extreme economic and human devastation wrought by protracted internal conflict can create a
security threat for the international community. Additionally, as the international community,
under the lead of organizations like the United Nations, has become more involved in
peacekeeping and peacebuilding, increasing attention has been paid to resolving long-running
internal conflicts. These interventions have produced significant costs for the international
community, both in terms of lives lost and the financial cost of long-term peacekeeping
operations. Understanding what factors make some wars last so long without resolution is
important, therefore, because it can help policymakers to design more successful responses to
them.
Despite the importance of understanding protracted internal conflicts, the duration of war
remains an understudied phenomenon. In recent years, a literature has emerged within the
bargaining and war approach that sees the duration of war (both interstate and civil) as primarily
driven by information asymmetries.
This literature sees conflict as a product of one or both
parties overestimating their probability of victory, fighting as revealing information about this
probability and war ending when enough information has been revealed and a bargain is reached.
Theoretically, informational approaches have given important insights into the factors
that affect the incentives for parties to negotiate or fight throughout the conflict process.
However, we have no means of testing these approaches empirically. There currently exists no
data allowing for testing the effect of information asymmetries on the onset, duration or
termination of interstate or intrastate war.
Even if we had measures of information asymmetries,
it is doubtful that these approaches could explain the full variation in the duration of civil war. In
particular, they could not explain why many wars last long beyond the point where the outcome
of war is clear, and why some last so much longer than others. Greater information asymmetries
3
Examples of these approaches include Filson and Werner 2002, Slantchev 2003 and Smith and Stam 2004.
4
Gartzke (1999) suggests that empirical measures that allow us to properly measure information asymmetries may
never exist.
2
Convention