Hierarchy Formation, Political Disintegration, and War

• In Event: Great (and Small) Power Politics

Abstract

Scholars recognize that political bargains underpinning integrative outcomes like state and hierarchy formation as well as disintegrative outcomes like civil war depend on the distribution of military power and the configuration of interests among a minimum of three sets of actors—two internal to a single state and at least one other external actor. External threats encourage state formation by creating a common interest in pooling military production; and the internationalization of civil war is more likely when outside actors have ethnic ties to a warring party. However, existing theoretical models generally focus on either political integration or disintegration while neglecting the strategic dependencies between them. This paper builds a three-party model that endogenizes state and hierarchy formation, political disintegration (as civil war), and interstate war. It implements Monte Carlo experiments to examine when stable states are internally constituted, and civil war arises solely from distributional conflict between local or “domestic” actors. Under these conditions, external actors possess strategic incentives to uphold obligations associated with sovereignty, and civil wars do not expand to include external actors. More generally, our model allows us to identify conditions linking the threat of war to state formation while examining how peaceful equilibria emerge endogenously through these political processes.

Authors

• Patrick J. McDonald, University of Texas at Austin

• Kevin Galambos, Rhodes College