Third-party intervention in secessions

Abstract

This paper presents and solves a model of ethnically motivated warfare which treats annexations as the explicit outcomes of secessions. An ethnic group within one country may want to engage in a secession in order to join its ethnic peers in the annexing country. The annexing country decides whether or not to support the separatist ethnic group in the conflict. I use this model to discuss how equilibrium behavior depends on economies of scale in the public good provision, ethnic heterogeneity, and sanctions. Among others, I find that sanctions can have the seemingly paradoxical effect of increasing conflict intensity