Reputation and Civil War: Why Separatist Conflicts Are So Violent

Of all the different types of civil war, disputes over self-determination are the most likely to escalate into war and resist compromise settlement. Reputation and Civil War argues that this low rate of negotiation is the result of reputation building, where governments refuse to negotiate with early challengers in order to discourage others from making more costly demands in the future. Jakarta's wars against East Timor and Aceh, for example, were not designed to maintain sovereignty but to signal to Indonesia's other minorities that secession would be costly. Employing data from three different sources: laboratory experiments on undergraduates, statistical analysis of data on self-determination movements, and qualitative analyses of recent history in Indonesia and the Philippines, Barbara Walter provides some of the first systematic evidence that reputation strongly influences behavior, particularly between governments and ethnic minorities fighting over territory.

Barbara F. Walter is Professor of Political Science in the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars (2001) and cohyphen;editor of Territoriality and Conflict in an Era of Globalization (Cambridge, 2006) and Civil Wars, Insecurity and Intervention (1999).