Why do some civil wars terminate soon, with victory of one party over the other? What determines if the winner is the incumbent or the rebel group? Why do other conflicts last longer? We propose a simple model in which the power of each armed group depends on the number of combatants it is able to recruit. This is in turn a function of the relative 'distance' between group leaderships and potential recruits. We emphasize the moral hazard problem of recruitment: fighting is costly and risky so combatants have the incentive to defect from their task. They can also desert alto- gether and join the enemy. This incentive is stronger the farther away the fighter is from the principal, since monitoring becomes increasingly costly. Bigger armies have more power but less monitoring capacity to prevent defection and desertion. This general framework allows a variety of interpretations of what type of proximity matters for building strong cohesive armies ranging from ethnic distance to geographic dispersion. Di¤erent assumptions about the distribution of potential fighters along the relevant dimension of conflict lead to di¤erent equilibria. We characterize these, discuss the implied outcome in terms of who wins the war, and illustrate with historical and contemporaneous case studies.
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Paper provided by UNIVERSIDAD DEL ROSARIO - FACULTAD DE ECONOMÍA in its series DOCUMENTOS DE TRABAJO with number
005029.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Esteban, Joan & Ray, Debraj, 1994.
"On the Measurement of Polarization,"
Econometrica,
Econometric Society, vol. 62(4), pages 819-51, July.
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