Bargaining and War

Abstract

mains possible after war starts. n his well-known book, The Causes of War (1988), Geoffrey Blainey claimed that to understand why wars started one had to understand why they stopped. There is good reason to take this claim seriously. Nearly all wars end not because the participants are incapable of further fighting but because they agree to stop, and even capitulation is often the result of concessions made by the victor (Kecskemeti 1958). Thus to explain why wars occur one must explain why states must fight before reaching an agreement. The problem of explaining the occurrence of war is therefore ambiguous: one might merely want to explain why two states could not reach agreement without fighting, or explain why their fighting lasted long enough and was severe enough to be identified as a war, or explain why some historical war occurred. And if fighting is expected to lead to agreement then fighting must be considered as part of the bargaining process and not an alternative to it. However, this is not the way most of the literature on war approaches the problem. War is instead normally assumed to be entirely the result of choices made before it begins. If it is represented as anything more than a final outcome it is usually depicted as a costly lottery, and a negotiated settlement, if considered at all, is normally represented as an alternative to war rather than something war is expected to lead to.1 The only attempt to follow Blainey's suggestion is an article by Wittman (1979) on war termination. Wittman modeled a war as a costly military contest between two states which will be won ultimately by one or the other of them. If it is to be ended instead by a negotiated settlement then both states must prefer the terms of the settlement to the expected value of continuing the war. One implication of this fact, Wittman claimed, is that changes in the relative military power of the two states will have no effect on whether they will be able to reach a negotiated settlement, since making one state more pessimistic about continuing the war will only make the other more optimistic and therefore cannot diminish the