BARGAINING THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT

Abstract

▪ Abstract  International relations theory has long seen the origins, conduct, and termination of war as a bargaining process. Recent formal work on these issues draws very heavily on Rubinstein's (1982) seminal analysis of the bargaining problem and the research that flowed from it. There is now what might be called a standard or canonical model of the origins of war that sees this outcome as a bargaining breakdown. This essay reviews this standard model and current efforts to extend it to the areas of (a) multilateral bargaining, which is at the heart of old issues such as balancing and bandwagoning as well as newer ones such as the role of third-party mediation; (b) the effects of domestic politics on international outcomes; (c) efforts to explicitly model intra-war bargaining; and (d) dynamic commitment problems.