Mediation and Strategic Militarization

This paper challenges the received wisdom that mediation is a weak institution. Much of this perspective is supported by variations of three arguments. First, mediators often do not have access to privileged information, beyond what is relayed to them by disputants. Second, mediators recommendations need to be self-enforcing as they are not backed by appropriate enforcement institutions. Third, a mediator’s mandate is usually set within an already ongoing dispute, and does not include the long-term objective of preventing militarization. The first point has been taken to suggest that anything a disputant is willing to share with the mediator she would also be willing to share with an adversary. The second point limits the role of mediation to information sharing which is undermined by the first incentive, and the third raises the possibility that even if a mediator could improve on things in the shortrun, a time consistency problem would cause mediation to induce perverse incentives for militarization. We show that these concerns are misplaced in settings where the states posses private information about their own capacity to fight. We find that mediation turns out to be just as effective as a hypothetical optimal institution with strong enforcement power and the ability to internalizes the long-term consequences of its behavior on subsequent militarization decisions. Comparing mediation with the best possible unmediated peace talks we find that when militarization costs are relatively low, mediation strictly improves the equilibrium chances of peace. ∗Princeton University, Department of Politics. †Columbia University, Departments of Political Science and Economics. ‡Princeton University, Department of Politics. §Warwick University, Department of Economics.