Quick Facts

Random facts about the patterns in conflicts:

Duration
For conflicts that began and ended after 1945 (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Fearon 2004):

• The median duration of interstate wars was less than 3 months.
• The median duration of civil wars was about 7 years. 

End

Consistent through different coders (Pillar 1983; Stedman 1991; Licklider 1995; Walter 1997):

• Military victory is more common than negotiated settlement in civil wars.
• Negotiated settlement is more common than military victory in interstate wars. 
• Pillar: about two-thirds of interstate wars end in negotiated settlements; about two thirds of intrastate wars end in military victory.

• Between 1940 and 1990, 42 percent of civil wars (seventeen out of forty-one) experienced some form of formal peace negotiation, and 94 percent of these cases drafted at least a cease-fire accord (Walter 1997).

James Fearon. 1998. Bargaining, Enforcement, and International Cooperation

James Fearon, “Bargaining, Enforcement, and International Cooperation,” International Organization, 52, 2 (Spring 1998), pp. 269-305.

Summary by Adi

Background: Traditional cooperation theory suggests that different issue areas in international politics can be characterized by different strategic structures (for example, some cooperation issues can be modeled as a coordination game, while others may resemble the Prisoner’s Dilemma). In addition, a central claim of standard cooperation theory concerns international institutions and the shadow of the future: by providing a framework for regular and repeated interaction, channeling information to concerned parties, and lowering the transaction costs of monitoring, international institutions lengthen the shadow of the future, and thereby make cooperation more likely (since states with longer time-horizons will care relatively more about the future payoffs from cooperation, and since the prospect of extended interaction makes the threat of retaliation a meaningful deterrent to cheating).