It's All the Mismatch's Fault

THE GREATER THE MISMATCH BETWEEN MILITARY POWER AND POLITICAL POWER, THE GREATER THE RISK OF CONFLICT AND THE LONGER ITS EXPECTED DURATION. A THEORY OF STRUGGLE FOR POWER THAT IS VALID BOTH IF THE CONTENDERS ARE TWO DIFFERENT STATES AND IF THE CONFLICT IS INTERNAL

by Massimo Morelli, full professor at Department of economics

Relations between two states (or between a governing group and an opposition group within a state) is peaceful if the distribution of the peace surplus is acceptable by both. 
Within a state, it is typically the distribution of political power that determines whether an opposition group feels excluded or sufficiently included in the distribution of the peace surplus. In case of conflict, the expected outcome depends instead on the relative military power of the opposition group with respect to the governing group. Thus, the comparison of the distributions of these two types of power determines the incentives to challenge the status quo with a potentially violent dispute. In “A Theory of Power Wars” - which I wrote with Helios Herrera and Salvatore Nunnari and which was recently published on the Quarterly Journal of Political Science - we show that the higher the mismatch between military and political power, the greater the risk of conflict and the greater its expected duration.
 
The key observation is that the groups’ political power is persistent in peace (because institutions are inertial and difficult to change), whereas a war is a catalyst for change both in military and in political power, due to the opportunity for a winner to destroy the loser’s military capacity and change institutions to its advantage. Hence, the incentive to start a conflict is not only influenced by the mismatch between the two relative powers but also motivated by the potential changes in both powers that could be induced by the war’s outcome.
 
In our two-period model, the outcome of a first-period war can either be a decisive victory by one of the two antagonists or yield a partial shift of powers in favor of the (partial) winner. In this latter case, the interaction continues in a second period, where players can decide to accept the distribution of the peace-time surplus determined by the new institutional status quo without fighting or to start a second war (which, this time, will be decisive for sure). We show that, indeed, not only the initial power mismatch, but also the expectation of the effects of a partial victory on the future mismatch matter for conflict onset and for conflict duration.
 
The results extend to a model where we allow bargaining on the distribution of resources in the first period for the following reason: the evolution of military and political powers and their future use in case of an indecisive war cannot be contracted ex-ante.
 
Yemen is a case where the elimination of conflict incentives is made particularly hard by the contemporaneous presence of multiple challenges: Having to face a challenge by the Houthis in the north and a secessionist challenge by the Southern Transition Council in the south, the government is made weaker on each front and unable to make concessions to one without upsetting the other. Hence, avoiding the mismatch on both sides would be close to impossible.
 
This combination of bargaining difficulties that perpetuate and exacerbate the mismatches makes the Yemen case an unfortunate showcase for why mismatches can persist and wars can be hard to stop.
 
Understanding that, in reality, the mismatch between military and political powers is more important than the balance of power debate focusing on a one dimensional notion of power should be important not only in international and national relations, but also, potentially, in other subfields of political economic studies.