Scholarly Implications

My theory calls for a reassessment of how scholars approach and understand war. As I described at the book’s outset, the rational-choice tradition has evolved in a manner such that verbal communication in and of itself is presumed not to carry any costs. Such a conclusion has undercut the motivation to gather separate data on the reality of wartime diplomacy. Consequently, scholarly research tends to see negotiations as a mere mechanism to convert information obtained from fighting into a diplomatic settlement short of military victory or defeat. Any negotiations that do not end a conflict reflect a lack of common beliefs but have few consequences beyond that fact. But even though this view of wartime diplomacy as a mere exchange of words is logically consistent and seemingly reasonable, it does not find much support in the historical record.

This book does not call for jettisoning a rational-choice understanding of war. If anything, it substantiates a critical implication of bargaining models of war: when it comes to forging peace, there is no real substitute for clear battlefield activity. Yet I have also demonstrated that diplomacy is not simply an exchange of words; the act of negotiating implicates far more costs and benefits. Deciding to talk can be perilous in signaling weakness or legitimating an adversary. In other circumstances, deciding not to talk can also be costly. The strength of the post-1945 effect in both my quantitative and my qualitative studies indicates the weight of institutional and normative factors in encouraging belligerents to consider diplomacy. At the same time, engaging in talks can create space to manipulate the military and political environment in order to promote the war effort.

An essential insight of this book is thus that negotiations—particularly during war—can directly affect the reversion outcome that actors will face should talks fall apart. If diplomacy outside war takes place in the shadow of violence, diplomacy during war can be harnessed to increase one’s ability to mobilize and apply even more violence. This potential benefit to negotiation has been documented across numerous wars and underscores the importance of grasping more fully the complex calculus that belligerents perform when deciding how to navigate a conflict. Contrary to the suggestions of many studies, bad news from the battlefield does not necessarily engender interest in peace, and diplomacy’s value does not suddenly dissipate once weapons are fired. Diplomacy is indeed rational, but a much wider spectrum of considerations helps to explain policymakers’ strategies regarding how they talk with the enemy during conflict.

Future bargaining models of war would be well served by accounting for some of these additional strategic considerations regarding the decision to negotiate.⁶ But this book also suggests that bargaining models can go only so far on their own, and game-theoretical models may become intractable if too many new parameters or sources of uncertainty are added at the same time. Other lines of inquiry, including the collection and assessment of new data, as demonstrated in this book, may prove necessary to both develop and assess more intricate theories of negotiation.

My argument and evidence also call some aspects of Zartman’s ripeness theory—one of the leading frameworks in conflict resolution research—into question. This theory, to recall, argues that “ripe moments” for negotiations arise in the presence of two necessary but not sufficient conditions: belligerents suffering from a mutually hurting stalemate and belligerents simultaneously perceiving the possibility of a diplomatic way out of fighting.⁷ The empirical support for ripeness theory and its variants typically relies on qualitative reviews of specific conflicts. Both my broad statistical findings and my individual case studies indicate that distinct battlefield trends, and not periods of stagnation, are a much stronger predictor of negotiations. Ripeness theory also provides no framework to understand or predict insincere diplomacy, instead assuming that negotiation onset presages peace or at least has no negative downstream consequences should talks fail. To the extent that perceptions of a way out are dependent on third-party mediation efforts, my theory suggests that external attempts to pressure belligerents into negotiations may unintentionally generate circumstances that fan the flames of war. Importantly, the battery of quantitative results I produce using daily-level data on fighting and negotiating substantiate my argument and go beyond conventional and anecdotal debates regarding ripeness theory that involve qualitative discussions of purposefully chosen conflicts.

While this book addresses the occurrence of negotiations and belligerents’ behavior within periods of conversation, it does not account for the underlying format, topics, or other aspects of the negotiations that may also influence their outcomes. These preliminary interactions that take place in advance of formal talks are often called prenegotiation.⁸ Decisions made in this early phase may define what the negotiations can or cannot accomplish before discussions even begin and thus represent a way to control diplomacy through an alternative face of power.⁹ For instance, agenda setting is a powerful tool that defines the boundaries of a bargaining interaction. This phenomenon has richer traditions in the fields of American politics and international political economy, where decision-making bodies have much more explicit institutional procedures, but in matters of international conflict, it has received drastically less attention.¹⁰ When Napoleon, for example, sought to win a battle in order to bolster his bargaining position in a negotiation, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord—minister of foreign affairs for the First French Republic, Napoleon, and later Louis XVIII—remarked, “Sire, it is not necessary. They have allowed me to set the agenda.”¹¹

Much as Talleyrand has received acclaim and criticism for his personal prowess as a diplomat, the backgrounds and attributes of the specific individuals sent to negotiate on behalf of a state or organization may also indicate the party’s interest in talks or signal any intentional limitations that it seeks to place on the scope of discussions. In the Korean War, the UNC delegation was exclusively populated with military officials who had no background in diplomacy or politics, while more members of the Communist delegation had wider experiences. It is perhaps no coincidence that the first two weeks of negotiations were spent haggling over the agenda, with the UNC seeking to discuss only military affairs and the Communists seeking to also include political questions. Systematically analyzing individual negotiators may thus shed valuable light on how talks in which they participate eventually unfold.

Prenegotiation processes are, as such, consequential and calculated endeavors worth exploring in their own right, both in armed conflict and in other substantive arenas.¹² Indeed, since, as this book underscores, negotiations are a highly strategic activity, the potential value of analyzing negotiations in their more formative stages is all the more evident.

Normative Ideals for Diplomacy

The belief in international relations scholarship that negotiations are a universally desirable and good-faith endeavor without meaningful liabilities is echoed in the policy world. Many experts and practitioners have failed to fully scrutinize the notion of insincere negotiations—largely because of a strong normative belief that diplomacy should not be exploitative.¹³ In Satow’s Diplomatic Practice, Ivor Roberts decries the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as an era when diplomacy was rife with “the ‘Machiavellian’ expedients of spying, conspiracy, and deceit” and when “raison d’état or what in English is called ‘the end justifying the means’ took unquestioned precedence over morality.”¹⁴ The shift to the notion of diplomacy as a nobler, more honest pursuit appears to have happened only sometime later. For example, in 1604, news leaked of the English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton declaring (after an “Evening in Merriments”) that “an ambassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his Country.” James I, incensed by this statement, forced Wotton to write two highly public apologies for this perceived impropriety.¹⁵ Some four centuries later, Sir Harold Nicolson—who served as a diplomat for the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom and later became a member of Parliament in the early twentieth century—emphasized the importance of an individual who could adhere to the “truth” when describing the set of criteria he used to “test” whether someone would make an ideal diplomat.¹⁶ But even as the maintenance of longer-term diplomatic relations would thus seem to depend on the honest and fair conduct of individual representatives,¹⁷ it may be shortsighted to believe that diplomacy is always done earnestly—especially during wars in which vital interests are at stake.

Unfortunately, some experts who have recognized that diplomacy can be exploited have inanely concluded that the issue emanates solely from non-Western actors. Following their experiences at Kaesong and Panmunjom during the Korean War, Paris during the Vietnam War, and various other encounters, numerous individuals who interacted with representatives of Communist states wrote books that decried the latter’s cynical and time-wasting tactics. Admiral C. Turner Joy’s book regarding his time as senior delegate for the UNC, which I quoted at length in chapter 6, is even titled How Communists Negotiate.¹⁸ Kenneth Young, who served as US ambassador to Thailand in the early 1960s, published a volume titled Negotiating with the Chinese Communists that described his interactions as “annoying and frustrating” because representatives possessed “supreme self-confidence.”¹⁹ Implicit in these recriminations is the belief that US representatives were far more sincere and could have realized agreement but for the Communists’ bad behavior. Some descriptions of diplomacy with non-Western representatives are imbued with subtle racism; one states that US diplomats had to display “maturity and realism in [their] treatment of non-Western concerns.”²⁰

This is certainly not to deny the existence of differences in diplomatic behavior across actors. Negotiation scholars have found ample evidence that culture influences how individuals bargain.²¹ Nevertheless, even if such concrete differences exist, my empirical analyses show that all actors, regardless of political, geographical, or cultural background, approach negotiations with the same basic underlying motivation: promoting their policy interests, even if it may cut across normative beliefs about the “right” way to conduct diplomacy. Those who research and practice diplomacy should thus be wary of the idea that negotiations cannot cause harm or that only “other” people use diplomacy for cynical ends. As the Indian diplomat Arthur S. Lall once noted, “In defense or promotion of its vital interests, a state has as much latitude in its actions irrespective of the interests of other states.”²² His sentiments are echoed by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who wrote that we must recognize “negotiation as an instrument of war.”²³

Negotiations in Civil War

Although research focused on interstate war has largely shortchanged the strategic implications of negotiations during conflict, scholars of civil war have arguably made larger strides in recognizing that talking with the enemy is not a costless enterprise. Work by Barbara Walter and Jeffrey Kaplow, among others, has articulated how governments may be resistant to negotiating with rebel groups because doing so could afford these nonstate violent actors an air of legitimacy that bolsters their cause. It could also signal weakness to other potential rebel groups, who may be inspired to wield violence to extract concessions from a seemingly soft government.²⁴ These potential consequences of negotiation become manifest regardless of whether a state leader strikes a deal with a rebel group. In other words, they are side effects that reshape the reversion outcome—even though most civil war scholars do not use these terms. My theory has taken this astute idea and incorporated it into a more comprehensive framework that enumerates a broader set of risks and rewards that come with negotiating while fighting.

Much of the empirical evidence this book offers has focused on wars between states. But because my core argument bears connections with civil war literature, it is worth reflecting on how my theory of wartime negotiations applies to intrastate conflict. Through much of the twentieth century, civil wars were less likely to end with negotiated agreements compared to their interstate counterparts.²⁵ Yet the rate of peaceful settlement for intrastate conflicts has steadily grown since the end of the Cold War.²⁶ These settlements have not come easily. Negotiation efforts to quell violence in Syria, Northern Ireland, Columbia, and Sudan—to name some examples from the early twenty-first century—have all been characterized by suspicions and accusations of parties negotiating in bad faith to prepare for renewed hostilities.

Indeed, there are two reasons to believe that insincere negotiations and the implications of my theory are especially salient when considering civil wars. First, the power imbalances that exist between rebel groups and the government tend to be far wider than gaps in capabilities that arise between belligerent states. One side is the state, which is more organized, resource rich, and partially defined by its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The other side is a nonstate actor that must overcome deficiencies across these same dimensions. Belligerents on the disadvantaged end of a highly asymmetric conflict have greater incentives to engage in indirect forms of interaction and to wear down the enemy through sustained and costly fighting.²⁷ Insincere negotiations, which can allow a warring party to stall for time and to reorganize for continued hostilities, accomplish precisely these objectives and increase diplomacy’s appeal as a weapon of the weak.

Second, negotiations are more frequent but also more likely to be exploited for side effects when latent external pressures on the belligerents to negotiate are high. My quantitative analysis in chapter 3 demonstrated that interstate wars without any major powers were more susceptible to these talks, which are externally motivated and ineffectual. It is therefore unsurprising that bouts of peace arranged by third parties are inconsistent in how durable they are over the long term.²⁸ Given that civil wars tend to feature nonmajor states and nonstate actors, third-party countries and organizations wield significantly more political and material leverage to push belligerents into diplomatic ventures.²⁹

These two factors suggest that rebel groups in civil wars may see few downsides and significant upsides to engaging in negotiations, even if—or because—they have a meager chance of ending the conflict through pure military might. Quantitative studies of civil war have shown that rebel groups are more likely to request negotiations when the battlefield reaches a period of stalemate, as this demonstrates the rebels’ ability to resist the state while also diluting the rebels’ optimism about making short-term gains in future fighting.³⁰ Yet, as I have underscored, an offer to negotiate by one party is not tantamount to the onset of negotiations or the prospects of a mutually acceptable settlement. If anything, my theory suggests that negotiations proposed in the middle of stalemates are most liable to be motivated by insincere intentions that seek to alter the war rather than end it.

Negotiations Not in War

Although this book’s proximate goal is to understand the logic of diplomacy during war, it also makes the case that scholars—particularly in the field of international relations—have much more progress to make in studying diplomacy and its practice as a whole, including the quotidian maintenance of relations between nations, institutions, and individuals. Diplomacy can be richly understood as a method to communicate intentions between states,³¹ but the interests of a monolithic state and the goal of being credible are only elements of a broader spectrum. Practitioners and historians, on the other hand, have a deeper appreciation of the subtlety, culture, and social dimensions of their craft but frequently discuss the vocation without firm theoretical underpinnings.³² Stronger connections between these two traditions are essential to helping us develop a more extensive and vibrant understanding of a central institution that holds international society together.³³

Many of the core insights I have presented also have implications for understanding important diplomatic interactions in settings that are several steps removed from active hostilities. The idea that negotiations can be harnessed to produce side effects is not limited to ceasing conflicts. Any process by which opposing parties attempt to resolve their differences using words can open an avenue for insincerity. Indeed, several examples I have provided throughout this book do not involve active violence.

The United States’ diplomatic activities regarding Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions in the twenty-first century may also involve the potential exploitation of diplomacy. In 2018, the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the international agreement designed to address Iran’s nuclear program that was mentioned at the start of chapter 1. This negotiation process repeatedly stalled over the summer of 2021, and there is suggestive evidence that some of this had insincere motivations. For Iran’s part, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may have delayed talks through the summer to allow for the new hard-line Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, a fierce critic of any return to the JCPOA, to take office in August and thus have a stronger hand in any subsequent negotiations.³⁴ In 2021, the Biden administration worked to shift international public opinion against Iran. Speaking to the press, the State Department official Ned Price decried Iran’s “outrageous effort to deflect blame for the current impasse” and claimed that the United States “stand[s] ready … to complete work on a mutual return to the JCPOA once Iran has made the necessary decisions.”³⁵

The United States’ actions regarding North Korea’s nuclear ambitions also have direct connections with my notion of insincere negotiation. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, North Korea’s diplomatic activities—which express a vague interest in some form of denuclearization but typically lead to no new limits on its program—have ultimately allowed the regime to become a de facto nuclear state.³⁶ Completely understandable international desire for a diplomatic settlement has frequently resulted in very eager attempts to engage in talks whenever North Korea has indicated some interest in diplomacy. This has often created opportunities for the Kim regime to extract side effects, such as the provision of humanitarian aid, that further its survival. Two conspicuous examples were the face-to-face summits between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore in 2018 and Hanoi in 2019, which themselves were partially a product of diplomatic momentum produced by South Korean president Moon Jae-in in 2018. While meant to address nuclear issues, neither summit made concrete progress toward denuclearization, as both sides had differing interpretations of the term. The fact that the two sides had not reconciled their inconsistent definitions of denuclearization in preliminary lower-level meetings, which would be the standard procedure for diplomatic summits, serves as evidence that both leaders were more interested in the public appearance of talks than in making real or difficult progress on the issue. One of the broader consequences and criticisms was that Kim’s sitting across from the head of state of the United States, with the two nations’ flags intertwined, allowed the North Korean regime to gain both domestic and international status.³⁷ As the Washington Post opined, the first summit “was, without question, a triumph for Kim Jong Un,” who could now “parade on the global stage as a legitimate statesman.”³⁸ North Korea’s diplomatic maneuvering demonstrates the efficacy of insincere negotiations for weaker parties that can take advantage of international support for engagement.³⁹

Accusations of foot dragging have also become prevalent in climate negotiations. With each passing Conference of the Parties (COP) related to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, highly developed countries and corporations have been criticized for undermining progress in setting or meeting critical goals to prevent disastrous temperature increases. Environmental organizations and activists have warned that the COP has become a forum for states and companies to “greenwash” their activities by touting specific accomplishments to divert attention away from the worst sources of pollution, using the language of environmentalism to disguise lack of concrete action and making seemingly grand commitments that are never fulfilled.⁴⁰ As an example, the Copenhagen Accord signed at COP15 in 2009 codified developed countries’ commitment to provide $100 billion annually to less developed countries by 2020. This relatively modest target, which will surely rise over time, has never been categorically met in any single year. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development self-reports that contributions rose from $54 billion to almost $90 billion between 2013 and 2021.⁴¹ Other organizations, however, suggest that the numbers are drastically inflated because they include the value of loans and count unrelated forms of aid as being “climate relevant.”⁴² As another example, the commitment to “net-zero” emissions gained significant attention in 2015, when the Paris Climate Agreement made frequent references to this term. The concept of “net-zero” sounds promising and has a scientific basis, but governments and corporations often adopt definitions that are not based on scientific principles and omit certain forms of pollution when assessing their own commitments to this goal.⁴³

States and companies experience enormous political pressures to come to the bargaining table and discuss solutions to climate change. The rise of climate protests and movements led by young people adds further impetus. Yet so far, many of the actions taken at these talks have allowed high-polluting actors to avoid or delay costly reforms while diverting pressure and blame from themselves, particularly for members of the public who may not follow climate policy in great detail. The fact that a term like “greenwashing” is becoming increasingly common in popular discourse suggests that the general population is more aware of the possibility that climate negotiations are, at least for some actors, conducted insincerely. My theory, considerably extrapolated, would suggest that climate negotiations will become more sincere when trends from the “battlefield” of climate change become stark and feel irreversible. The questions of how painful and absolute the consequences of climate change need to become to spur radical collective action, and whether those changes will be too late to meet the moment, remain open and have existential implications.

When to Give War or Diplomacy a Chance

My book has largely focused on the occurrence of negotiations and their impact on conflict resolution. My empirical analysis, however, does not directly address the welfare implications associated with wartime negotiation. Wars wreak death and destruction, and it is important to understand how diplomacy affects both.

On the one hand, quantitative evidence shows that wars have become shorter and less deadly in the post-1945 environment, where both latent external pressures for diplomacy and observed rates of negotiation have been high. Wars between 1900 and 1945 had a median length of 220 days and 26,700 overall deaths; since 1945, these median numbers have fallen to 157 days and 6,000 deaths.⁴⁴ The supposed “long peace” associated with the current international order has also avoided global conflagrations as devastating as the two world wars.⁴⁵ If negotiations have been more frequent in this environment, then perhaps efforts to promote diplomacy have been worthwhile regardless of any failures or negative externalities based on insincere negotiations.⁴⁶

On the other hand, some scholars have bemoaned the limited or counterproductive impact that negotiations have had in modern-day conflicts. In the introduction, I made a brief reference to a well-known Foreign Affairs piece penned by the historian Edward Luttwak called “Give War a Chance.” Written a few years after the Bosnian War of 1992–95, this essay offered a dispiriting assessment of the international community’s attempts to promote peace, one that overlaps with themes I have raised in this book:

An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace… . Since the establishment of the United Nations and the enshrinement of great-power politics in its Security Council, however, wars among lesser powers have rarely been allowed to run their natural course… . [A] cease-fire tends to arrest war-induced exhaustion and lets belligerents reconstitute and rearm their forces. It intensifies and prolongs the struggle once the cease-fire ends—and it usually does end… . Peace takes hold only when war is truly over.⁴⁷

My theory suggests that both “it cannot hurt to negotiate” and “give war a chance” are flawed positions because they adopt unconditional views of negotiation, albeit from opposite directions. Just because wars are more limited today than they were in the past does not mean policymakers can declare diplomatic efforts to be an unalloyed good. The salient question is not whether wars today are less deadly than wars of yesteryear. It is instead whether wars today could be made even less deadly if negotiations were applied more judiciously than they have been. At the same time, just because some negotiations exacerbate violence does not mean diplomacy should be sidelined until one side has fully destroyed the other. These opposing positions are implicitly based on a shared idea that there is no discernible pattern to when and why negotiations succeed in ending hostilities. The argument and evidence I have presented in this book indicate that clear information from the battlefield heavily influences whether third-party pressure is more likely to facilitate peace or to undermine it. The existence of numerous institutions, actors, and avenues that help potential belligerents pursue diplomacy introduces an increased risk of negotiations being abused if they are imposed thoughtlessly. But if applied prudently and in the right circumstances, these same actors and institutions afford a valuable path for belligerents to more quickly arrange peace when they so desire. In the words of the civil war scholar Stephen Stedman, negotiations “should not be offered like buses that come along every fifteen minutes.”⁴⁸

My argument and findings offer three suggestions for third parties attempting to quell conflicts. First, external actors could deploy the brunt of their diplomatic pressure when the battlefield has clearly revealed one side’s advantage. As we have seen, one prominent method third parties use to create such pressure is organizing mediation efforts. Scholars have produced mixed results about the impact of third-party mediation on conflict. Some works conclude that mediation increases the likelihood and pace of conflict termination, while others produce less promising conclusions.⁴⁹ Those in the latter camp frequently analyze mediator bias but yield dissonant findings about whether biased or unbiased mediators are better at terminating conflicts.⁵⁰ The effectiveness of mediation also appears to fluctuate as a function of time, with mediation being more productive at early and late stages of conflict.⁵¹ These extant works, whether or not they find positive effects, generally focus on fixed attributes of the actors involved without accounting for battlefield developments and how they dynamically influence the supply of, demand for, and consequences of mediation.⁵² For example, wars with quick or decisive outcomes in one side’s favor may be readily settled by mediators, while conflicts with less clear-cut trajectories may lead to mediation efforts that are used insincerely. The supply of potential mediators could also be shaped by the state of the battlefield, with more committed mediators offering their services when fighting becomes especially intense or lopsided.⁵³ While these individual claims require further scrutiny and testing, my theory underscores the importance of considering the future costs of fighting as a motivator for belligerents to not only negotiate but negotiate sincerely. Incorporating this dimension may help to consolidate seemingly disparate judgments regarding mediation’s relationship with conflict resolution. When it comes to intrawar diplomacy, nothing is as clarifying as the battlefield.

Second, to further increase a belligerent’s interest in negotiating sincerely, outside actors must threaten to impose costs so that whatever benefits could be accrued from negotiating insincerely and improving one’s reversion outcome are nullified.⁵⁴ While the threat of British military intervention proved useful in stopping Israel during the Arab-Israeli War, actual military involvement by major powers tends to exacerbate conflict by dragging additional actors into hostilities.⁵⁵ Sanctions and embargoes that limit the flow of military aid to belligerent states are likely a more efficient manner to reshape the future costs of fighting.⁵⁶ The United States’ ability to deescalate the 1956 Suez Crisis by threatening the United Kingdom, France, and Israel with economic sanctions lends one important example.

Third, outside parties should be very cautious in promoting ceasefires alongside negotiations. My argument and results demonstrate that sustained and present battlefield momentum expedite diplomacy’s ability to settle conflict, while indefinite or quiescent battlefields invite insincere intentions. I have also shown in chapter 4 that both (internal) negotiations and ceasefires are associated with decreased hostilities. If diplomacy has its own independent effect in quelling hostilities, adding formal ceasefires on top of this can further create breathing room for belligerents to remobilize their military forces or to engage in blame shifting.

That said, my point is not that negotiations should be wholly avoided when the battlefield is stalemated or indeterminate, or that ceasefires should never be implemented during war. Having third parties that can rapidly mobilize to facilitate diplomacy may allow belligerents to enter negotiations more quickly and with fewer reservations when they feel interested in talking. This could help prevent wars from escalating needlessly because one or both sides worry about looking weak and being exploited. The Cenepa Valley War, explored in chapter 4, demonstrates this point. But what matters is that belligerents seek negotiations out themselves. The fact that the belligerents in the Cenepa Valley War did so is why that war was resolved so quickly.

Moreover, temporarily dampening hostilities through diplomacy may afford valuable time to conduct humanitarian peace efforts that relieve the suffering of countless individuals affected by a war they did not seek and do not control. Many appeals for ceasefires in contemporary conflicts are framed in precisely this manner. In attempting to ameliorate suffering in the Yemeni civil war, the site of one of the largest humanitarian disasters in modern history, the United Nations and several other states led persistent efforts to broker a ceasefire.⁵⁷ Appeals for a ceasefire in the Tigray conflict of 2020–22 emphasized the need for humanitarian deliveries and state parties’ obligations to protect Ethiopian civilians in accordance with the Refugee Convention of 1951.⁵⁸ Diplomacy and ceasefires can help create critical and short-term moments of relief for innocent civilians.

It is erroneous, however, to believe that negotiations are guaranteed to promote relief even if they do not succeed in ending the overall war. The undeniable benefits of humanitarian aid distributed during moments of quiet must be considered alongside the potential consequences of exacerbating the political and military environment—and thus humanitarian suffering—in the longer term.⁵⁹ This is a terrible and morally fraught dilemma. My theory does not provide a straightforward prescription for how to navigate this quandary, but it does highlight the fact that this predicament exists and must be countenanced when shaping conflict resolution policies related to diplomacy.⁶⁰

Some may suggest that a compromise policy would involve organizing talks that are strictly limited to addressing humanitarian concerns, avoiding political matters and broader ceasefires. This idea is not implausible on its face, but policymakers must have their eyes wide open to the reality that the ability to promote humanitarian principles during war is also beholden to belligerents’ broader strategic intentions and desire to gain an advantage. Talks held shortly after the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian war, begun in 2022, are illustrative of these pitfalls. In late February and March that year, not long after Russian forces began a “special military operation” that aimed to seize much of Ukraine and realize the so-called “denazification” of the Zelenskyy government, a series of externally motivated peace talks took place—first in Belarus and then in Turkey. These negotiations revealed massive gaps in belligerents’ bargaining positions, but both sides agreed to the creation of humanitarian corridors for fleeing civilians.⁶¹ At face value, this was a promising development. But as my argument suggests, and as later events would seem to indicate, such a view is naive. Any artificially constructed pockets of peace, especially when fighting has not provided enough information to create common beliefs between actors, are potential opportunities for belligerents to further their war aims. Indeed, Russian forces were repeatedly accused of intentionally attacking Ukrainian civilians in the humanitarian corridors that the two sides had arranged.⁶² To be sure, it was due to these corridors that approximately 125,000 people were evacuated and spared serious injury or death in the first two weeks of the war.⁶³ But these human rights atrocities indicate that ostensibly peace-promoting activities can be wielded to exact violence.

Brief and abortive negotiations like the ones that took place in early 2022 between Russia and Ukraine can prompt leaders around the world to consider whether they should push belligerents into further talks. The notion that diplomacy could lead to peace in such instances is tempting. But in line with this book’s argument, the indeterminate back-and-forth of hostilities over the course of a war, as well as the involvement of major powers on both sides of the conflict, does not produce an environment that is conducive to good-faith diplomacy that begets long-term peace. Diplomatic pushes made in these conditions may not only fail to end the war but also perhaps reinvigorate it. Ultimately, policymakers should both remain wary of diplomacy’s potential side effects and avoid applying additional external pressure to artificially accelerate the process, even as—and, indeed, even more so because—peace is at stake.

Final Fighting Words

There is little surprise that war is simultaneously an object of fascination, inquiry, and dread. War represents one of the most overtly destructive processes perpetuated by human civilization. Despite extensive scholarship, including this book, that explains how war is better understood as a strategic activity, war still instinctively feels like the product of irrationality. War is cruel, traumatizing, and catastrophic. Enormous questions about the nature of humans, the fate of individuals and large populations alike, and the state of global affairs hang in the balance because of war.

It is precisely for these reasons that we must appreciate warfare in all of its manifestations, as well as all of the factors that may stymie or enable its continuation. This book has argued that diplomacy does not immediately lose its value once wars begin. The resumption of diplomacy during conflict may trigger optimism among citizens and third-party observers, but it is also not an inevitable sign of progress toward a lasting settlement. Time and again, negotiations have changed belligerents’ political and military fortunes regardless of whether they accomplish their professed aim of producing peace. Anyone interested in mitigating conflict must appreciate that distinctions between war and diplomacy are not as binary as we may expect or want them to be. Blood not only is shed by the sword on the battlefield but can also be drawn by the pen at the bargaining table.