Less Is More? Shifting Power and Third-Party Military Assistance

William Spaniel and Burcu Savun

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2024, vol. 68, issue 7-8, 1332-1357

Abstract: In contexts as diverse as civil war interventions, alliances, and military coalitions, states often militarily assist protégés to counteract unfavorable power shifts. Existing theoretical work finds that such assistance mitigates commitment problems and reduces the probability of war. We develop a model that captures this but also includes information asymmetries. In many cases, overcoming the commitment problem encourages the protégé to take greater risks in bargaining, thereby increasing the probability of war due to incomplete information. Using mechanism design, we show that in some cases, no feasible transfer can reduce the probability of war to zero. More broadly, our results indicate that encouraging policymakers to further expand military assistance can backfire despite empirical relationships that may appear otherwise.

Keywords: war; alliances; bargaining; mechanism design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220027231202797 (text/html)

Related works:
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:sae:jocore:v:68:y:2024:i:7-8:p:1332-1357

DOI: 10.1177/00220027231202797

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().