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This concluding chapter recaps on what the book has investigated: the development of a representative form of government and the establishment of a system of public credit in Europe. It has also explored the constraining effects of representative assemblies and the idea that geographic scale hindered the ability to sustain an intensive form of political representation. The chapter examines the implications of the book's findings for three broad debates concerning the role of war in the process of state formation, the possibility of using institutional change to solve commitment problems, and the sources of early modern growth. In particular, it considers the political determinants of economic development within European city-states. The chapter suggests that the same political conditions that were key to the early success of the so-called “states of credit” may have also ultimately set them on a path toward economic decline.

Logically it cannot have been true that each Power benefited from fighting in 1914. Yet, each reached this conclusion in August of that year. Germany and Austria saw the rise of Russian power as forcing their hand. Neither considered a defensive strategy in the West and an early attack on Russia which would have had the advantage of keeping Britain out of the war. France and Russia wanted to make sure they supported each other (as they had not done in a series of prewar crises). The solidity of alliances was thus as important to them as winning the opening battles.

This chapter presents theoretical arguments about the determinants of war duration and severity. It begins with a summary of the bargaining model of war. It then moves on to explain both unlimited and limited wars, starting with the situational commitment problem and preventive wars, before turning to the dispositional commitment problem and unconditional surrender. The chapter ends with an analysis of the other two causal mechanisms that are critical in bringing about violent conflict, in each case explaining both the logic of the decision to fight and the reason why wars driven by the mechanism will be limited in duration, intensity, or both. In addition to suggesting general predictions about whether wars driven by the different mechanisms will be limited, it also derives specific hypotheses for each mechanism that allow for more convincing empirical tests.

This chapter and the next take on the task of explaining the stability of cooperation in the face of potential erosion by free riders and bullies. The argument of the chapter agrees with the common view that the key enforcement mechanism is one of coalitions of agents: if agents act jointly, even an individually dangerous bully cannot resist effectively. But coalitional enforcement is not risk or cost free, so it is necessary to explain how mutual trust is established and maintained. That is, to explain how the costs of enforcement are kept low (reducing the temptations of second order freeriding) and to explain why it’s worthwhile for agents to pay those low costs. This chapter identifies a set of objective and subjective commitment devices which operate in concert to incentivize agents to “pre-commit” to coalitional enforcement if a triggering defection arises, to incentivize maintaining that commitment should it be necessary, and to advertise those commitments to other agents.

This chapter models the instability of peace agreements, motivated by the empirical regularity with which peace agreements tend to break down following civil war. When war provides opportunities for profit to one side, or when other difficulties such as historical grievances exist, peace may become incentive incompatible. The party that has something to gain from surprise warfare may agree to peace, but will later renege on it. It is shown that the levels of conflict chosen by this group are an increasing function of both grievance and greed, but decreasing in the direct costs of war. Peace is achievable via externally devised mechanisms that enhance commitment to peace. Aid and direct military peacekeeping intervention (sanctions) can reduce or eliminate conflict. These sanctions, however, need to be credible. Finally, the independent provision and finance of international sanctions are considered. When these arrangements yield little benefit to financial sponsors, or are very costly to them, the bite of the sanctions can become ineffective.

Chapter 5 provides evidence of commitment problems on both the donor and the recipient sides. Donor agencies and recipient governments must manage competing interests in a complex and ever changing environment that is far from immune from global shifts and politics. This makes the measurement and enforcement of both donor and recipient commitments difficult, straining relations between the two parties.

This chapter explores the role of diaspora communities in the politics of interethnic bargaining processes in identity conflicts. It explores both the positive and negative impacts such communities can have when a negotiation process is set in motion, not just on the parties to the conflict but also on intermediaries who are engaged in trying to secure a peace agreement. Commitment problems are commonly identified as one of the main obstacles to negotiation in interethnic disputes. Disaporas can exacerbate this problem through their engagement via remittances, arms transfers, political mobilization, and other kinds of support to warring parties. However, diasporas can also provide much needed support to a peace process when the members of a community are convinced that politics must replace armed struggle. Such turnabout or waning effects are are an important but understudied dimension of diaspora politics in identity-based conflicts.

This introductory chapter briefly examines the variation in war duration and severity by unraveling the logic of different causes of war. It utilizes the bargaining model of war, analyzing in particular three causal mechanisms that are critical in bringing about violent conflict: divergent expectations and mutual overoptimism, principal-agent problems in domestic politics, and commitment problems that generate an inability to trust one's opponent to live up to a political agreement. Each one is associated with a unique path from peace to war and back to peace, resulting in wars that are different. Additionally, the chapter identifies a different type of commitment problem referred to as the “dispositional commitment problem,” which states that no credible agreement exists, not because of shifting power (a situational commitment problem), but because leaders conclude that their opponent simply is not deterred by the costs of war.

Chapter 2 outlines the theoretical arguments of the book. The chapter first provides a theoretical framework for understanding aid policy bargaining between donor agencies and recipient governments. Then, drawing on theories of institutional economics, the chapter articulates how commitment problems in foreign aid are theorized to influence choices in aid delivery and the sustainability of aid delivery mechanisms over time. The chapter argues that the sustainability of a aid delivery mechanism depends on its ability to incentivize both donors and recipients to uphold their commitments over the long term.

This chapter shows that political decision-makers need to solve two difficult problems when they build support for reforms by compensating losers. First of all, compensation can be economically and politically costly, and political decision-makers take four types of costs into account when they decide whether a reform is worth pursuing: dilution costs, deadweight costs, internal costs, and audience costs. Second, winners cannot always commit to compensation, which matters greatly to a political system's level of reform capacity since promises of compensation ring hollow if the losers believe that those promises will not, in fact, be fulfilled. The empirical examples discussed in the chapter include a comparative case study of reforms in Belgium and the Netherlands, a comparative analysis of government debt in parliamentary democracies, and a discussion of democratic paralysis in the United States since the 1980s.

This chapter presents case studies of the Crimean War, the Pacific War in World War II, and the Iran–Iraq War, which provide further support for the arguments about situational and dispositional commitment problems. In the Crimean case, the British had strong preventive motivations for war that arose out of the fear that Russia was on the verge of acquiring Constantinople; their aggressive war aims and reluctance to settle followed from this fear. The Russians, however, understood the British concerns and thus remained open to negotiation. In the Pacific War, the Japanese concluded that significant expansion was necessary to forestall decline; the Americans, who failed to understand this fear, responded to the Pearl Harbor attack with the conclusion that negotiation with Japan was futile. Finally, in the Iran–Iraq War, Saddam Hussein attempted to take advantage of a temporary window of opportunity associated with the Iranian Revolution; the Iranian response was to launch an ideological crusade designed to remake the Iraqi state and thereby eliminate the dispositional threat that they associated with Saddam Hussein.

Chapter 1 summarizes the core arguments of the book and introduces the significance of the project both theoretically and practically. The chapter argues that scholars and practitioners too often focus on aid effectiveness, ignoring how choices regarding aid delivery mechanism are made to being with. The chapter then provides a brief historical look at foreign aid, demonstrating that the history of foreign aid is a history of fads and fashions. Finally, the chapter summarizes the core theoretical argument of the book, which is that commitment problems constrain the policy compromises reached by donors and recipients. If we want to know whether an aid delivery mechanism is likely to be sustained over the long term, we need to look at whether it induces credible commitments from both donor agencies and recipient governments.

Critics of international criminal tribunals (ICTs) charge that they undermine peace processes. Advocates of ICTs maintain that there can be no peace without justice. There is still much to learn about wartime ICTs’ impact on peace processes. This chapter addresses how the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) affected efforts to end the Bosnian War. Drawing on over 100 interviews with key stakeholders from the Bosnian peace process, and declassified data from the Clinton administration, the chapter finds that ICTY played a key role in facilitating peace efforts. Among other things, the ICTY’s indictments strengthened mediators’ hand in implementing crucial participation decisions. The ICTY also helped parties to overcome commitment problems. The analysis suggests that the ICTY’s cautious approach to indicting top leaders, coupled with the fact that mediators exercised discretion over the arrest and transfer of suspects, both capture why the ICTY facilitated, versus undermined peace efforts.

This chapter discusses the Paraguayan War of the nineteenth century, in which Paraguay launched an aggressive war against Brazil and Argentina. It argues that this aggressive and risky move emerged from a fear of decline created by its neighbors' economic and military rise and by their incipient alliance. The case is particularly useful for analyzing dispositional commitment problems, as Brazil, but not Argentina, refused to consider negotiation with Paraguay. Historically, Paraguay had survived, like most buffer states, by playing off the two powers against each other, but the rapprochement of Argentina and Brazil fundamentally reshaped power politics in the region. The historical record demonstrates that Paraguayan fears of Argentina were well founded, but that those of Brazil were, if not unfounded, in fact inaccurate.

After surveying the literature on the causes, consequences, and management of civil wars, we argue that novel ways of examining civil war management are needed. We advocate for a developmental view of civil wars in order to better understand how to prevent the escalation of low-level armed conflict to full-scale civil war. To prevent full-scale civil war, third parties need to (a) respond swiftly, (b) have the will and ability to impose tangible costs on (and offer benefits to) governments and rebels, and (c) remain involved over the long term. Our analysis shows that typical third-party civil war management approaches (mediation, peacekeeping, and intervention) fail to adequately address at least one of these issues. This motivates our argument in favor of focusing on a different type of third party that could arguably play a particularly constructive role in civil war prevention: highly structured intergovernmental organizations.

This chapter provides the book’s theoretical foundation, establishing that civil war violence results from incomplete information and commitment problems between government and rebel forces. UN peacekeeping reduces violence by making combatants’ use of violence more costly and helping factions commit to peaceful forms of conflict resolution. The two characteristics of peacekeeping missions that best enable them to mitigate violence are capacity and constitution. These characteristics can vary dramatically within and across missions. Capacity is conceptualized as the number of personnel deployed and constitution as the type of personnel deployed. Missions with larger amounts of appropriate personnel better perform violence reduction activities, as do missions constituted with substantial armed troops and police. The capacity and constitution of peacekeeping missions should be considered critical components of peacekeeping’s ability to reduce violence.

This chapter defines highly structured intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and examines their temporal and spatial evolution. It then describes the role that these organizations can play during civil war development. We argue that highly structured IGOs have an inherent, vested self-interest in the domestic peace and stability of member-states; the institutional structure and substantial resources that allow them both to act quickly and to be able to alter the cost-benefit calculations of both the government and rebel sides; and an enduring preference for member-states’ internal peace and stability. These features of highly structured IGOs satisfy all three conditions for successful civil war prevention identified in Chapter 2. The chapter further elaborates on why and how highly structured IGOs sanction member-states at risk of civil war and develops our main hypothesis: states’ memberships in highly structured IGOs decrease the risk that low-level armed conflicts escalate to full-scale civil wars.

The U.S. was in a position of economic and military hegemony after World War II. However, by the early 1970s, the U.S. dollar depreciated following President Richard Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard. To fight this problem, Nixon offered indefinite military protection from all of their enemies to all oil-producing states, if those states agreed to denominate their oil sales exclusively in U.S. dollars. This agreement reestablished the U.S. as the world’s sole superpower. At the turn of the millennium, U.S. dominance faced challenges from al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s decision to abandon the dollar in favor of the euro in oil sales. The war on terror began as an effort to eliminate each of these threats. Following the Iraq war, the U.S. seemed to establish control and alliances with all of the world’s key suppliers of energy, along with the states serving as transit routes.