Spoiling Inside and Out

peace accords signed between 1988 and 1998, thirty-one failed to last more than three years.1 Contributing to their failure was the behavior of so-called spoilers: those who use violence or other means to undermine negotiations in the expectation that a settlement will threaten their power or interests.2 The stakes for understanding spoiler behavior are high. Where parties kept spoilers at bay, such as in Guatemala and South Africa, years of bloody conoict gave way to successful transitions to peace and democracy. Where spoilers proved triumphant, such as in Angola and Rwanda, the violence ensuing after a peace accord failed was more horriac than what had preceded it. Conventional explanations of conoict resolution assume that both negotiators and spoilers act primarily to achieve objectives vis-à-vis their external opponent. Politics internal to their national community are relevant only insofar as they increase or decrease audience costs, that is, the domestic price that political actors pay for their foreign policy decisions. This explanation, however, neglects the meaningful ways in which domestic politics are not only a constraint on actors’ conoict strategies but a motivator as well. Actors turn to negotiating or spoiling to contest both what a proposed settlement entails and who has the power to decide this and other matters on behalf of their community. For competing factions in a nonstate group, in particular, participation in or spoiling of negotiations offers an opportunity to advance their struggle for political dominance. This article develops a framework for understanding negotiating and spoiling as mechanisms of internal political contestation. It takes the notion of “nested games,” which George Tsebelis uses to explain Western European electoral politics,3 and applies it to the uniquely ouid context of nonstate groups. Spoiling Inside and Out