, parliament, and courts made during civil war termination bargaining attempts. The case study is an in-depth analysis of bargaining attempts during the Sierra Leone civil wars from 1991 to 2002.