Mutually Assured Distrust: Ideology and Commitment Problems in Civil Wars

Abstract

Within the study of intrastate armed conflicts, many scholars rely on a bargaining model when explaining why some civil wars are intractable. Primarily, scholars posit that commitment problems represent a key barrier to settling conflicts through negotiations. Yet, some civil wars are more easily resolved than others. If commitment problems are a universal feature of civil wars, what explains why commitment problems are more salient in some conflicts as compared to others? We argue that ideological differences between combatants enhance commitment problems in civil wars. Assuming that ideology is used by combatants to generate support, concessions that violate the ideological goals of each side may alienate supporters. With extreme ideological polarization, concessions may be viewed as relative as opposed to absolute, making it difficult for either side to credibly commit to offer concessions. To test these claims, we quantitatively examine the duration and outcome of all intrastate conflicts from 1975 to 2011.

Rebels with a Cause: Does Ideology Make Armed Conflicts Longer and Bloodier?

“…Some issues may simply be zerosum, with one or both sides unwilling to cede ground despite the costs involved. We argue that ideology magnifies these dynamics, diminishing trust between armed actors (states and rebels) and significantly reducing their willingness to compromise over now "indivisible" issues (Hassner 2003;Keels and Wiegand 2020, 2028-2029. Such "grand" ideology in the sense theorized aboveand related incompatibilities between adversariesare therefore likely to contribute to violence.…”

“…There is certainly evidence that secular ideologies like Communism provide a strong motivation to fight, have quasi-religious overtones, and promote mutual distrust and hostility against ideologically others (Kalyvas 2018). One notable exception is Keels and Wiegand (2020) who hypothesize that ideological differences create commitment problems which contribute to conflict duration, finding that religious ideology in particular hindered conflict termination in the period 1975 to 2011. Although somewhat temporally constrained, their evidence does suggest that ideology increases the duration of armed conflict.…”

“…Bargaining theory further provides a powerful explanation for why these aspirations contribute to violence (Fearon 1995;Keels and Wiegand 2020, 2024-2028. Fearon (1994Fearon ( , 1995Fearon ( , 2004 particularly names uncertainty, commitment problems, and issue indivisibility as key drivers of both interstate and intrastate violence.…”

“…So, while we treat each new conflict outbreak as initiating a new conflict duration count, to properly capture the "risk" of conflict termination in such contexts requires stratifying our analyses by failure order, wherein each event is measured first from entry and then from the previous event (Prentice, Williams and Peterson 1981). This differs somewhat from more common approaches in the intrastate conflict literature utilizing Cox proportional hazard models which assume the baseline "risk" of conflict termination should not vary over time regardless of previously observed failures (Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan 2009;Keels and Wiegand 2020). Specific results for our dyadic and monadic duration models are presented in Supplemental Tables A2 and A3 respectively in the Online Appendix.…”

High valuations, uncertainty, and war

“… 1. See, for example, research on the causes of territorial conflict (Abramson and Carter, 2016; Diehl and Goertz, 1992; Shelef, 2016), regime conflict (Keels and Wiegand, 2020; Maoz and Russett, 1993; Owen, 2010), and resource conflict (Colgan, 2010; Markowitz et al, 2020; Ross, 2006; Rustad and Binningsbo, 2012). …”