Submission Statement
Recent attempts by private US citizens to negotiate directly with the Russian government have brought renewed attention to the topic of conflict termination. This article by Oriana Skylar Mastro and David A Siegel discusses the forces and conditions which drive countries to the negotiating table, as well as those which may incentivize leaders to refuse negotiations. The authors introduce the concept of “resiliency”, the capacity for a state to resist further escalation. States are concerned that the act of opening up negotiations will be perceived as further weakness, giving their opponent an incentive to double down or increase the intensity of their attacks Conditions and actions which reduce the risk of escalation or increase resiliency should therefore increase the chance of states opening negotiations. One way this can occur is through signaling resiliency by the state currently refusing negotiations. The goal is to disincentivize escalation in response to a signal of weakness by showing that said state is capable of resisting further escalation, such as through a “costly signal”. Another is the assessment by one party that the other finds further escalation to be too costly. An important note is that states see these costs as blows to their perception, independent of the actual state of the battlefield. As a result, the authors find that “face-saving measures”, like unilaterally reducing the intensity of a conflict, are less effective than might be hoped because they fail to address the perception of vulnerability that states see as the true cost of negotiation. This dynamic holds while states have high resiliency, where they can be confident that further escalation by their opponent will not result in their outright defeat. When states have low resilience(in other words, when they are lo longer able to prevent or resist the opponent’s escalation), they may open negotiations at the first opportunity, choosing to accept the costs of being perceived as weak in order to avoid the greater costs of an outright defeat.
The implications for the conflict in Ukraine are clear. First and foremost, this article is a strong rebuttal to the idea put forth by Haass and Kupchan that the West can compel Ukraine to the negotiating table while continuing to provide sufficient aid to repel further Russian attempts at conquest. As long as Ukraine remains a “high-resiliency” state, capable of credibly defeating Russian escalation, they will be loathe to give an impression of weakness that could incentivize Russia to double down. Similarly, given that Russia’s entire thesis of victory rests on the idea of the West eventually exhausting its will for escalation and ceasing its aid to Ukraine, Haass and Kupchan’s decision to open negotiations with Russia signals that the West is reaching that point of “low-resiliency”, where it is looking to cuts its losses with early negotiation. This in turn would be an incentive for Russia to further escalate, on the presumption that the West will be unable to prevent or impose costs for doing so.
Oriana Skylar Mastro is a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank.
David A Siegel is in the Department of Political Science at Duke University
Getting belligerents to the negotiating table is complicated and fraught with difficulties, both in theory and practice. A willingness to talk is seen as the first concession, affecting an adversary’s beliefs about the balance of power and resolve long before offers are exchanged. Assuming, as is often done, that talks occur during fighting inhibits our understanding of the process of war. This article contributes to our understanding of conflict and its negotiated conclusion by proposing a novel mechanism to explain why rational states may refuse to talk during war and when they might change their positions. We find that states are willing to open negotiations under two conditions: when their opponents find escalation too costly, and when there is a signal of high resilience that only the highly resilient care to use.
Those findings have important policy implications. Political scientists have long recognized the dilemma of compellence—states may be reluctant to give in because of concerns that they are opening themselves up to even more coercion (Schelling, 1966). We show that states may be reluctant to show a willingness to talk for the same reason, and therefore, it can be counterproductive to attempt to coerce an enemy to the negotiating table. Todd Sechser (2010: 649) recommends that the stronger country issuing the compellent threat offer side payments or make lesser demands to assuage the reputational costs the target states may pay for acquiescing to deal with such challenges.
Our findings suggest a different explanation: states are concerned with the negative material consequences that their approach to diplomacy may convey to the enemy, and so face-saving measures emanating from the enemy do not allow a state to save face. After all, it would remain clear to the enemy that a decision to adopt an open stance signaled weakness, and that adverse inference would still yield the potential for escalation by the enemy. While the limitations of face-saving measures emanating from the adversary are discouraging, our findings suggest new opportunities for outside mediators, who can provide guarantees in ways that lessen the strategic costs of conversation.
An ever-increasing number of modern wars are limited conflicts that end in negotiated settlement (Pillar, 1983). Understanding how military outcomes translate into political outcomes—how combat outcomes and diplomatic behavior interact to affect the likelihood that all sides will come to the table—is of greater importance than ever before. This article sheds light on the factors that influence states’ decisions about talking to the enemy during wars and illustrates how future generations of policymakers can shape those factors for peace.