To War or Not to War: Sub-Conventional Warfare’s Effects on the Likelihood of Conventional War

Abstract

As states seek to advance their interests in the international system, the threat of war is perpetually present. As a result, scholars have produced a rich body of literature that seeks to explain the causes of war. One explanation is the bargaining model of war. Fearon (1995) argues that the inefficiency of war gives states incentives to reach prewar bargains but notes that states still fail to reach bargains and go to war. To explain this, Fearon (1995) gives three logical, rationalist explanations for war: (1) information problems or private information and incentives to misrepresent that information, (2) commitment problems, and (3) issue indivisibility (pp. 381-382). Fearon (1995) and other scholars have made significant contributions to the literature on the causes of war, but these efforts have focused primarily on civil war and conventional war (CW) between states. A critique of Fearon’s (1995) work is that it does not explain why states may be able to reach a settlement in one context but not in another. As a result, this dissertation seeks to answer this question: Why do states fail to reach a war-avoiding bargain in one case but not another? Sub-conventional warfare (SCW) can answer this question. Due to the relative costs of war, states turn to SCW to advance their interests. This dissertation seeks to explain the effects of SCW on the likelihood of CW. Using the bargaining model of war and Fearon’s (1995) “rationalist explanations for war” as a foundation, this dissertation proposes a theoretical framework for the effects that SCW has on the likelihood of CW. Tests of this theory, using case studies of enduring rivals, demonstrate that SCW can make CW both more and less likely.