Margaret Peters 0:00

Eric, thank you all. We're going to go ahead and get started. So today we have with us Eric Min from our very own political science department. Eric min is an Assistant Professor of Political Science here at UCLA. Before coming to UCLA, he got his graduate degree at Stanford University. He works on all sorts of very interesting issues, a large project he is now finished that he's presenting here today is his work on negotiation during war. He is also a distinguished Teacher, teacher here at UCLA, won that this year. So very happy for him. So let you take it away. Sure. Great.

Eric Min 0:39

Thank you very much, Maggie. Thank you to everyone being here in person as well as online, and to the Burkle Center for having me. I really appreciate it. Let me just take a second to get the screen shared so get things going, see if it works. Okay, great. All right, so I'm really happy to be able to present to you, As Maggie mentioned, this recently finished a published book called Words of war, negotiation as a tool of conflict. I want to start this presentation kind of the way I start the book by comparing two different stories of diplomacy in two different wars. The first conflict that I want to talk about is the Russo Japanese war of 1904 to 1905 a big struggle between these two empires at the turn of the 20th century. One of the defining features about the Russo Japanese war is the way in which it ended with a relatively swift diplomatic settlement. Here we have pictures of the Russian and Japanese representatives meeting in Portsmouth under the mediation of President Teddy Roosevelt. And what's notable is that the first time, and really the only time they spoke was 95% of the way into the overall war's duration. Those talks remained kind of active for the remaining 5% of the war, and ultimately they wrapped up pretty swiftly a settlement that codified the fact that Japan had pretty much trounced Russia on the battlefield in that war. If we fast forward seven or eight decades or so, we find ourselves in the Falklands War of 1982 here we have a lot of diplomatic potential take place throughout the entire war. One example of that is Secretary of State, Alex Hague, meeting Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She didn't look very happy to see him, and that's, I think, intentional. She doesn't want to talk, but talk she does. In fact, the first negotiations of the war happened 5% of the way into the conflicts overall duration, and about half of the war is spent having some active communication between the belligerent states of the UK and Argentina. Ultimately, though most of the negotiations that take place during this war completely failed to bring any semblance of peace, and it's when British troops end up landing in the Falkland Islands and retaking it by force that the Argentinians have to sign an instrument of surrender. Now there are obviously a lot of different reasons these wars differ, but one of the questions that sort of motivated this project is trying to understand whether these different stories of diplomacy in these wars are just coincidences, or whether there's something deeper underneath all of it. So that leads to the book's motivating question of, what is the role of negotiations in the midst of war? And I think this is an important question, because if you look back at the last two centuries of interstate war, you see that about two thirds of those wars have ended through some form of negotiated settlements. Diplomacy obviously has to matter in thinking about how wars ultimately often come to an end, despite that fact, if you look at the academic literature, we don't actually have a very strong understanding of how exactly diplomacy works during war or why we would actually do it. Bargaining models, which are game theoretic models, arguably, are a forefront of this literature in political science, and if you look at many of these models, they don't really think very much about diplomacy. And to the extent they actually consider negotiations, they include them as this sort of costless, mechanical and earnest instrument that basically lets the belligerents drift slowly, closer and closer to some sort of mutually acceptable agreement that all sounds nice and feels intuitive, but it actually butts up really badly against the historical record, where we see that the history of diplomacy during war is much more complicated and much more sort of non linear than many of these models of war would suggest. And I'd say that that's a pretty significant shortcoming in our understanding of how to bring wars to an end. So with that in mind, my book attempts to develop a theory about wartime negotiation, how, why and what happens, and what the consequences of it are. And ultimately, there's a lot of things I try to argue in the book, but one takeaway point that I really hope to impress is that negotiations have to be understood as not only a tool that helps to settle wars, but also as an instrument that's sometimes used to manage fight and potentially win these wars as well. So to make this argument, I first want to delineate two ideal types of negotiation. On one side of the spectrum, we have what I might call sincere negotiation, which referred to good faith attempts to try to find some sort of potential agreement. Now this is a designation about intentions, other than out. Just because you don't get an agreement doesn't mean that it wasn't sincere. But the whole point, especially in the wartime context of sincere negotiations, that actors come to the table because they actually want to try to avoid additional conflict. Most negotiation literature, I would argue, implicitly, sort of adopts this idea that negotiation is a sincere activity, where everyone comes with the hopes of making something work out. But in the book, I really want to impress that there's another part of this spectrum, an opposite side, that often isn't really appreciated as much, which is what I call insincere negotiation. Insincere negotiation refers to bad faith attempts where actors may try to exploit negotiations for what some negotiation scholars, especially decades ago, called side effects. Side effects, according to these scholars, are consequences of negotiation that are unrelated to whether a deal is actually made in the context of war, there are two particular side effects that might be useful for belligerents when they decide to negotiate insincerely, and both of them are sort of tied together by this idea that belligerents don't want to avoid more war by negotiating, but they instead want to change or reshape The trajectory of the war in their own favor. Two common ways in which this actually plays out in practice. One involves a political angle. Sometimes belligerents will try to go into negotiations, have them fail, and use that as an instrument to deflect political brush pressure and to try to blame the other side for being the recalcitrant party. Try to get more people on their side. But there's also a militaristic angle as well. Many of these states will use negotiations as a moment of breathing room to try to stall for time on the battlefield, to give themselves an opportunity to regroup, remobilize and rearm themselves, so that they can hopefully fight more effectively once these negotiations fall apart. So I want to highlight that these two different kinds of negotiation exist, that this latter type is often under appreciated by negotiation scholars. And the puzzle that we want to try to explain in the book is how, when and why each type of negotiation is actually used in the midst of war. To build up this argument, I first want to talk a little bit about the general logic behind why you might choose to negotiate or not in conflict, given that most of the time, belligerents don't talk to each other in war, it might be easier to first think about why belligerents are so reticent to communicate with each other in active conflict. There's a couple key reasons that might be true. One is sort of this larger structural issue where the two sides may think there's really no point to negotiating a deal, because I simply cannot believe that the other side would actually abide by the terms of an agreement. And in political science parlance, we'd call that the existence of a major, credible commitment problem. But there's one other factor that often isn't thought of as much that can explain why factors don't like talking to each other during the conflict, which is that if you offer to communicate with the enemy, many times, leaders seem to think that this signals weakness and flagging resolve to the other side, and that this can be dangerous because it might embolden the enemy to fight harder on the battlefield, thinking that you're sort of ready to give up, and that you could deflate support for war on the home front. In a relatively recent book by Orion of scarlet master, she calls this concern the risk of adverse influence, that if I'm willing to talk and I make it too obvious, others are going to start trying to take advantage of me. And historically, there are many anecdotes of leaders often being very worried about offering to negotiate for exactly that reason, and this helps to explain why, often actors don't talk to each other when they're fighting, but we do know that they do eventually come to the bargaining table. So in thinking about reasons to negotiate, we come back to sincere and insincere forms of diplomacy. Because one reason, one obvious reason why states may choose to come back to the bargaining table in war is that they simply don't think it's worth fighting anymore. They're suffering. They're losing. It's only going to get worse, so we might as well try to settle our differences and write an agreement down. But I want to again impress this idea that that's not the only reason you might choose to negotiate. An actor may try to reshape the war in their favor by engaging in insincere negotiations, trying to redirect political pressure, trying to re arm and re mobilize for further conflict. So ultimately, in my theory chapter, I argue that there are two key factors that help to explain both when negotiations are more likely to occur in war, as well as what kind of negotiation is more likely to take place. The first factor I focus on is not new. It's certainly something people have recognized in international relations literature, which is the existence of clear information that is trickling in from the battlefield. A classic IR way of understanding war is that. War is an honest and costly way to reveal real information about one another's capabilities and resolve so if the battlefield starts trending very heavily and consistently in one side's paper, then it should make it more clear to both sides that they should have a common understanding of where the war is headed, and make at least one side more likely to think I need to stop fighting, because this isn't a war thing. So the more Battlefield information we're getting that's clearly directed in one side's favor, the more likely it is that negotiations that take place in those moments would be sincere efforts to stop the war. So that's the first factor. The second factor relates to something that I call latent external pressures for peace, which are these sorts of pressures that can be activated by the international community to try to get actors to talk to each other. These could be international institutions that have sort of a peace lobby, international organizations, international laws, international norms, etc. If we live in a world where latent external pressures for peace are very low or sort of non existent, then I argue that the costs to initiating negotiations are high for the reasons that I stated on the previous slide about your fear of looking weak and potentially signaling a lack of resolve in that situation. Talks won't happen all that frequently because they're seen as a very costly, but if they do happen, it's a pretty good signal that at least one side genuinely wants to stop fighting. So in those cases, we would expect talks to occur and to be more sincere. This is a visualization of this part of the argument, where on the x axis we have battlefield information. And basically I'm arguing that as we get more Battlefield information, the likelihood of negotiations increases, and the likelihood of those talks being sincere is always pretty good, but gets higher and higher as we go rightward on that figure. In contrast, if we live in a world that has really high latent external pressures for peace, where third parties constantly are sort of twisting the arms of belligerents to talk to each other, then the cost to negotiating become really low. And in fact, the belligerents may feel cost to avoiding diplomacy. In those cases, those actors will talk, sort of regardless of what's going on in the battlefield, because it's not a reaction to the battlefield. It's just a reaction to third party pressure. And this is interesting, because it opens up the floodgates to allow belligerents to use negotiations for side effects that they think might help them in the war, rather than bring the war to an end, which means that they'll be more insincere talks. So in contrast, if we're in a world with high external pressures, we should basically have negotiations happen very frequently and sort of all the time, but there should still be some loose connection between the amount of information on the battlefield and whether those talks are likely to be sincere. So these two figures together, I think, visually encapsulate the broad strokes of my argument, and the rest of the book is focused on attempting to substantiate the implications of these two figures. Now, as I'll note near the end of this talk, I do this in a variety of different methods, but arguably, one of the main empirical contributions of this book is assessing these arguments using two new data sets that I've created that catalog over 1700 battles and 189 periods of negotiations across 92 interstate wars between 1823, and 2003 I'm happy to talk more about these data. People are interested later, but I just want to give you just the the broadest of strokes that we need in order to move forward for the purposes of the talk. For now, when it comes to the battle data, there's a bunch of encyclopedias, dictionaries of battles, that try to catalog these clashes. I collected all of them and coded them for whether or not those battles were won by the initiator of the war or the target of the war, and I score them positive or negative. This table basically shows that there's a roughly 50/50, split in battles won by initiators versus targets. A bigger challenge in terms of collecting data, was data on negotiation, where I went through several 100 sources, just piece together what were days on which formal representatives of belligerent states exchanged offers with one another. There were ultimately 189 uninterrupted periods of these talks. But another way of seeing it is to say that there's about 17% of the time that belligerents were fighting, they were also talking to each other at the daily level. This is the kind of data that I was able to extract through a lot of data collection for quite a long period of time. So with that in mind, we can get closer to trying to understand the relationship between latex Storm, FIRST, for peace, Battlefield information and negotiations. In order to measure latent external pressures for peace, I go through several strategies in the book, but one of the main things I've tried, and I think one of the bluntest ways I attempt to capture this idea, is to leverage the existence. Of the post 1945 international environment. And I'm not alone in making this argument. Many international relations scholars have pointed out that the post world war two environment was unique in the advent of multiple international institutions, organizations, laws and arts, etc, that pushed for peace and were against conflict, and that we're just sort of in a systemically different environment following the end of World War Two. Now it's worth noting, I'm taking that 1945 line from existing scholars, but also, if you look at my negotiation data and just sort of hands off, ask the data, when is the moment that negotiations start becoming more frequent in wars? Those tests independently also point out 1945 as sort of a turning point, just to kind of impress this point. If you look at pre 1945 wars, the rate of negotiations about 11% and then after 1945 that rate goes up quite a bit to 28% something is changing here, and we'll dig a little bit more into that change in just a couple minutes. Moving on to Battlefield information. To create this measure, I turn back to the battle data that I described on the last slide, and I create a measure called recent imbalance, which basically looks at what were the outcomes of war over the last 60 days, and to what extent did those recent battles trend in either belligerents favor. An example of this measure here is from the Korean War, and I won't go into too much detail, but for those of you who know something about the Korean War, you know that it's in the first nine months or so of the conflict that there's a lot more movement up and down the peninsula, and that's being reflected in this plot, and we have similar data for 91 other interstate wars. So with these data together, we can start doing the analysis. And just for those of you who might be technically interested, the way that I do this is adopting something called a multi state model in order to understand the relationship between external pressures, battle information and negotiation behavior. Briefly speaking, what the multi state model does is it basically is going to break wars down at the daily level and say that on any given day, we can be in one of three different states of the world. We could be not negotiating, we could be negotiating, or eventually the war could come to an end. And then on the diagram, you see all these arrows that point out the particular transitions that might occur within this system. What the multi state model allows us to do is to try to understand what factors help to explain each one of these different transitions, either in and out of negotiations or through a military victory, defeat. I forgot this is a touch screen, sorry, or from negotiation to termination, which would be a negotiated settlement. So one of the real strengths of the multi state model is that you might have any variable that you want to know, like what effects does it have on negotiations or war, and the multi state model allows that variable to have different effects depending on which transition you're looking at. So it doesn't make us kind of assume that a single variable has to have the same effect across the entire war. For those of you who do quantitative studies of conflict, we've thought more about this later. I add a lot of control variables that are quite classic to this literature, but we don't have to talk about that. Now, with all that set aside, I want to talk briefly about the top line results, and I'm going to show some visualizations of coefficient plots. But honestly, I will just ask that you believe my verbal summaries of the coefficient plots, and we'll just move forward, probably an easier way to go. So the first thing I did is I applied my multi state model to pre 1945 wars, which I argue are an environment with relatively low latent external pressures for peace. And again, here's the coefficient plots, but let me describe the two takeaway findings from this analysis. The first one is that when there's more information coming out of the battlefield, in terms of recent imbalances on the battlefield, we have an increased likelihood of negotiations starting. In addition, that same increase in battle information is also tightly related to negotiations successfully ending wars. It increases the likelihood of a negotiated or diplomatic settlement. So that's what we see in a world with low external pressures for peace. Now, if we run this same model on post 1945 wars, where I argue there's a much higher systemic level of external pressures for peace, things look a little bit different. The key difference here is that Battlefield information no longer has a really meaningful connection with whether or not negotiations take place during conflict. Negotiations just kind of happen willy nilly all over the time, regardless of what's happening on the battlefield. However, if negotiations do take place, and there's a lot of Battlefield information that trends in one side's favor, we still see that those negotiations are more likely to successfully end the war. If we take a couple steps back, essentially, these results align with what the. Diagrams illustrate in terms of encapsulating the theory, and these results are also quite statistically stable in terms of being robust. Now, one thing I don't want to dig into too much, but it is important for the service of the overall argument is elsewhere in the book, I show that periods of active negotiations are also related to lower levels of contemporaneous fighting on the battlefield. So when belligerents are talking, they don't fight as intentionally as they usually do. And this is really important, because part of the story here is that negotiations might be useful as a moment of breathing room in order to rearm and regroup and to fight later more effectively. So with that in mind, I want to show one last set of results that sort of speak to in sincere negotiations and what effect they might actually have on future fighting. So the question here might be, if a negotiation doesn't end a war, what happens in the conflict after that failed negotiation? To analyze this, I use a bunch of regressions where basically compare what battlefield activity looks like in the moments before negotiation, and compare it to what the battlefield looks like immediately after those failed negotiations. And once again, I can show coefficient plots, but it's easier to sort of relay the main findings in words. And there's two main findings here that are tightly related. The first finding is that when talks fail to end the war, we see systematic evidence that subsequent fighting on the battlefield tends to favor the war target. So oftentimes, before the war initiator does better. After these talks fail, war targets seem to regain some of the initiative. And I interpret this pattern as sort of a testament to the fact that war targets use negotiations to often mitigate some of the war initiators, first mover advantage, their initial strategic advantages in striking first the second finding, which is tightly related, is that failed talks are also followed by subsequent fighting that is more consistent with what we might expect to happen on the battlefield. So if you looked at the two sides pre war military capabilities and belief that that relationship should roughly kind of predict what the battles should look like, or what the war should look like. That equilibrium really seems to set in after talks that failed to end a war. And these results are also quite statistically robust as well and show that there's a tight relationship between failed talks and shifts that occur on the battlefield. So as I mentioned, this quantitative analysis is a key part of the contribution of the book on the empirical level. But I do want to just kind of briefly highlight that it's part of a larger constellation of approaches that I take to substantiate the argument. So chapters three and four have a lot of the statistical stuff I just explained, but they also have in depth case studies of several conflicts across space and time. Chapter Five is a really in depth study of the first Arab Israeli war, and ultimately makes the point that insincere negotiations didn't only matter, but might have been instrumental to Israel's ability to survive as a state in its early months of existence. And then chapter six is about the Korean War. And this chapter, I think, is really interesting in that it combines both qualitative analysis of the Korean War, but also includes some statistical analysis, where I gather daily operation reports from the military, as well as full negotiation transcripts across the entire war and I use supervised machine learning methods and text analysis methods to create fine grained data that substantiate my theory on a much more granular level than what I'm able to do with quantitative analysis in the preceding chapters. So with that, let me just briefly wrap up by saying that again, one of the main points I hope to impress upon readers of the book is that negotiations don't only reflect the battlefield, but can also be used to reshape them in some way. And I think this is an important corrective to a lot of existing literature that doesn't really pay much attention to diplomacy in war, because it sort of treats it as being cheap talk, or sort of just this side process. It's a central process to understanding conflict. One of my hopes is that the data that I collected, that I briefly shared with you won't only be useful in helping to support my theory, but also to other scholars of war who might be interested in doing more intra war analysis, which isn't as common to this day, but hopefully this can change that, and then, as I'm sure we might talk about in the Q&A session and with Maggie, the findings of my book are complicated in terms of what it means for policy with respect to diplomacy, and especially third party diplomatic intervention in conflicts. It doesn't give any simple answers, but one of the things that it does impress is that sometimes policymakers sort of have this notion that it can't hurt to try to negotiate, because the worst case scenarios is that these deals don't work out, and the warts continues as it was before. My theory and evidence sort of suggests that that might be a naive way of understanding diplomacy, and that sort of naively deployed diplomacy might not only lead to no peace, but could actually exacerbate conflict in some way, and that we need to be careful about those possibilities and how people might intervene in these active conflicts. So with that, I'll wrap things up. Thank you very much for your attention thus far. I look forward to our discussion.

Margaret Peters 25:15

All right, I'm gonna start out and ask Eric a couple questions. Alexandra, can you help me with the chat? Okay? And for those of you online, please feel free to put questions into the question section, and then then we'll open it up. So here's my first question for you. Imagine I'm the British Foreign Secretary, and the Pakistanis call me up today and are like, we want to negotiate with the Indians. How do I know that they're sincere versus they're just worried about getting their butts kicked and want time to prepare?

Eric Min 25:57

Yeah, so I would say that in the context of this theory, it's more likely than not that in this sort of position, that sort of diplomatic activity has a higher likelihood of being insincere than sincere, because a lot of the arguments suggest that sincerity is mainly born from, like an actual sort of common understanding that the war should come to an end, and we sort of have an idea of how that war should come to an end. But if we're at this initial stage where, obviously, there's been a lot of terrible violence, but we haven't gotten to the war stage yet, I don't think there's that common understanding to that exist, that would be a useful, actual starting point for meaningful negotiations, and that, you know, maybe something's there, but it's more likely than not that it's more for kind of either posturing or kind of getting on people's good sides, showing that I'm the more sort of peace affirming party, and hoping that people get good vibes for me from that more so than actually ending the conflict.

Margaret Peters 26:53

Great, All right, so sitting with that example, or thinking about Russia, Ukraine, should the international community be so invested in trying to do negotiations, or even though it feels really painful because innocent civilians die on each side, is it better to let the war play out?

Eric Min 27:17

Yeah, so this is one of those complicated things that I was touching on the last bullet points, and I spend a lot of time talking about in the conclusion of the book, where it's really not like there's sort of this reductive view sometimes in policy debates that either we should just let them completely fight it out, sort of Edward Lovelace, like give where war a chance, or that we just need to continue to sort of, you know, push because it can't hurt to negotiate. I don't think either one is necessarily true, but in the context of Russia, Ukraine, I think that the current sort of efforts to just sort of push for diplomacy and just kind of throw a lot of proposals at them, and especially the Trump administration doing, like, multiple ultimatums, just saying, like, take this or else we'll walk away, are not particularly productive, and that if third party actors actually want to have some meaningful effect on negotiations, having more likelihood of succeeding, there has to be more than just these diplomatic sort of presses. You have to kind of expand things out more to what these third parties offer in terms of military aid or potential security guarantees, some of these more costly sort of things that have to be considered and done in order to reshape the actual incentives of the actors to to settle but just like continuing to bang on their door and tell them like you need to keep talking. Or here's an idea what you think of it without doing some of those more serious things that reshape fundamental incentives like those probably aren't going to work, and might be more just for posturing of the third parties like again, them saying they're doing something rather than meaningfully having a chance at succeeding at striking pace.

Margaret Peters 28:51

Great. So if you imagine you were on President Harris's in the in the alternate timeline, negotiating team, what, what do you think or what do you think you would do in Russia, Ukraine? How would you approach this situation?

Eric Min 29:06

Yeah, so I think there's no need to completely give up on diplomatic efforts, but one of the changes that I would make is, instead of continuing to just like, push all these different proposals, sometimes that they're kind of detached from the reality of the war as well. It's really just about making proposals. I would always say that we are sort of standing ready to be ready to help, kind of facilitate communication and kind of leaving that window open, rather than forcing them sort of through, through the through the door diplomacy. And then, as I sort of mentioned, if I was on the Harris team, it would be about like, what are the other sort of policy, policies that we could enact in order to either make Russia feel like more secure that you know, they're not in some sort of Jeopardy with NATO or whatever, and also make Ukraine feel secure that them making a deal actually means something, and that it would be upheld, and that third party. Would help to enforce it, rather than not. Or about, like, what additional pain could we press on Russia to make them feel that the prosecution of this war is incredibly costly? Because, sure, it's costly, but like, could we make it hurt even more again, to change the fundamental incentives to seriously think about settlement so it's about, like, all these other things you do on top of negotiations and not just this kind of continuous insistence on on talking without considering more of those other policies.

Margaret Peters 30:30

Great. All right, let me open it up to the room.

Audience Member 1 30:36

Oh yeah, I wanted to right. This is a great talk, and definitely Putin came to mind when you were talking about the insincere angle. But, you know, I wanted to follow up on that question of third party mediation, because a lot of your external factors focused on the more systemic, structural and so when you were doing the in depth case studies Arab, Israeli or Korea, you know, did you tease out best practices for the third party mediators. You mentioned some, you know, in terms of testing one on the battlefield using other levers. But is that part of your theory? Because I didn't see it as much. You know, what role do mediators play in in diplomacy? And, you know, here we could go back to the Russia, Ukraine, you know, Saudi Arabia, kind of injecting itself this platform. One could argue, maybe not so sincere. They're looking for spillover of what you call, you know, side effect benefits or so forth. So are there anything you know, any part that focuses on that mediation? And then the second question, what about non state actors, which are so part, a big part of our world today, only interstate. But do you believe your theory would apply?

Eric Min 31:41

Sure, No, thank you for those questions. So with respect to what I learned about mediators best practices there, I'll admit that's not the core of the theory, right? And a lot of the empirical leverage is from sort of this, like systemic change. That said, when I did look more at sort of the qualitative case studies, and also leaning upon some pre existing mediation literature as well. There are some best practices that I think come to mind. One of them, as I was hinting at or alluding to, is that mediators who sort of stand like ready to help facilitate negotiations, rather than just sort of bringing a bunch of proposals to the table often, are a little bit more helpful. One thing that I didn't know in several cases, including like the Turko simply award in 1974 is that sometimes mediators would not really communicate. In that case, the US and UK were the particular circumstance that had the strongest drive. There's a lot of evidence they didn't communicate with each other, right? They had different goals. They just kind of one of them went through this Geneva conference framework. Kissinger just talked to the the belligerents himself, and then Foreign Minister Callahan UK was incensed when he found out that Kissinger was just doing things on his own right, so there was no coordination. It was just the individual actors just trying to solve things on their own. And there are multiple examples where there could be mediators that might do something more productive, but when they're not on the same page, and either might be kind of cross pressures or make it easy for the belligerents to sort of bounce one another off each other, that's not good. The other thing that's notable, and this is true in multiple cases, including ISRAEL PALESTINE recently is that mediators need to create proposals that are reactive to what is actually going on in the battlefield or is being learned from fighting. One of the notable things about you know, the recently failed ceasefire with ISRAEL PALESTINE is that that plan, which kind of came into being in early January, was pretty much largely the same plan that the US, Qatar in Egypt had floated since last May. Like things kept changing in the war, and they just kept bringing the same proposal over and over and over, right? There was no reaction to the battlefield. And unsurprisingly, those sorts of proposals tend not to work out right in in the end. So I think there are a lot of those sorts of pieces of advice that come from looking at the qualitative studies about the judicious application, sort of coordination, of mediators to kind of get the job job done with respect to non state actors. I speak about this a little bit in the conclusion of the book, where obviously my initial motivation was interstate war. That's what brought me into this. But in many ways, I actually think that a lot of the findings and ideas of my argument apply almost more so to civil conflicts. And I mean that in two different ways. One is that civil conflicts, relative to interstate wars, have a much more sort of asymmetric power dynamic right between the belligerents, because usually a host, like a government and rebel groups. In that case, I think insincere negotiations might be an even more sort of compelling or necessary tool for non state actors in order to have some sort of fighting chance. And in fact, I would actually argue Civil War literacy. Literature was several steps ahead of interstate war literature and acknowledging that diplomacy is a strategic act, because we have a lot of research about how non state actors love the opportunity to negotiate with the government, because it makes them look legitimate. It gives them sort of this like shame that you know, state parties might not sort of feel in the same way. So I think non state actors often have much more of a draw to, like, want to do this. Actually, I mix my two reasons together, yeah, so highly asymmetric. So more sort of reasons to do that. And also, yeah, more of the incentives of non state actors. Oh, and a third one, I guess, is, you know, I make a lot of hey, of external pressures for peace being a thing, and that certainly is true in interstate wars. I think it's even more true in civil conflicts, that if major powers sort of press upon governments and rebel groups to talk that that pressure to negotiate is even more powerful than what international actors might be able to do in an interstate conflict. So I think there's many different reasons why a lot of the dynamics of talking about would actually happen more easily in civil conflicts. And in the book, I give multiple examples, like on the Syrian civil war, especially where insincere negotiations happen all the time for both sides.

Margaret Peters 36:19

Alright, I see a hand.

Audience Member 2 36:21

So great book. Delighted to see that it's out. Thank you. So I have two questions. One has to do with this issue of sincerity and insincerity. So assessing it, when you get negotiations, you get two parties, and you have got the possibility that both are sincere, both are insincere, and one is sincere, one is not. So in two of those combinations, you're not going to get the successful negotiated outcome. How do we know whether it was one party that was insincere or both parties, for instance, here, so that's one question. Second question is about the role of negotiations and their strategic utility, and whether there's an issue of the strategic utility for domestic political reasons. It's not just an issue whether there's external pressure, but you've got to mobilize a domestic society. You've got to sustain a war effort and and sometimes sort of entering negotiations, which you know, which you can help scuttle the terms you impose, nevertheless, it gives you more breathing space now with the international community, with your domestic society,

Eric Min 37:46

right? Sure, yes. So thank you for the questions. Also, thank you for your support with the book over the years. So partially exists thanks to you. With respect to the first question about how we deduce whether an actor is being sincere or not. That is a big challenge of the book, because theoretically it makes a lot of sense, at least in my mind. But this is about intentions, right? And I'm only able to really observe the the outcomes of the negotiation. So in the quantitative analysis in the book, I sort of make these assumptions that if a war comes to an end, that those negotiations must have been sincere. If it didn't come to an end, it could have been sincere, but it is also more likely that it's insincere. And I sort of kind of take those assumptions and run with them, but you know, a lot more of the qualitative analysis, that's where I have, I think, a lot more purchase on being able to actually understand what the intentions of the actors are, because we're able to look at primary source documents or memoirs that they write after the fact, where they talk about the logic behind why they chose to communicate. And in many of those places, they're actually quite transparent, not to one another, but transparent to each other, to themselves, that like, yeah, we have no intention of actually making an agreement here, and in the Korean War case especially, have lots of examples where both the US and North Korea China are clearly coming into talks just to sort of, you know, propagandize and to say that they're talking, but clearly amongst themselves, they're saying that we have no intention of settling. So I think the intentions part really comes out of looking at like, what these people are thinking and saying qualitatively and in the quantitative analysis, just making some assumptions that I think are reasonable about, like, what are the sorts of outcomes where we might expect at least one after to be insincere and just sort of play out The way that I would expect based on those assumptions, but it's much with the qualitative evidence that I think speaks to the intentions with respect to the utility of negotiations for domestic reasons. That's absolutely true as well. It might not be built into my theory quite as much. But again. Qualitatively, there are many examples where this was the case. So for example, in the war the Roman Republic, which is one of my cases in my book, which no one's ever heard of, but it's a really interesting case from the 1840s France under Louis Napoleon the Third decides to enter negotiations with the new Roman republic, not because they have any intention of settling. In fact, they use that time to take the military to higher ground to lay siege on them as soon as the negotiations come to an end, but because Napoleon, third is coming up on legislative elections, and is really worried about recent news and how the war hasn't gone very well for France. So he just uses negotiations as a way to, sort of, you know, relieve some of that pressure and get people to not, you know, think so much about his foreign policy failure there, while getting ready to fight more ferociously and ultimately destroying the Roman Republic once those negotiations come to an end. And then many of these cases, including the Korean War, Vietnam War, set up a valley war. There are multiple examples where these leaders are not only choosing to negotiate because they think outside parties want them to, but because, yeah, there is some domestic constituency, whether it's sort of the more dovish people that want them to stop fighting, or trying to kind of increase support for the war by laying blame on the other side for not being willing to end the war. That does happen. And in fact, I would argue that the recent collapse of the ceasefire with ISRAEL PALESTINE, that part of that was also sort of domestically driven on Israel's part, at least, where some of the more right wing members kind of wanted those talks to fall apart and kind of put new conditions on the deal in order to make it collapse. And that was very much a domestic, domestically motivated logic. So that's very much there, even though that might not be an explicit part of what my theory is trying to test.

Alexandra Lieben 42:02

And you said, off of failed negotiation, the target does better on the battlefield for how long?

Eric Min 42:12

Yes, so it's more. It depends. So like I use several different sort of temporal windows for what I'm doing, and whether it's like 3060, 90, 120 days, oftentimes that advantage remains. It doesn't remain as strong over the entire time, but systemically, something does change in terms of the dynamics on on the battlefield. So it's not that that turnaround eventually gets completely neutralized. It does get kind of chipped away, but it does last, oftentimes, throughout the remainder of the conflict, that something has fundamentally shifted. And even though we might get a little bit closer parity, statistically in terms of average effects, we do see that there's sort of this, like durable change of following these failed negotiations.

Alexandra Lieben 43:04

What do you attribute that to?

Eric Min 43:07

Yeah, so a main thing that I would attribute that to, there's a lot of factors, but one of the main ones speaks to what I discussed with, sort of the war initiators, first mover advantage, strategically striking first, has a lot of benefits, both strategically and like you're just ready to go, you've sort of, you know, militarized yourself. I argue in the book that for many war targets, even if you kind of know a war is coming, and you might not know either, right? Sometimes you don't know for sure that there's a gap between your kind of latent military capabilities, like what you could do if you had the time, and what you actually have on the battlefield ready to go at the initiation of a conflict. So what I would argue happens oftentimes with these insincere negotiations, especially for war targets, is that they get relatively large benefits from having that time to sort of mobilize more of their forces in order to fight closer to what they really think they can do, which is certainly the case like at the first Arab Israeli war, where Jews were flowing into Israel as these ceasefires, the ceasefires were taking place, and kind of arming themselves up more effectively in that way. And there's other things going on, but I would say that's the main dynamic that I'm capturing here

Margaret Peters 44:21

In the back.

Audience Member 3 44:23

So if you identified 1945 as it's like separating line where, if my, if I understood correctly, post 1945 you have higher latent external forces pushing for these negotiations to happen. Yes, I wonder, if you check if you took in your research or in your book, do you go into more granularity within each of those spheres, and why I've mentioned that what I had in mind, I was thinking in the pre 1945 still in the colonial era, what would it be like if you're in a regional conflict and your suzerain says we're not doing this anymore? Okay, and that's obviously, like, to me, that would be even more meaningful than in today's era. Sure. So is that something that you looked into, or was that a challenge beyond the data set?

Eric Min 45:14

I mean, it is a challenge, but I did try to look into it in the book. So yeah, like I, as I mentioned in the presentation, the pre post 1945 effect, I think, is a big one. So it gives me a lot of leverage, but it also extremely fluent. So one thing I do try doing as sort of an alternative measure is whether or not the belligerence in the conflict whether at least one of them was a major power or not. And the logic there is that if a war features no major powers, only minor powers that they should be much more likely to be pushed around compared to major powers. Now, those major powers, like they're not immune to these pressures, but that they're a little bit more able to kind of withstand international pressure, to negotiate, and when I use that as a measure of, you know susceptibility to pressure, actually find that that's really meaningful, that when you have wars where the belligerents are all minor powers, they are way more frequently pushed into talks that they did not originally propose or orchestrate, and that many more of those talks are more likely to fail, right? So that is the kind of more granular approach I took. And that's true both pre 1945 post 1945 but especially post 45 you see those effects being quite strong. Because it's not only that there's susceptibility to pressure, there is just much more pressure post 45 which is what I was partially what I was arguing.

Margaret Peters 46:41

You know, one thing that made me think about is, you know, since we just went into the papal Conclave, if you think back to the Middle Ages, where occasionally the Pope would be like, Hey guys, you're going to negotiate, and then you don't actually see conflicts resolved after that. So it's not just that these institutions are totally new, but they are similar. All right, I have couple people, and we're kind of running out of time. So why don't we collect a couple questions? I'm going to start with one from online, and then I'll take We'll take her question and answer them both

Audience Member 4 47:10

Right online question, what is the role of elites and other actors who might undermine a head of state sincerity? How do these other actors factor into the assessment of sincerity. Great.

Audience Member 5 47:25

And I know you touched a bit on failed negotiations, so I want to ask, do fail negotiations typically result in prolonged conflict or shorten the conflict, or is it just case by case?

Eric Min 47:34

Okay, great. Let me see. So let's start with the role of elites who undermine sincerity. So it is certainly true that my argument sort of takes this, like state as a as a unit approach, where we're just talking about kind of a leader and what they want. I think it's certainly possible that if they're sort of domestic dissent inside a country, that that can have unintended consequences from the perspective of government in terms of how negotiations go. That being said, I also would suggest that sometimes elites, that sort of the pressure they put on leaders, might be part of the reason, excuse me, why sometimes these negotiations take place, which kind of goes back to our suggestion about domestic pressures to negotiate. So that would actually have been, initially, my sort of idea for how elites play a role in diplomacy, that they kind of create pressures on leaders to choose to talk. And maybe in those cases, you could be more likely that those negotiations might be insincere, right? If the leader didn't want to talk, and then elites want them to talk, they might just go through the motions of diplomacy, but have failed or vice versa. So I do think that there is a place that elites can play in shaping that sort of policy. There's a lot of really great work, including by Elizabeth Saunders, about how these foreign policy elites can affect what leaders do. So if you're interested in that, you should look into that the insiders game is our most recent book on that. And then with respect to this question of whether failed negotiations lead to prolonged conflict, the answer is kind of complicated, but you know, the shortest version of it is that pretty much Yes, right? That, like, successful negotiations tend to shorten conflicts, and then failed negotiations don't shorten conflicts. So, like, another one that's a weird statistical finding. Like to describe it that way, but basically it means that if talks fail, conflicts tend to last longer than they would have if negotiations hadn't taken place. And that's part of the dilemma about pushing for negotiations that if it's successful, but work might come to an end earlier, but it doesn't work, and you kind of do it in this inopportune moment, you might actually exacerbate the conflict.

Margaret Peters 49:59

All right, I got Norman and Cartwhen on my list.

Audience member 6 50:08

My question is about public and private signaling. Sure, as I understand, most associations that you talk about in the book are kind of privately available. And also a lot of Battlefield information are private, right? You don't want your belligerent or your adversary to know what you think about Battlefield, even if you think it's not going well. So what is the point of sometimes belligerents signaling publicly that they're willing to negotiate or not to negotiate? Like, what does that do to the negotiation process?

Eric Min 50:38

Yeah, so it's absolutely true a lot of these negotiations that are in, especially my data, are private behind the scenes affairs. But it is worth noting that even when there are private affairs, many of these belligerents will then turn around and either go home or speak to the international audience and say like it's either going well or it's not going well. It's not going well, it's their fault. So one of the main reasons why these actors would make public pronouncements that like I'm willing to negotiate or not willing to negotiate, is to try to create signals for both international and domestic audiences. So in particular, you see qualitatively in many of these cases, in the book and others, that leaders might sometimes choose to offer to negotiate because they want to look like the magnanimous party, and their hope is that the other side will refuse to negotiate, or they'll like, say, I'm willing to negotiate under these preconditions that sound reasonable to most people, but the other side will turn it down, and then they'll say, Well, they're the difficult party, and therefore they get more support on their side. And you see a lot of that happening right now with Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, a lot of cases here, and then other times, sort of a cross cutting dynamic is sometimes actors will publicly pronounce, I'm not willing to negotiate in order to and I'm sure you know you're aware of this, like the audience costs, like I'm trying to credibly show you that I will never falter by sort of making this very public pronouncement that I'll never talk to you, and therefore you should take this seriously. So it's often used as a signal of of resolve to the other side. And if war is about learning this information, you might learn something about your your capabilities, of how you are militarily by fighting. But you know, this might be one way of trying to communicate how long you're willing to fight by just saying in front of everyone, like, I'll never negotiate with you.

Margaret Peters 52:31

Do you have any more questions in the chat? All right now, Cartman, you can ask your question.

Audience Member 7 52:38

Yeah, so my question, I think we've also got two aspects. One is, you discussed how wider states or small states can be pushed to their country. Are those states usually like fully independent states, or are they kind of proxies of other larger states. And the second question is with this issue of capabilities. And I don't know if this relates to the book or not, but there have been recent cases in like Sudan, South Sudan, where both belligerents are state and Hilti. And so we would expect that both sides should know each other's capabilities beforehand, or at least like the asymmetry suit, and that he is like very, very comparison to like in inner state. So how does that factor into this issue of negotiating, given that I would assume that they know each other's capabilities, and thus they are more willing to either sacrifice or agree.

Eric Min 53:54

Okay, so, yeah. With respect to the minor states that I'm often talking about, I think in particular, post 1945 a lot more of the minor states, they are like independent states, but they're clearly have some colonial connections or legacies that often are part of what major powers are able to sort of push them into negotiations. So that's certainly true pre 1945 as well. But yeah, like none of these minor well, not none, but many of them are not just kind of fully independent states out of nowhere. They have some connections that major powers are able to leverage to to push them into talks, certainly. And then, with respect to your last question, if I could try to clarify so you're saying both belligerents being states might have a decent understanding of each other's relative capabilities. I get to that point, and then I'm not sure I know like what the

Audience Member 7 54:48

State actors where both actors like, because in both, like recent cases(?), both of the fighting forces are state [incoherent]. Yeah. And given that they're both state, you would expect both to know more about each other. Given that they part of the same security adversaries, they share a lot of information and evidence, how does that factor into their negotiations? Well, I think like, how do you expect that?

Eric Min 55:21

Yeah, sure. So in that case, like, if we're talking about state that might know each other's capabilities, that might be sort of true, in some sense, for all pairs of states that end up fighting each other, they kind of know something about themselves, but because you roughly know each other's capabilities, I don't think that necessarily first means you know everything about each other's capabilities are, like, what would actually happen if you started fighting? And then, in particular, the other part that's sort of the big unknown, even if you were able to see every weapon that the other side had, and everything in the military, the sort of intentions and resolve, right kind of how long you're willing to fight, and like, what you're really fighting about those might not be as clear to the two sides. So even with full understanding of capabilities, and I'm not the only one who's argued that it's like just kind of questions of resolve might lead these parties to fight now, if it is a question mainly of, if we're not worried as much about, like, what our relative capabilities are, and it's much more about like, how resolved is the other side, how long can they fight it out? In those instances, I would think that there'd be much less incentive and desire to negotiate, because offering to negotiate, like I said, even with these external pressures, might be one of those signals that like I'm willing, I'm starting to back down a little bit and sort of reconsider my options. So I think in those cases, those belligerents would have a lot of motivation to try to stay quiet, or to at least make it look like I'm not interested in negotiating as as much as they can, as long as they can withstand and then if they get to negotiating table, being super difficult and not, you know, showing willing to compromise.

Margaret Peters 57:02

Hey. Well, on that note, it's 1:30 so thank you all so much for coming. We are back here on May 22 in the afternoon for Professor Shayna Cox from Geography, talking about her work. That sovereign debt and other types of debt owned by states. So we'll be back here then. Thank you.