Talk Is Cheap: How Limited Conflict Facilitates Credible Communication

• In Event: Models of International Security and Foreign Policy

Abstract

Policymakers and scholars often identify low-level conflict as destabilizing and lament the existence and proliferation of tactics by which states can impose moderate costs on each other. We present an alternate perspective: limited conflict -- both its availability and execution -- can forestall high-level conflict and facilitate credible communication and trust-building between potential adversaries. We examine a formal model of incomplete information under shifting power, in which a rising actor has private information about the degree to which its preferences align with a declining actor’s. In round 1 the riser chooses a degree of revision against the decliner, which endogenously informs the size of the power shift. The decliner then responds with some level of preventive action that mitigates the power shift, ranging on a continuum from inaction, limited actions (``hassling''), or a full-scale war. We find that the availability of limited responses by the defender both precludes war and allows the riser to credibly communicate its preferences by limiting or refraining from revisionist actions. Hassling thus enables credible reassurance signals that do not exist when the decliner is artificially limited to a binary war-peace response, as past models have assumed. Our findings in this more general and realistic strategic setting contradict prominent arguments that mistaken preventive war frequently occurs against rising states with no hostile intent due to incomplete information.

Authors

• Peter Schram

• Brandon Yoder, Australian National University