War and Stability in Dynamic International Systems

We present a dynamic, complete-information bargaining model of war with N countries. The analysis of a network with more than two countries significantly generalizes previous work. We consider an environment where a country’s military strength varies stochastically over time as a function of endogen...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of politics Vol. 78; no. 4; pp. 1139 - 1152
Main Authors Krainin, Colin, Wiseman, Thomas
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Chicago University of Chicago on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association 01.10.2016
University of Chicago Press
Subjects
Armed forces
Bargaining
Consumption
Inequality
Information
Negotiation
Network analysis
Peace
Stability
Stochastic models
War
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Summary:We present a dynamic, complete-information bargaining model of war with N countries. The analysis of a network with more than two countries significantly generalizes previous work. We consider an environment where a country’s military strength varies stochastically over time as a function of endogenous consumption. If countries are sufficiently patient, then war is inevitable and will quickly spread throughout the network. We leverage insights from the limiting case to identify two key factors that promote peace among countries with limited patience: peace is easier to sustain when countries have equal military strength or when mechanisms exist to preserve any existing inequalities. Varying the number of countries does not have a consistent effect.
ISSN:0022-3816
1468-2508
DOI:10.1086/686307