Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of Conflict

Part of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs Series
Forthcoming, February 2025

Negotiations play a critical role in resolving most wars short of complete military victory or defeat. Yet at the same time, three quarters of all wartime negotiations over the last two centuries have failed to produce peace. What explains when, why, and how belligerents negotiate while fighting? Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of Conflict argues that wartime diplomacy is an underappreciated and highly strategic activity that not only helps to settle wars, but also to manage, fight, and potentially win them. I establish a theory that explains when talks will occur during conflict, as well as their likelihood of being sincere (good-faith attempts to reach a settlement) or insincere (bad-faith attempts to exploit diplomacy to curry political support and remobilize one’s military forces). I demonstrate that an international environment which applies high pressure on belligerents to negotiate will permit parties to talk regardless of their sincere or insincere intentions. Meanwhile, battlefield activities that strongly favor one side will increase the chance that negotiations which do take place are sincere. As such, the combination of strong external diplomatic pressures and indeterminate battlefield activity enables insincere negotiations that may promote war rather than end it.

I support my claims using a combination of statistical analysis of data on fighting and negotiating over two centuries of interstate war recorded at the daily level, computational text methods applied to archival documents from the Korean War, and several qualitative case studies of conflicts spanning space and time. This book makes at least three contributions. First, the negotiation and battle data I use in my statistical analysis are new, represent a fusion of several hundred sources of data, and offer an unprecedented step forward in the study of interstate conflict. Second, the notion of insincere negotiations contradicts a long-standing belief in international relations scholarship that wartime diplomacy is a mechanical process that has no strategic value beyond ending wars. Finally, Words of War challenges an assumption held by both scholars and practitioners that it “cannot hurt” for third-party actors and institutions to promote diplomacy during war.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction: Time to Talk

  • Chapter 1: A Theory of Wartime Negotiations

  • Chapter 2: Quantifying Two Centuries of War

  • Chapter 3: Fighting to Talk

  • Chapter 4: Talking to Fight

  • Chapter 5: Fighting Words in the First Arab-Israeli War

  • Chapter 6: The “Talking War” in Korea

  • Conclusion: Time to Stop Talking

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