Peace Talk and Conflict Traps

TL;DR

This paper models how costly pre-play signals influence conflict dynamics, showing they can both prevent wars and entrench stalemates, with implications for peace strategies and policy choices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel overlapping-generations model incorporating private signaling, memory, and publicity effects to analyze conflict and peace dynamics.

Findings

Signaling reduces conflict onset hazard.

Public leaks can prolong conflicts once initiated.

Peace or conflict traps emerge depending on publicity and signaling.

Abstract

Costly pre-play messages can deter unnecessary wars - but the same messages can also entrench stalemates once violence begins. We develop an overlapping-generations model of a security dilemma with persistent group types (normal vs bad), one-sided private signaling by the current old to the current young, and noisy private memory of the last encounter. We characterize a stationary equilibrium in which, for an intermediate band of signal costs, normal old agents mix on sending a costly reassurance only after an alarming private history; the signal is kept marginally persuasive by endogenous receiver cutoffs and strategic mimicking by bad types. Signaling strictly reduces the hazard of conflict onset; conditional on onset, duration is unchanged in the private model but increases once a small probability of publicity (leaks) creates a public record of failed reconciliation. With publicity, play generically absorbs in a peace trap or a conflict trap. We discuss welfare and policy: when to prefer back-channels versus public pledges.