Causes of Conflict
Such are the general causes and conditions of International Conflict Behavior whether nonviolent conflict behavior, violence, or war.
Conflict Behavior manifests a series of subphases in the balancing of powers. Each subphase involves different kinds of behavior.
Why do wars occur and recur, especially in cases when the decisions involved are made by careful and rational actors? There are many answers to this question. Given the importance of the question and the wide range of answers, it is essential to have a perspective on the various sources of conflict.
There are two prerequisites for a war between (rational) actors. One is that the costs of war cannot be overwhelmingly high. By that, we mean that there must be some plausible situations in the eyes of the decision makers such that the anticipated gains from a war in terms of resources, power, glory, territory, and so forth exceed the expected costs of conflict, including expected damages to property and life. Thus, for war to occur with rational actors, at least one of the sides involved has to expect that the gains from the conflict will outweigh the costs incurred.
Without this prerequisite, there can be lasting peace. As cogently argued by Fearon (1995), there has to be a failure in bargaining, so that for some reason there is an inability to reach a mutually advantageous and enforceable agreement.
The main tasks in understanding war between rational actors are thus to see why bargaining fails and what incentives or circumstances might lead countries to arm in ways such that the expected benefits from war outweigh the costs for at least one of the sides.
A good portion of our overview of the causes of war is thus spent discussing a framework of different bargaining failures. There is emphasize that understanding sources of bargaining failure are not only used as a categorization, but also because different types of failures lead to different conclusions about the types of wars that emerge, and particularly about things like the duration of a war. We return to comment on this after discussing various reasons for bargaining failure.
Reasons for bargaining failure:
1. Asymmetric information about the potential costs and benefits of war;
2. A lack of ability to enforce a bargaining agreement and/or a lack of the ability to credibly commit to abide by an agreement;
3. Indivisibilities of resources that might change hands in a war, so that not all potentially mutually beneficial bargaining agreements are feasible;
4. Agency problems, where the incentives of leaders differ from those of the populations that they represent;
5. Multilateral interactions where every potential agreement is blocked by some coalition of states or constituencies who can derail it.
To illustrate the importance of understanding which reason lies behind a conflict, note that if there is a lack of ability to enforce or commit to an agreement, then a war may last a long time.
It will last until either one side has emerged victorious, or the situation has changed so that the costs of continued conflict have become overwhelmingly high for all sides. Such a lack of enforceable agreements is often one of the main ingredients leading to protracted wars.
In contrast, suppose that enforceable and credible agreements are possible, but that the states start with asymmetric information, for instance, about the relative strength of one of the two countries. In such a case, there can be a bargaining failure which leads to war.
However, in such a setting once war really begins the relative strengths of the countries can become clearer, and given that credible bargaining is possible and can avoid further costs of war the states could then reach an agreement to end the war. So, different durations of wars can correspond to different sources of bargaining failures.
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