The Armed Peace: A Punctuated Equilibrium Theory of War

According to a leading rationalist explanation, war can break out when a large, rapid shift of power causes a credible commitment problem. This mechanism does not specify how inefficient fighting can resolve this cause, so it is an incomplete explanation of war. We present a complete information model of war as a sequence of battles and show that although opportunities for a negotiated settlement arise throughout, the very desirability of peace creates a commitment problem that undermines its likelihood. Because players have incentives to settle as soon as possible, they cannot credibly threaten to fight long enough if an opponent launches a surprise attack. This decreases the expected duration and costs of war and causes mutual deterrence to fail. Fighting's destructiveness improves the credibility of these threats by decreasing the benefits from continuing the war and can eventually lead to peace. In equilibrium players can only terminate war at specific windows of opportunity and fighting results in escalating costs that can leave both players worse off at the time peace is negotiated than a full concession would have before the war began.     

The Reckoning: Official Inquiries and the Iraq War

The moral and political reverberations of the Iraq War of 2003 are still being felt all over the world. In the belligerent democracies of the West, official inquiries of all kinds and conditions have probed and exposed the nature of government, the reflexes of the national security state, and, most extraordinarily, the sensitive relations between rulers and intelligencers. For all parties the consequences have been severe. Focusing on Britain, and especially on the inquiries led by Lord Hutton and Lord Butler - an odd couple but a revelatory combination - this article takes stock of the reckoning.