The Equifinality of War Termination: Multiple Paths to Ending War

"The Equifinality of War Termination: Multiple Paths to Ending War"

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2009
Our theory contributes an alternative domestic politics pathway to traditional bargaining models of war termination. In bargaining models, the rational updating process that produces an overlapping bargaining space can develop a significant lag that extends the war beyond a logical ending point. We posit that a change in the domestic governing coalition is often necessary to kick-start this updating process once it has become bogged down through preference, information, and entrapment obstacles. We demonstrate that domestic coalition shifts are a critical path to peace, using survival analysis techniques on Bennett and Stam’s (1996) war-level dataset of wars (1862-1990) and a new belligerent-level dataset of wars (1945-2006). These tests show that because war policies can become institutionalized over time, there is a very strong link between coalition shifts and war termination.