DISSERTATION

TITLE
Mediation in the Shadow of Coercion: The Strategy of Great Power Intervention in International Conflicts

COMMITTEE
Kenneth Schultz, Stanford University (Chair)
Barry O'Neill, UCLA
Marc Trachtenberg, UCLA
Kristian Gleditsch, University of Essex

SUMMARY
A powerful country that intervenes in a violent crisis has a better chance than any other intermediary to negotiate a peace agreement. With its superior military strength, it can change the embattled parties' cost-benefit calculus by threatening punishments and promising rewards. But peace negotiations organized by major powers often fail because disputants find themselves uncertain about the third party's intentions, and they do not believe the intermediary will make good on its promises. What motivates major powers to intervene in conflicts? Why do some use military coercion in negotiating settlements, while others choose to mediate by helping the disputed sides communicate effectively? When can powerful countries succeed in efforts to end war? In my dissertation, I show how bias—a close alignment of preferences between a major power and one of the parties involved in an international dispute—affects the manner and the outcome of intervention bargaining. I find that biased major powers make effective third parties because they have a highly credible threat to use force against the less favored belligerent.  Such biased interveners nonetheless prefer to coerce under the guise of mediation because, in doing so, they can extract concessions in a less costly, private setting. These intervention efforts are more likely to succeed precisely because disputants expect coercion in the event that settlement talks fail. Please click on the link above to download a short version based on three chapters of my dissertation or click here for a more detailed dissertation summary and chapter outline.

METHODOLOGY
I use game theory, quantitative analyses and case studies. I recently collected a data set of U.S. involvement in post-World War II crises by merging parts of existing data sets and coding additional variables. In addition, I am in the process of assembling and coding a data set of major power mediation since 1918. Both data sets are designed to test how third-party bias affects the manner and the outcome of three-way crisis bargaining. Please e-mail me for more information or if you wish to obtain the data. As an IGCC fellow, I also took three 6-week trips to the Balkans and researched major power intervention in the following crises: (1) the Italo-Yugoslav dispute over the port city of Trieste, (2) the final Trieste settlement, and (3) the Serbo-Albanian conflict over the Kosovo province.


PAPERS

"Should Peacemakers Take Sides? Major Power Mediation, Coercion and Bias"
(Revise and Resubmit, AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW)
This paper focuses on powerful third parties whose interests in a conflict are closely aligned with a single disputant's interests. I show that such third-party bias reveals private information about an intervener's willingness to secure an agreement using force. When a highly biased power intervenes in a crisis, a peaceful settlement is likely because warring parties are certain the third party will enforce an agreement by military means. When an intervener shows less favoritism, negotiations tend to fail because the disputants doubt it is committed to use force. Peace is again more likely when the third party is unbiased because such a party behaves as a mediator, seeking agreements both adversaries find acceptable. These findings, coupled with evidence from U.S. and British interventions in the Balkans, suggest a possible explanation for why major power intervention can bring about such drastically different outcomes.

"Strategic Conflict Resolution: Major Power Involvement in International Crises, 1918-2003"
I use a data set of great power mediation since 1918 to test the conditions under which a major power successfully mediates an agreement in a crisis. I employ all the crisis-specific controls found in the mediation literature to be associated with mediation success and find that third-party bias remains a strong predictor of intervention success whether or not the controls are included in the analysis. These findings suggest that leaders of powerful states who weigh the pros and cons of a potential intervention can often predict, without even considering the details of individual conflicts, if their states are good candidates for such an intervention. For example, if a state's bias in a crisis is high enough to compel its leaders to use military coercion but not high enough to communicate military resolve, the state's leaders should be aware that their military will likely become embroiled in the conflict. Similarly, impartial states considering mediation should know that their leverage as mediators lies in their ability to promise positive inducements and provide security guarantees to both sides.

Bargaining in the Shadow of War: U.S. Intervention in International Crises, 1945-2003
I use a data set of U.S. involvement in 290 interstate crises since 1945 to determine whether a superpower's bias affects its choice to remain inactive in a crisis, mediate, or coerce one of the adversaries into an agreement. In addition, I test whether bias can influence the outcome of an intervention and disputants' satisfaction with such an outcome. The data indicate that successful mediation is most likely when the superpower significantly favors a single crisis actor and disfavors the other, or when it favors both disputants, but for different reasons. A mediator that favors both actors is motivated to find a solution both disputants find acceptable and "fair.''  However, when a powerful third party highly favors a single disputant and is biased against the other, the less favored belligerent is more likely to expect that the superpower is also resolved to employ military coercion should mediation fail. For this reason, the less favored party settles in order to avoid coercion (and not because it is satisfied with the terms of the settlement).

How to Communicate Resolve: States' Public Foreign Policy Positions and Credibility of Threats
This paper explains how states' bargaining preferences, as reflected in their public foreign policy positions, affect (1) their resolve to engage in military combat and (2) their ability to signal that they are willing to go to war. The crisis bargaining literature focuses on how states can best signal resolve but does not fully explore what resolve is. I propose, in the context of third-party intervention, that an intervener's convergence of bargaining preferences with one of the disputants determines how highly the intervener values a particular settlement in a conflict and reveals information about the third-party's willingness to secure an agreement using force. While threats are not always credible because unresolved third parties have an incentive to bluff, bias can alleviate credibility problems because it is a recognized feature of a state's foreign policy and, as such, difficult to misrepresent.