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What characteristics of a civil war determine whether it will end in a government victory, a rebel victory, or a negotiated settlement? To explore this question we present an expected utility model of the choice rebels and governments face between accepting a settlement or continuing to fight. The model implies that a settlement becomes more likely as (1) estimates of the probability of victory decline; (2) costs of conflict increase; (3) estimates of the time required to win increase; or (4) the utility from a settlement increases relative to that of victory Factors that (1) increase one party's probability of victory; (2) increase its payoffs from victory; (3) reduce the costs of conflict; and/or (4) reduce the time required to achieve victory increase that party's probability of winning and decrease the likelihood of a settlement. We test these propositions with a multinomial choice model that correctly predicts the outcome in 86 percent of the cases.
Since the end of World War II, civil war, not interstate war, has been the most frequent, deadly, and persistent form of armed conflict in the international system, regardless of whose count one uses. The proliferation of conflict within nations has stimulated a substantial body of research into the causes of revolution and other forms of civil war. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to the question of what factors determine the outcome of civil war: whether the government wins, the rebels win, or they reach a negotiated settlement.
Since the end of the Cold War, a number of protracted civil wars have been brought to a conclusion by means of negotiated settlements. U.N.-mediated peace accords resulted in at least a temporary end to civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bosnia, Angola, Guatemala, and Cambodia, to name but a few. This trend led scholars such as Roy Licklider (1992, 1993b, 1993c, 1995) to examine the conditions that make civil wars amenable to negotiated settlements and the conditions that make those settlements hold. Patrick Regan (1996) analyzed the effects of outside intervention on the outcome of civil wars. Barbara Walter (1997) explored the critical role of third-party intervention in bringing about a peaceful settlement to civil wars. Mason and Fett (1996) examined the characteristics of a civil war that...