Nationality, rationality and misperception : building blocks of civil war and the effects of intervention

In this paper I intend to study the framework of civil war and the effectiveness of in-ternational intervention into intrastate violent conflict. My aim is to provide policy suggestions for international players seeking conflict management and to describe possible mechanisms that influence the intensity and the duration of civil wars. I pre-sent briefly theories of civil war and different forms of interventions, mainly from an economic and material perspective, and try to show essential aspects to effective in-ternational management of conflicts. In the first main part of the paper, I use a decision-theoretic model of a three-stage game to suggest how the parties allocate their resources to fighting and production, when these are drawn from a common pool. I show how the effect of exogenous fac-tors might change with the level of fierceness and try to show a condition for potential contracts of peace to be accepted by both parties. I propose reducing the imperfect information between the different parties as a key element to satisfy such a condition. Lastly, I consider the effectiveness of interventions in this framework. An important result in this part is how different conflicts and players may respond differently to third party involvement. In particular, the receiving party’s initial mili-tary strength and economic size are key characteristics. In my model, I show that from a conflict management point of view, the best strategy is to increase the differences in economic output and to strengthen the economically smaller party militarily. In the second main part, I consider negotiations between the two parties and show that all conflicts can be solved under full information. Under symmetric imperfect in-formation, I show how there exists no general sharing-rule between the parties which is truth revealing and on the budget. I therefore suggest international contributions in the process to establish credible expected punishment for knowingly disclosing false information, and show that third parties must contribute at least half of the expected future output of the country to achieve this. I wrap up the discussion by finding the optimal sharing-rule for a cost-minimizing third party, and by discussing the partici-pation constraint. Finally, I use a data set of civil wars after 1945 to insinuate the impact of different kinds of interventions in different types of conflicts. SPSS is used to calculate Pearson correlations between firstly the success of interventions and secondly the duration of conflicts and characteristics of the conflict and the interventions