Third-party intervention in sequential Wars of Attrition with incomplete information

Abstract

Vast literature in political science and political economy either argues or assumes that the state's primary role is to provide security. I propose a dynamic model to study the strategic interaction of a state and violent non-state groups that violently compete over rents and when there is uncertainty about the strength of each group. In the model, non-state groups fight sequential Wars of Attrition with replacement under asymmetric information. The violent competition between groups generates a negative externality for the state; the state wants to minimize competition and can temporarily weaken groups' military capabilities by targeting them. The analysis shows that public information about the strength of the last winner of a conflict mediates a trade-off between the likelihood and the intensity of violence when a new group emerges as a challenger; that even if targeting groups is costless for the state, targeting both groups is not always the optimal violence-reducing policy, when the state is weak its optimal policy is to take sides in favor of the incumbent group; and that these differences between weak and strong states will shape the dynamics of reputation building of violent non-state groups.