Formal Models of Alliance and Rivalry in Conflict

Session Submission Type: Virtual Created Panel

Session Description

This panel brings together four papers that use formal theory to examine the role of alliances and rivalries in international and subnational conflict. Smith notes that states invest considerable effort in shaping perceptions of blame and studies a model in which these perceptions of blame for conflict matter. He focuses on the case in which blame determines a third party's willingness to provide support for an ally involved in conflict. Crisman-Cox and Gibilisco introduce a dynamic game of outbidding where two groups use violence to compete for evolving public support in a tug-of-war fashion. They fit the model to newly collected data on Palestinian support for Hamas and Fatah in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and use the fitted model to test the outbidding hypothesis — enhanced competitive incentives increase violence — without relying on proxies. Carroll studies alliances that have outlived their-short term purpose and argues that these alliances create solutions to coordination problems in the short term and that these coordinated solutions generate spillover effects into other issue areas. He argues that alliances help generate dynamic market segmentation and that this dynamic market segmentation is enough to microfound institutional inertia. To develop the idea, he writes down a model of alliance formation, trade, and conflict over time. Ingram analyzes the problem of side choice in third-party intervention in the presence of multiple interveners. States must decide between attempting to co-opt their rival’s proxy or combat the proxy by intervening on behalf of the opposing side. She models this as a team contest with inter- and intra-group competition.

Sub Unit

• Division 4: Formal Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Tug of War: Dynamic Outbidding Between Terrorist Groups - Casey Crisman-Cox, Texas A&M University; Michael Gibilisco, California Institute of Technology

• It's Not Our Fault: Blame and the Politics of Military Cooperation - Bradley C Smith, Vanderbilt University

• Market Segmentation and the Endurance of Alliances - Robert J. Carroll, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Choosing Sides and Sapping Rivals Through Proxy Warfare - Katherine Ingram, Princeton University

Chair

• Alexandre Debs Yale University

Discussants

• Scott Wolford University of Texas

• Jack Paine University of Rochester