Reputation and Civil War

Attempts to resolve why self-determination disputes between governments and ethnic minorities so often result in civil war.

Why do self-determination disputes between governments and ethnic minorities often end in war? Barbara Walter argues it is because governments want to build tough reputations. Through a wide array of evidence, she demonstrates the importance of reputation building for governments in multiethnic countries and how governments consciously invest in it.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, in which 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 F. Walter provides some of the first systematic evidence that reputation strongly influences behavior, particularly between governments and ethnic minorities fighting over territory.