Chapter ??? Commitment Problems and Shifting Power as a Cause of Conflict

Commitment Problems and Shifting Power as a Cause of Conflict Robert Powell Decades ahead of his time, Thomas Schelling emphasized that “most conflict situations are essentially bargaining situations” (Schelling 1960, 5). Building on this, formal work on the causes of war in political science since the mid-1990s has generally framed the problem in terms of an “inefficiency puzzle” akin to Hick’s paradox regarding strikes (Kennan 2008). Since fighting is costly, war is Pareto inefficient at least ex post. Why then does bargaining ever break down in an inefficient outcome (Fearon 1995)? Work on war and conflict has broadly emphasized two sources of inefficiency, informational problems and commitment problems. The former arise when (i) the bargainers have private information about, for example, their payoffs to prevailing or about their military capabilities and (ii) the bargainers have incentives to misrepresent their private information. Informational problems often confront states with a risk-return trade off. The more a state offers, the more likely the other state is to accept and the more likely the states are to avert war. But offering more also means having less if the other accepts. The optimal solution to this trade off frequently entails making an offer that carries some risk of rejection and war. The crucial issue in commitment problems is that in the anarchy of international politics or in weakly institutionalized states which lack an effective monopoly on the use of force, states or opposing political factions may be unable to commit themselves to following through on an agreement and may also have incentives to renege on it. If these incentives undermine the outcomes that are Pareto superior to fighting, the states or factions may find themselves