Rationalist Explanations for Two-Front War

Keisuke Nakao

Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, 2020, vol. 26, issue 4, 20

Abstract: By extending the extant costly-lottery models of dyadic war to three-party bargaining scenarios, we offer rationalist explanations for two-front war, where a state at the center is fought by two enemies at opposing peripheries. We found that even though private information exists only in one front, war can break out in both fronts. Because the war outcome in one front can affect the outcome in the other through the shift of military balance, a peripheral state may preventively join the war ongoing in the other front to leverage its power (e.g. Napoleonic Wars), or the central state may preemptively initiate war in one front to establish its preponderance in the other (e.g. World War I). These findings echo Waltz’s neorealism concern that a multi-polar system may not be so stable as the bipolar system that bargaining models of dyadic war commonly presume.

Keywords: costly-lottery models; rationalist explanations for war; three-party bargaining; two-front war (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D74 F51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/peps-2020-0018 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Working Paper: Rationalist Explanations for Two-Front War (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:pepspp:v:26:y:2020:i:4:p:20:n:5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/peps/html

DOI: 10.1515/peps-2020-0018

Access Statistics for this article

Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy is currently edited by Raul Caruso

More articles in Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().