Duration of Intrastate and Interstate Conflicts

A paper submitted for an International Security course explaining territorial intrastate and interstate conflicts.

Political scientists have sought to understand, “Why do wars last as long as they do?” and “Why are some wars longer than others?” Different frameworks including the attrition and bargaining models, as well as the veto-player framework can help address the disparity of duration among intra- and inter-state conflicts.

Bennett and Stam seek to understand what factors cause some interstate wars to last longer than others, and whether mobilization of troops is significant in determining war duration. They note that wars and their durations have important effects on leaders' popularity and on the stability of national regimes. They surmise that as states are led by rational leaders, "the decision to try to end a state's participation in a war will be made when the costs of continuing to fight become greater than the benefits." They find that balance of forces appears to be a key variable in determining the duration of wars; the more out of balance the opponents' capabilities are, the faster the war progresses. Both democracy, and repression are associated with shorter wars. War between highly repressive regimes is to be 15 months shorter on average than a war that involved moderately repressive regimes, while there was a 21 month difference between a war that involved moderately democratic states with a war between a state without democratic institutions. For wars in which highly democratic states participated, the average length of wars that these states had initiated was 9.2 months, while the average of those wars that they did not initiate was 16.7 months. For highly repressive states, in comparison, these average lengths were instead, 11.8 and 18 months. Further, wars that were initiated by states that were neither highly democratic or repressive lasted an average of 22.4 months. Therefore, both democratic and repressive states are associated with shorter wars.

Langlois and Langlois use a separate attrition model to help explain war duration. Attrition behavior is defined as waiting for the other side to give in despite the costs of delay; pragmatically, warring states forgo bargaining to 'wait it out,' hoping that the other side will give in and surrender. They find that wars that end with the challenger giving in are typically much longer than those that end with the defender giving in. While the mean duration of the wars that end with the challenger giving in is 20.5 months, the wars that end with the defender giving in last is on average 3.7 months only.

According to Cunningham, "civil wars show a remarkable variation in how long they last." He states that more parties involved in conflict make “civil wars more difficult to resolve through negotiation and therefore are of longer duration." As such, he seeks to explain the wide variation in the duration of civil wars, reconciling the disparity between war durations: why are some civil wars resolved quickly while others drag on for decades without resolution? Cunningham suggests that multiparty conflicts are more difficult to resolve and therefore are longer. A veto player framework is developed using similarities and differences between governmental bargaining and civil war negotiations, emphasizing the "strategies that actors in conflict will use both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table to try to get the best deal possible based on the number, preferences, and strength of veto players participating in the conflict. These various strategies affect the duration of these conflicts.” Civil wars can become multi-party, as well, when external states intervene into the conflict. External states may intervene to: “enforce an agreement to end the war, provide support to one side in its attempts to win the conflict, or out of a desire to pursue some independent agenda in the conflict, such as Rwanda and Uganda's interventions in the conflict in Congo/Zaire.” Statistical analysis reveal that: “civil wars with more veto players are substantially more resistant to resolution, and that the narrow assumption within the literature that civil wars are two-actor phenomena limits our ability to understand the dynamics of war duration and termination.”

Fearon offers that “civil wars last a long time when neither side can disarm the other, causing a military stalemate. They are relatively quick when conditions favor a decisive victory.” Civil wars post-1945 have lasted significantly longer when they have involved land or natural resource conflicts between state-supported migrants from a dominant ethnic group and “sons-of-the-soil,” and when rebels have access to finance from contraband like opium or cocaine.

Only recently has scholarship begun to focus on the "role of outside military and/or economic interventions in the expected duration of civil conflicts." Regan ascribes the motivation of outside, third-parties that intervene in intrastate conflict as some form of conflict management. Regan finds that conflicts with biased interventions are "considerably more likely to end in the next period than are those with neutral interventions." Regan seeks to address whether "third-party interventions tend to shorten or lengthen the duration of intrastate conflicts and whether particular strategies for intervening have different effects on the conflict." He also finds that military or economic interventions both greatly increase the expected duration of a conflict. He finds that regardless of the target of the type of an intervention, an intervention tends to decrease the likelihood that a conflict will end in the next month. Furthermore, the use of force has no bearing on whether a conflict will end in the next period, but "any conflict that attracts opposing interventions is considerably more likely to remain ongoing than a conflict that does not have interventions supporting both sides."

Slantchev explores the reason that wars last as long as they do, and investigates the actions of the initiator after having started a war. Long wars are expected to end poorly for the initiator, so democratic initiators obtain better outcomes in wars, but only because they start wars that tend to be short, which tend to do better in general. He utilizes an endogenous war termination model, where "states possess private information about their ability to wage war, and this information is gradually revealed through fighting. Every battlefield outcome, every rejected offer, and every unreasonable demand causes a state to update its beliefs about the strength of its adversary by inferring what types of opponents are likely to behave this way." In this capacity, democracies tend to select wars they correctly predict to be short because of the declining public support for fighting, but initiators generally do better in short wars. Slantchev also indicates that while military capabilities cannot always predict duration of war, theories such as the endogenous war termination, still, are suitable to generate testable hypotheses. He uses the example of the Seven Weeks War; while Prussia was believed as the weaker side that was unable to defeat the Austrian Empire, the Battle of Koniggratz gave the Prussians a stunning victory. For the Crimean War, however, the model did not predict the correct outcome. The army sizes were roughly at parity, and the population slightly favored Russia. The model suggested that the Russians should have done better, but not overwhelmingly so - however, the Russians were beat by France, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire, which disproves the model.

Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski hypothesize that "existence of an interstate rival can prolong the conflict even when actual involvement has never materialized," where "the mere expectation of possible financial assistance from the rival can deter rebels from seeking settlement." They deduce that civil conflict might be altered depending not only on the timing or target of intervention, but also on the "identity of the intervening state and ways in which that identity affects a desire of guerrilla forces to sustain the fight." They surmise that "when a civil war country is involved in a rivalry with another state, the rebels' expectations of aid will increase their desire to fight and prolong the war even before the occurrence of an intervention." In other words, a non-event of war can also alter the duration of conflict.

Propelled by rational-choice theory, bargaining models and attrition behavior help explain interstate behavior, while veto player frameworks help explain intrastate behavior. Many scholars have neglected to account that civil, intrastate, conflicts may be driven by multi-parties. The greater amount of parties present, the longer the duration of war. Territorial disputes have also been studied to lengthen the duration of civil wars. Therefore, the question of why wars last as long as they do, while rational, is explained by a myriad of factors.

References

Akcinaroglu, Seden, and Elizabeth Radziszewski. 2005. “Expectations, Rivalries, and Civil War

Duration.” International Interactions 31 (4): 349–74.

Bennett, D. Scott, and Allan C. Stam. 1996. "The Duration of Interstate Wars, 1816-1985". The

American Political Science Review. 90 (2): 239-257.

Cunningham, David E. 2006 "Veto Players and Civil War Duration." American Journal of

Political Science 50 (4): 875-92.

Cunningham, David E., and Douglas Lemke. 2013. "Combining Civil and Interstate Wars".

International Organization. 67 (3): 609-627.

Fearon, James D. 2004. “Why Do Some Civil Wars Last so Much Longer Than Others?” Journal

of Peace Research 41 (3): 275–301.

Fearon, James D. and David Laitin. 2003. “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War.” American

Political Science Review 97 (1): 75-90.

Langlois, Catherine C., and Jean-Pierre P. Langlois. 2009. "Does Attrition Behavior Help

Explain the Duration of Interstate Wars? A Game Theoretic and Empirical Analysis".

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Regan, Patrick M. 2002. "Third-Party Interventions and the Duration of Intrastate Conflicts." The

Journal of Conflict Resolution 46 (1): 55-73.

Sambanis, Nicholas. 2004. "What Is Civil War? : Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of an

Operational Definition". Journal of Conflict Resolution. 48 (6): 814-858.

Slantchev, Branislav L. 2004. "How Initiators End Their Wars: The Duration of Warfare and the

Terms of Peace". American Journal of Political Science. 48 (4): 813-829.