New working paper, Coalition Politics and War Termination, with some game-theoretic models, a case study of the end of WWI on the Western Front, and a null-result Cox model *in the lit review*.
scott-wolford.com/uploads/2/5/2/…
(1/x)
This one came directly from teaching #WWIinrealtime: after years of talking about military victory, why did the Allies grant Germany an armistice they knew would be fragile in 1918?
(2/x)
I wrote down a model where (a) coalition partners have to agree to grant an armistice if their opponent asks for one and (b) one partner will get a larger share of the postwar pie if the war continues than if the war ends today.
(3/x)
Most of the time, the rising partner can force a continuation of the war to realize its rising power and reap the associated gains, but when it's not rising *too* fast and when its stakes are lower than the declining partner, then the war ends in an "early" armistice.
(4.x)
Just like WWI in the West, where the Entente tolerates a fragile armistice rather than the "American peace" that would follow a war that continued into 1919 or 1920, as they'd been planning for.
(5/x)
The model explains how intra-coalition politics shapes the duration of war, both compared to other coalition wars and to bilateral wars.
Fun stuff, in my entirely biased opinion.
(6/6)
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