Tainting the Well or Priming the Pump? The Dynamics of Cooperation in Civil War
Abstract
Abstract: ÒTainting the Well or Priming the Pump? The Dynamics of Cooperation in Civil WarÓ Civil war is a dynamic process of repeated interactions between combatants. Existing civil war research, however, focuses primarily on violent interactions, paying less attention to cooperation between adversaries during war. Yet cooperation is common during conflict, even while violence simultaneously occurs, with examples as diverse as joint demining exercises during the Colombian conflict to trade in oil between ISIS and the regime in Syria. To understand how successful and unsuccessful cooperation between combatants affects conflict dynamics and civil war settlement, we propose a research project that examines how past cooperative interactions and their outcomes influence future cooperation, battle dynamics, and the prospects for sustainable peace. Our project develops a novel theory of cooperation during conflict that advances basic science. We theorize that combatants have private information not only about relative strength and resolve, but also about their trustworthiness. While battlefield events reveal information about strength and resolve, cooperative events reveal information about the adversaryÕs trustworthiness. Over time, this can shift expectations about the likelihood of reciprocation and the value of cooperation, building trust between enemies. As trust is built, the range of issues over which the disputants are willing to cooperate expands and fear of the opponent violating an agreement decreases, allowing cooperation to progress. In short, small successful acts of cooperation can build upon each other, leading to deeper cooperation, conflict settlement, and sustainable peace, while failed attempts discourage future cooperation and prolong violence. We propose to assess our hypotheses with two types of data and analyses. The first is original large-n observational data on all cooperative events in all civil conflicts between 1989 and 2018. We will collect these data using a combination of automated and human coding of news reports and will develop a novel measure of the cooperative history between adversaries. The second set of analyses will use original data on the statements of rebel and state leaders and spokespersons. We will gather these data using a newly developed quotation recognition algorithm that will allow us to extract both direct and indirect quotations from relevant sources. We will perform sentiment analysis on these data to more directly assess the trust-building mechanism in a smaller sample of conflicts. Our team includes researchers with expertise in civil conflict resolution, recurrence, conflict dynamics, leadership, and mediation, as well as automated and human data collection, text analysis, and quantitative statistical analysis. This project innovates in several ways. First, while the majority of conflict resolution research focuses on violence, we focus on cooperation, arguing that cooperation reveals important and unique information. Second, we acknowledge differences between cheap versus costly and successful versus unsuccessful cooperation. Existing research systematically ignores cheap and unsuccessful events, failing to account for the information these attempts reveal. Third, our study incorporates prior cooperation as a theoretically important component in a novel theory of cooperation during conflict, along with existing explanations such as battlefield dynamics, international involvement, and leader incentives. Finally, we connect the conflict dynamics and conflict resolution literatures in novel ways, directly considering how the terms of peace are endogenous to the cooperative processes that produced them and acknowledging the role of cooperation in affecting the information and commitment problems that obstruct resolution.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 09, 2020
- Source ID
- W911NF2010070
Entities
People
- Alyssa Prorok
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- United States Army
- University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign