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Issue Indivisibility and Time Horizons as

Rationalist Explanations for War
a
Monica Duffy Toft
a
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Published online: 16 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Monica Duffy Toft (2006) Issue Indivisibility and Time Horizons as Rationalist
Explanations for War, Security Studies, 15:1, 34-69, DOI: 10.1080/09636410600666246
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Security Studies 15, no. 1 (January–March 2006): 34–69
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DOI: 10.1080/09636410600666246
Issue Indivisibility and Time Horizons

as Rationalist Explanations for War
MONICA DUFFY TOFT

This paper focuses on two rationalist explanations for war: issue
indivisibility and time horizons. It argues that both types of bar-
gaining problems have not only been undertheorized in the inter-
national relations literature, but that a non-trivial proportion of the
Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 18:47 12 November 2014
violence witnessed since the end of the Cold War may be explained
by these obstacles to non-violent conflict resolution. The paper in-
cludes a discussion of nationalism and religious belief and how
these relate to issue indivisibility and infinite time horizons. To il-
lustrate the key arguments, it uses the case of Russia’s two most
recent wars in Chechnya.
This paper explores two bargaining problems—issue indivisibility and time

horizons—as rationalist explanations for war. Scholars of bargaining the-
ory have long noted that rational actors in a dispute should be able to
find a dispute resolution short of violence that will leave them both bet-
ter off.1 Because violence is costly and risky and actors understand this,
rational actors have a strong incentive to reach an agreement short of vi-
olence. As James Fearon notes in “Rationalist Explanations for War,” this
may explain why violent conflict is relatively rare. The interesting question
then shifts from the more common “why war?” to “why war sometimes but
not others?” Fearon neatly reviews and synthesizes the literature on three
general obstacles to non-violent bargaining outcomes. In his survey, Fearon
is partial to two of the three explanations he reviews, private information
Monica Duffy Toft is an associate professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government
and assistant director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.
For comments on earlier versions of this paper I would like to thank Ivan Arreguin-Toft,
Andrew Kydd, Dani Reiter, R.H. Wagner, and the participants in the National Security Seminar
at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University. I would also like to thank
the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Weatherhead Center for International Relations for
my research in the Religion and Global Politics Project, from which the idea for this paper
emerged.
1 The best recent treatment is James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International
Organization 49, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 379–414.
34
Issue Indivisibility and Time Horizons 35
and commitment problems, and he introduces but discounts the third issue,
indivisibility.2
Since the publication of Fearon’s essay, international relations theorists
have largely dealt with private information and commitment problems.3 Pri-
vate information problems arise because rational actors have incentives to
conceal or misrepresent their true interests and risk preferences.4 Thus, actors
are prone to miscalculate, ending up in wars they did not seek. Commitment
problems describe situations in which parties to a conflict have a genuine
desire to seek a solution short of violence; but since in most cases they are
not evenly matched (most violent conflicts are asymmetric), the weaker side
may not be able to trust that the stronger side will keep its agreements, par-
ticularly if one or both parties see the asymmetry as widening in the future.
Commitment problems may explain why weaker actors risk violence rather
than accept a settlement that may result in them being even worse off at a
future date.5
Aside from private information and commitment problems, there are at
least two additional rationalist explanations for war: issue indivisibility and
asymmetric time horizons (or time horizons for short). Issue indivisibility
refers to situations where two rational actors cannot agree that the issue over
2 See James D. Fearon, “Bargaining, Enforcement, and International Cooperation,” International

Organization 52, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 269–305. In subsequent work, Fearon shows that commitment
failures can take on characteristics of issue indivisibility. In his discussion of why warring parties within
a state cannot cooperate despite having a long shadow of the future, he notes that “a single ‘defection’
by the faction that gains power can eliminate or permanently weaken opponents, rendering conditional
retaliation ineffective for the policing of power-sharing agreements. Thus a commitment problem can
make the object of contention (state power) effectively indivisible and so a prime candidate for war-of-
attrition bargaining” (ibid., 293–94, fn 78). In other words, “Warring factions invariably have conflicting
preferences over the terms of a settlement and may hold out for better terms for a long time in a (literal)
war of attrition” (ibid., 294).
3 Other scholars have explored non-rationalist obstacles. For the impact of the number of actors
on a bargaining outcome, see Kenneth A. Oye, ed., Cooperation Under Anarchy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986), For institutional contexts, see Lisa L. Martin, Coercive Cooperation: Explaining
Multilateral Economic Sanctions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), On how organizational
culture of bureaucracies might affect actor preferences for peace or war, see Jeffrey W. Legro, “Culture
and Preferences in the International Cooperation Two-Step,” The American Political Science Review 90,
no. 1 (March 1996): 118–37.
4 On information problems, see for example, Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” 379–414;
Andrew Kydd, “Game Theory and the Spiral Model,” World Politics 49, no. 3 (April 1997): 371–400; and
Robert Powell, In the Shadow of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
5 On asymmetrical conflicts, see Ivan Arreguı́n-Toft, “How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asym-
metric Conflicts,” International Security 26, no. 1 (Summer 2001): 93–128. On commitment problems
more generally, see Thomas C. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, rev. ed., (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1980). More recent treatments among international relations scholars include Barry Posen, “The
Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” in Ethnic Conflict and International Security, ed. Michael Brown
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 103–24; Barbara F. Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War
Settlement,” International Organization, 51, no. 3 (Summer, 1997): 335–64; and James Fearon, “Commit-
ment Problems and the Spread of Ethnic Conflict,” in The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear,
Diffusion, and Escalation, ed. David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1998): 107–26.
36 M. D. Toft
which they are bargaining is divisible. As the apocryphal tale of Solomon’s

decision to divide a child in two illustrates, most issues are literally divisible.6
Once divided, however, what remains of the thing divided becomes qual-
itatively different to the actors in question. Many issues share this quality,
ranging from offices (for example, which of those eligible becomes king) to
religious sites (for example, the Q’aba in Mecca) to control of small plots of
seemingly worthless territory. Where true, actors might escalate a dispute to
violence because the benefits of obtaining ownership or control of the thing
in question outweigh the costs and risks of non-violence or division. The
second alternative, time horizons, remains virtually unexplored in interna-
tional relations literature.7 Two actors with different time horizons might end
up in violence when the actors do not share the same value of the future.8
Contrary to Robert Axelrod’s model of iterated games in which a “shadow of
the future” makes cooperation between rational, egoistic players more likely,
I highlight the circumstances under which the shadow of an infinite future

can make such cooperation less likely.9
Until recently there has been relatively little exploration of the problem
of issue indivisibility and almost no discussion of time horizons.10 As I will ar-
gue, this lack of attention has stemmed partly from a misunderstanding about
the possibility of issue indivisibility. Some scholars argue that because values
such as offices and territory are literally divisible, and because of the possibil-
ity and prevalence of side payments, issue indivisibility is a poor foundation
for a general explanation of why disputes escalate to violence sometimes but
not others.11 As to time horizons, the lack of attention might be due to two
factors: (1) a narrow definition of rationality and (2) an excessive application
6 In the story, King Solomon is approached by two women who both claim to be the rightful mother
of a child. Each demands custody and presents strong evidence of her maternity. Solomon deliberates and
calls the women forward to hear his decision: he will divide the child in two, giving half to each woman.
One of the women throws herself at the king’s feet, begging him to spare the child and surrendering
her claim to custody. When Solomon sees that the other woman was willing to see the child dead rather
than surrender her claim, he awards the child to the first woman and proclaims that by her willingness
to sacrifice her claim for the child’s life, she has shown herself to be the child’s true mother.
7 There is a literature on the impact of time horizons on bargaining outcomes in the context of
iterated games, but as I will argue, its assumptions and applications make it less relevant to the type of
bargaining under consideration here. See Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic
Books, 1985).
8 Or, they could also end up escalating a dispute to violence because both maintain a long or infinite
time horizon.
9 For a related argument see, Michelle Garfinkel and Stergios Skaperdas, “Conflict without Misper-
ceptions or Incomplete Information: How the Future Matters,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 44, no.
6 (2000): 793–807.
10 For a book-length treatment of issue indivisibility and war, see Monica Duffy Toft, The Geography of
Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, and Indivisible Territory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Also see Stacie Goddard, “Uncommon Ground: The Making of Indivisible Issues,” (PH.D. dissertation,
Columbia University 2003); and Ron Hassner, “To Halve and to Hold: Conflicts Over Sacred Space and
the Problem of Indivisibility,” Security Studies, 12, no. 2 (2003): 1–33.
11 See Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War, 381–82.
of a subset of bargaining game structures that precludes the possibility of a

bargain not being reached.
The rest of this paper follows in four sections. First, I introduce issue in-
divisibility as a bargaining problem, showing how literal divisibility and side
payments do not undermine the explanatory utility of issue indivisibility. Fo-
cusing on territory as an issue of dispute, I argue that a group’s attachment to
territory can make violent disputes over even objectively worthless territory
rational. Second, I introduce the case of Russia’s two most recent wars in
Chechnya as an illustrative case of the mix of causes that best explain in-
trastate conflicts. Third, I explore the nexus between violence, religion, and
nationalism, showing how the concept of time mixes with conceptions of
salvation and redemption to make risking violence and death rational in the
present. Fourth, I again use the Chechen case to illustrate how time horizons
can not only prevent non-violent conflict resolution, but act to prevent war
termination once a conflict is under way. The paper concludes with a sum-
mary, highlights of the argument’s theoretical implications, and suggestions
for further research.
THE PROBLEM OF ISSUE INDIVISIBILITY
In “Rationalist Explanations for War,” Fearon introduces issue indivisibility as

one of three obstacles to bargaining short of violence:
Perhaps some issues, by their very natures, simply will not admit com-
promise. Though neither example is wholly convincing, issues that might
exhibit indivisibility include abortion in domestic politics and the prob-
lem of which prince sits on the throne of, say, Spain, in eighteenth- or
nineteenth-century international politics. Issue indivisibility could in prin-
ciple make war rational for the obvious reason that if the issue allows
only a finite number of resolutions, it might be that none falls within the
range that both prefer to fighting.12
He then goes on to express skepticism about the explanatory utility of issue

indivisibility in real-world bargaining:
However, the issues over which states bargain typically are complex and
multidimensional; side-payments or linkages with other issues typically
are possible; and in principle states could alternate or randomize among
a fixed number of possible solutions to a dispute.13
If this assessment of the distribution of divisible issues (issues are “typically”

complex and side-payments are “typically” possible) is correct, then Fearon
is right to suggest that issue indivisibility is unlikely to ground a general
12 Ibid., 382.
13 Ibid.
38 M. D. Toft
explanation of why disputes escalate to violence sometimes but not others.

But then Fearon advances a subsidiary claim:
War-prone international issues may often be effectively indivisible, but the

cause of this indivisibility lies in domestic political and other mechanisms
rather than in the nature of the issues themselves.14
This raises an important question: is it necessary that issues be objectively

indivisible for the expected effect—escalation to violence—to obtain? Or, to
paraphrase Alexander Wendt, is indivisibility what actors make of it?15 By
identifying a problem set in which some issues are “in their nature” indivisi-
ble, while others are in effect social constructions, Fearon’s statement implies
that only the former should count as true obstacles to a rational conflict res-
olution short of violence.16
Fearon does not try to support this claim; instead, it takes the form
of an assertion. He is not alone in this respect. Ronald Hassner, for exam-
ple, has argued that only sacred spaces, such as the Q’aba in Mecca or
the Temple Mount in Jerusalem count as truly indivisible issues; whereas
territory—including territory incorporated into a nation’s consciousness as a
sine qua non of national identity—does not count as indivisible because it
is not deemed sacred. According to Hassner, sacred space is characterized
by three elements: (1) integrity, (2) boundaries, and (3) nonfungibility.17
Integrity indicates the space cannot be subdivided; boundaries indicate terri-
tory possesses clearly defined and unambiguous borders; and nonfungibility
means nothing else can be substituted for that territory. Although this is a
clear and precise definition of sacred territory, nationalists would see these
same criteria as applying to their beloved homeland. As I explained in earlier
work, “homeland” is a special category of territory: it is not an object to be
exchanged but an indivisible attribute of group identity.”18 Thus, although
14 Ibid.
15 Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy is What States Make of it: The Social Construction of Power Politics,”
International Organization, 46 (Spring 1992): 391–425. Wendt argues that a structure has no necessary
behavioral implications other than those attributed to it by the subjective understandings of its chroniclers.
In an earlier version of an analogous argument, Stephen Walt asserts it is not so much the objective
balance of power against which states are apt to balance but a combination of objective factors and
“other mechanisms” (stated intent and ideology, histories of friendship or rivalry, and so on) that should
more properly be conceptualized as balance of threat. See Walt, Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1990), chap. 2.
16 If Fearon was right, the empirical distribution of issue indivisibility as an obstacle to non-violent
dispute resolution would be (a) extremely small and (b) subject to absorption into the private information
obstacle; insofar as if it is true that issues imagined as indivisible, but not really so, can be re-imagined
relatively easily, then willingness or ability to re-imagine issue indivisibility simply becomes another form
of private information.
17 Hassner, “To Halve and to Hold,” 15.
18 Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence, 20. For similar treatments of ethnic homelands see, Anthony
Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986); Walker Connor, “The Impact
Hassner’s definition is helpful, his assertion that it applies only to sacred

spaces unnecessarily circumscribes his arguments.
Hassner’s hiving off of territory from true or natural issue indivisibil-
ity (into which he includes only sacred spaces) therefore stands as possible
empirical support for Fearon’s implicit claim that the distribution of issue indi-
visibility as an obstacle to non-violent conflict resolution is low as compared
to private information and commitment problems. It supplies an empirical
referent for a highly restrictive definition of issue divisibility and, by implica-
tion, advances the argument that regardless of the stated aims of combatants,
ethnic and nationalist conflicts over territory might be better explained by
other causes, such as disputes over resources.
The logic of the claim that it is meaningful to distinguish between real
and imagined issue indivisibility is interesting. It suggests, as constructivists
do, if an issue has been made indivisible by an act of will (or by the accre-
tion of wills over generations), then it can also be made divisible by an act
of will.19 This would not be true of, say, something naturally or intrinsically
indivisible (that is, incapable of being divided without being qualitatively al-
tered).20 Other than its biting critique of the possibility of universal theory,
this is, in fact, constructivism’s central appeal: it holds out the possibility that,
for example, if the cooperation-disrupting implications of anarchy are what
states will them to be, then states can, by as yet unspecified mechanisms, un-
will them as well.21 Yet, as a colleague recently put it to me in arguments over
the capacity of will to alter constructed realities “Rocks are natural and bricks
are constructed, but if either hits you in the head you might not appreciate the
difference.”22 Unless one can support the claim that constructed realities are
relatively easy to alter, there is, in short, no good reason to suppose an oper-
ational or causal difference between issues that are naturally indivisible and
of Homelands Upon Diasporas,” in Modern Diasporas in International Politics, ed. Gabriel Sheffer (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 16–46; and John Agnew, Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation
of State and Society (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987)
19 An issue may be perfectly divisible but made functionally indivisible because of strategic inter-
action. For example, elites may be willing to make concessions; but for fear of losing power, they have
their hands tied because of promises made to the public or the desires of the public. Such an argument
is common in the literature, though not explicitly termed a problem of indivisibility; it is more often
called domestic audience costs. See, for example, Hein Goemans, “Fighting for their Survival: The Fate of
Leaders and the Duration of War,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 44 (2000): 555–76. For an account
that looks at the dynamics of bargaining between states, not necessarily elites and masses, as a source of
indivisibility, see Stacie Goddard, “Uncommon Ground: The Making of Indivisible Issues” (PH.D. disserta-
tion, Columbia University, 2002). I admit that indivisibility may arise as a result of political dynamics, but
such approaches fail to consider that some goods are either inherently indivisible or that once interpreted
as indivisible in the political sphere, they are then difficult to reinterpret and present as divisible to a
persuaded population.
20 For a similar discussion of indivisibility from a game theoretic perspective see, Steven J. Brams
and Alan D. Taylor, From Cake Cutting to Dispute Resolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996).
21 Cf. Wendt, “Anarchy is What States Make of it.”
22 I am indebted to Ivan Arreguı́n-Toft for this remark.
40 M. D. Toft
those whose indivisibility is the product of human social construction. In the

absence of a convincing argument to the contrary—and neither Fearon’s nor
Hassner’s excellent essays are persuasive in this regard—we should expect,
for example, homeland territory to count, under the right circumstances, as
an indivisible issue.
My point here is not that private information and commitment prob-
lems do not also constitute real obstacles to conflict resolutions short of
violence—it is no accident that Fearon’s article has become a standard in the
field. Rather, I simply assert that as obstacles to non-violent conflict resolu-
tion, issue indivisibility (and, I argue, time horizons) should be considered
on a par with both private information and commitment problems. My argu-
ment is two-fold. First, in terms of consequences and as suggested above, the
distinction between a feature of actor conflict which is socially constructed
and natural may not be very useful. Wendt, for example, would not sug-
gest the “constant climate of war” adduced to anarchy by realists and neo-
realists does not exist and have a real impact on the plans and calculations of
statesmen. Wendt’s argument is that it did not (and by extension, does not)
have to be that way. Second, no one—neither Fearon nor any of those who
explore private information and commitment problems as obstacles to non-
violent conflict resolution since publication of his article—attempt to argue
that these two rationalist explanations for war are themselves free of so-
cial construction. My argument, therefore, builds on, rather than contradicts,
Fearon’s.
If it is true that as compared to private information and commitment
problems—both of which often feature prominently in interstate disputes—
issue indivisibility is disproportionately represented in ethnic, nationalist, and
religious conflicts, then in some respects the timing of Fearon’s argument was
unfortunate.23 By the time of its publication, policy elites, immersed in state-
centric theories and confronted with the practical difficulties of managing
23 Perhaps “survey” would be a better summary than “argument.” The argument to which I refer
here is that private information and commitment problems account for the lion’s share of the causes of
conflict escalation in more recent research. Older research which treats indivisibility of issues with some
consideration includes Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1960); Fred C. Iklé, How Nations Negotiate (New York: Praeger, 1964); Glenn Snyder and Paul
Diesing, Conflict Among Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), chaps. 2, 3; Janice Gross
Stein, ed., Getting to the Table (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), chap. 8; Alexander
George and Gordon Craig, Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Problems of Our Times, 2nd ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990), chap. 12; Roger Fisher, “Fractionating Conflict,” in International Conflict
and Behavioral Science, ed. Roger Fisher (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 91–109; John Vasquez, “The
Tangibility of Issues and Global Conflict: A Test of Rosenau’s Issue Area Typology,” Journal of Peace
Research 20, no. 2 (1983): 179–92; Paul F. Diehl, “What are They Fighting For?: The Importance of Issues
in International Conflict Research,” Journal of Peace Research 29, no. 3 (1992): 333–44. For a more general
social science treatment, see Jon Elster, Solomonic Judgements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989). A more recent exception is Barry O’Neill who provides a helpful schema of indivisible issues.
Barry O’Neill, “Risk Aversion in International Relations Theory,” International Studies Quarterly 45, no.
4 (December 2001): 617–40.
Cold War nuclear bipolarity, were increasingly faced with a different kind
of conflict, the origins and intensities of which had not been adequately ad-
dressed or explained. Most were taken aback by the rise in ethnic, national,
and religious violence that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and
early efforts to explain these conflicts tended either to rely state-centric the-
ories or simply revert to “ancient hatreds” (that is, irrational actor) models of
conflict.24
Are nationalists, religious adherents, and terrorists irrational actors? Most
social scientists remain highly skeptical of such arguments, and I count my-
self among them. Most of the nationalists, religious adherents, and terror-
ists who initiate or participate in organized violence are in fact rational ac-
tors, even when they acknowledge a certainty that their own deaths will
result from their actions.25 They calculate the expected costs and benefits
of their actions then act to maximize their utility. But many policy mak-
ers appear to accept the argument that terrorists, and in particular suicide
terrorists, are not rational actors.26 To understand the rationality of suicide
bombing, it is necessary to understand issue indivisibility and time hori-
zons and how they influence conflict bargaining. The next section takes
up issue indivisibility as it relates to disputed territory. Specifically, I intro-
duce a synoptic case study—Russia’s first dispute with Chechnya in 1994—
as a way to illustrate (not test) the utility of both issue indivisibility and
time horizons as explanatory variables in a conflict that did escalate to
violence.
24 State-centric and fear-based theories include Roger D. Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence :
Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002); Stephen Van Evera, “Hypotheses on Nationalism and War,” International Security 18, no.
4 (Spring 1994): 5–39; Barry Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” in Ethnic Conflict and
International Security, ed. Michael Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 103–24.; and
R.H. Wagner, “The Causes of Peace,” in Stopping the Killing: How Civil Wars End, ed. Roy Licklider (New
York: New York University Press, 1993), 235–68. Examples of purely ancient hatreds argument include
Edward Shils, “Primordial, Personal, Sacred, and Civil Ties,” British Journal of Sociology 8, no. 2 (1957):
130-45; Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New
States,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Harold R.
Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); and William Bloom, Personal
Identity, National Identity, and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
25 Suicide is often taken as evidence of irrationality, yet most people recognize it can still be a rational
act in and of itself if the actor calculates that the expected benefits outweigh the costs. Suicide should
therefore be counted as evidence of irrationality only in circumstances where there is no reasonable
prospect of benefit from the self-sacrifice, not as a result of willingness to make such a sacrifice per se.
26 For evidence of the rationality of suicide terrorism, see Stathis Kalyvas, “Wanton and Senseless?
The Logic of Massacres in Algeria,” Rationality & Society 11, no. 3 (August 1999): 243–85; Robert A. Pape,
”The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” American Political Science Review 97 (August 2003): 343–61;
and Ariel Merari, “Terrorism as a Strategy of Insurgency,” Terrorism and Political Violence 5, no. 4 (Winter
1993): 213–51. For an excellent account of how Hizballah trained its followers to accept violence and
death as a rational course, see Martin Kramer, “Hizballah: The Calculus of Jihad,” in Fundamentalism
and the State, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993),
539–56.
42 M. D. Toft
INDIVISIBLE SPACE: TERRITORY AND VIOLENCE
International relations scholars thus far have done an outstanding job of

bracketing the logic of obstacles to non-violent dispute resolution but at
the cost of neglecting an empirical assessment of the distribution of such
obstacles across space and time. A key question remaining unanswered
is what proportion of violent conflicts is the result of commitment prob-
lems, asymmetric information, issue indivisibility, time horizons, or some
combination.27
Even if we grant that private information and commitment problem
obstacles best explain states and interstate interactions, we note that since
1990 there have been only a handful of interstate wars involving fewer than
100,000 casualties combined.28 Tragic as this figure is, ethnic, civil, and re-
ligious wars comprise nine of ten large-scale conflicts, and the twenty-two
wars that began in the 1990s claimed between 1 and 2 million lives.29
In other words, private information and commitment problems may ac-
count for only a fraction of large-scale violence. Similarly, issue indivisibility
may not play as strong a role in violence between states, yet proves vital to
our understanding of a majority of intrastate conflicts. This is hardly the same
thing as claiming private information and commitment problems do not at
times complicate non-violent conflict resolution within states but rather as-
serts that they generally play a lesser role for reasons that derive from the
logic of each factor. For example, in international relations theory generally,
we assume states are unitary rational actors, and this assumption rarely draws
much fire. This is not because the assumptions are plausible but because the-
ories built on these assumptions have proven useful and generate meaningful
policy recommendations. Yet the same assumption at the sub-state level is
apt to draw considerable criticism, whether the sub-state actor is a multina-
tional corporation, terrorist or organized criminal group, or political party.
Again, the validity of the assumptions is less the issue than the explanatory
and policy utility derived from theories of ethnic and national conflict that
27 For an article that tries to incorporate commitment problems with time horizons, see Peter Hwang
and Willem P. Burgers, “Apprehension and Temptation: The Forces Against Cooperation,” The Journal
of Conflict Resolution 43, no. 1 (February 1999): 117–30. With other models of bargaining, however, and
despite their revealing “the prospect for future interactions is necessary for cooperation,” their discussion
underplays the importance of time in favor of trust (for example, commitment problems).
28 Since 1990 there have been four interstate wars: Persian Gulf, India-Pakistan, Ethiopia-Eritrea, and
the recent Iraq war.

29 Estimates vary widely as some sources include civilian deaths resulting from drought and famine,
while others include only military deaths. Since 1940 the total number of deaths from civil war ranges
from 14 million to 33.1 million. This number is calculated from the author’s own data set of all civil
wars since 1940. Additional figures in this paper are calculated from this data set also, unless otherwise
noted. The twenty-two wars started in the 1990s occurred in Georgia (two), Rwanda, Burundi (two), Iraq,
Moldova, Sierra Leone, Yugoslavia (three), Algeria, Tajikistan, Brazzaville (two), Russia (two), Yemen,
Zaire/Congo, Angola, Guinea Bissau, and the Philippines. For a list of cases, please see appendix. The
data set is available from the author.
are based on such assumptions. The problem is that the state as a whole
is qualitatively different—in terms of preferences and utility functions—from
the sum of its parts. As Chaim Kaufmann points out in his review of rational
choice approaches to the study of ethnic conflict, rational choice approaches
have so far suffered from a lack of understanding of how individuals calculate
utility:
The main trouble is that the very existence of ethnic conflict poses an
immediate and serious anomaly for rational choice because it radically
contradicts the program’s core assumptions. If people are motivated solely
by individual interests, there is no reason why they should accept net
losses of material welfare to support a group identity. (Rational choice
approaches normally exclude purely psychic benefits as determinants of
behavior, as this would move the explanatory action to explaining those
beliefs and emotions. In the study of ethnic conflict, this would in effect
cede the field to the other three approaches.)

Individuals should therefore support group goals only when
coerced—when group leaders control benefits more valuable than the
costs of complying with leaders’ demands, can identify noncompliant in-
dividuals and punish them, and can prohibit exit. Otherwise, attempts to
organize conflict along communal lines should either collapse under the
weight of mass disinterest or mass assimilation, or else disintegrate into
free-for-alls in which coalitions are based purely on local advantage and
should cross-cut identity boundaries as often as not.
What should not occur are the willing mass attachments to group
identities observed by researchers in the other main research programs
in ethnic conflict.30
To be sure, Fearon’s presentation of logical obstacles to non-violent

conflict resolution is not “rational choice” in any strict sense, but Kaufmann’s
keen observation helps place Fearon’s doubts about issue indivisibility, for
example, in a clearer light.
Millions of human beings had been consumed by violence world-
wide in other-than-interstate wars since World War II, but not until the
collapse of the Soviet Union did these wars appear to merit serious atten-
tion from international relations theorists and national foreign policy experts.
Nationalism—a phenomenon whose key feature is the “willing mass attach-
ment” of individual to group identity—was an important cause of violent
conflict after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, for example,
nationalist and ethnic identity issues lay at the core of more than three-
fourths (seventeen of twenty-two) of all civil wars started during this decade.
Many would-be nation-states in the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact
30 Chaim Kaufmann, “Rational Choice And Progress In The Study of Ethnic Conflict: A Review Essay,”
Security Studies, 14, no. 1 (January–March 2005): 182.

44 M. D. Toft
mobilized for increased autonomy ranging from greater political or economic

autonomy as in Tatarstan to outright statehood as in Croatia.31 Each de-
mand represented conflicting interests, but only some escalated to violence.
Why?
A recent survey of ethnic wars reveals a striking pattern.32 Ethnic groups
concentrated in self-declared ancestral homelands within a country tended
to seek nation-statehood and proved less willing to negotiate outcomes short
of that goal. Their demands, as in Abkhazia in the Republic of Georgia and
Chechnya in the Russian Republic, tended to be met with armed force. Dis-
persed or highly urbanized ethnic groups in a state were unlikely to seek
full political independence, and their demands tended to be met with nego-
tiations rather than armed force.33
The mechanism of issue indivisibility in these conflicts is as simple as
it is pervasive.34 Nations are defined in many ways; but with few excep-
tions (that is, Roma, Berbers), most nations identify strongly with a specific
territory: a homeland. By “identify,” I mean that individual members have
come to see the occupation or control of a territory as inseparable from
their existence as nationals. Threats to homeland become tantamount to
threats to survival, and many nationals would rather risk death than live
on without a sense of national identity.35 In fact, if we consider the empiri-
cal distribution of civil wars over the decades 1940 to 2000, we find that 98
percent of civil wars fought for territorial control were incited by ethnically-
based demands, while 73 percent of all ethnically-based civil wars involved
fights for territorial control.36 Territory is thus central to ethnicity and na-
tional identity and is a prime motivator for war, and, not inconsequentially,
death.
31 Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence, chap. 1.

32 Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence, chap. 3.
33 Keep in mind that in my theory, issue indivisibility only comes into play as a barrier to non-
violent conflict resolution in sub-state conflicts in which groups are concentrated in a national homeland.
Chechnya—the case chosen for analysis here—fits that pattern and is, in my view, representative of other
cases in which an ethnic group is concentrated in its national homeland. This, however, is not the same
thing as saying that all ethnic conflicts fit this pattern.
34 This article discusses the indivisibility of territory from only the nation’s perspective. For an ar-
gument on how a state’s concern about precedents (for example, establishing a reputation for allowing
secessions constrains its willingness to cede territory) provokes it to see its territory as indivisible, see
Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence, chap 2.
35 Previous research tests this thesis against logically competing motivations for self-sacrifice, such as
strategic importance (that is, defensible rivers or mountains) and economic resources (including developed
industry or exploitable natural resources). In all cases, these factors played some role in the willingness
to risk death to protect the nation. However in cases of homeland concentration these motivations were
invariably eclipsed by the issue of national identity and attachment to territory. See Toft, The Geography
of Ethnic Violence, chap. 3. Also see Pape, “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.” Robert Pape’s
findings about the connection between suicide terrorism and self-determination fights provide further
confirmation.
36 Pearson chi2 (1) = 62.72, pr = 0.00.
The connection between death, sacrifice, immortality, and national iden-

tity is captured well by Benedict Anderson in his introduction to Imagined
Communities:
No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist

than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial
reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either
deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true
precedents in earlier times . . .
The cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer
if one tries to imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph
for fallen Liberals . . . The reason is that neither Marxism nor Liberalism are
much concerned with death and immortality. If the nationalist imagining
is so concerned, this suggests a strong affinity with religious imaginings.
As this affinity is by no means fortuitous, it may be useful to begin a
consideration of the cultural roots of nationalism with death, as the last

of a whole gamut of fatalities.37
Self-sacrifice in defense of the nation becomes a virtue, a secular path

to an immortality commemorated by memorials such as tombs of unknown
soldiers. No one questions the rationality of a soldier—a person authorized to
kill others in defense of his or her state—who risks death in an effort to save
his fellow comrades in arms. His sacrifice is thought to be heroic.38 Yet by
contrast, many consider a young person who walks into a crowded market-
place and sacrifices herself in the defense or advancement of her nation by
detonating a bomb to be irrational (perhaps drugged or “brainwashed”).39
In addition to my earlier point that self-sacrifice in expectation of propor-
tionately greater benefits should be considered a rational act, this example
highlights an underlying mechanism linking self-sacrifice with identity and
rationality. Essentially, the more closely one identifies with a person, or in
37 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1991), 9–10.

38 For example, a brief survey of United States’ Medal of Honor citations—and this is the state’s highest
award for gallantry in war—reveals that many of its recipients acted to safeguard others knowing they
would not survive the attempt. The classic example features a soldier leaping upon a live hand grenade
in order to save the lives of his adjacent comrades. Also see U.S. Army Center of Military History, “Metal
of Honor Recipients Somalia,” http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/mohsom.htm for the citations of MSG Gary
I. Gordon and SFC Randall D. Shugart who were each posthumously awarded medals of honor for their
actions in Somalia in 1993. Gordon and Shugart were two special operations soldiers who volunteered
(their requests were rejected two times before finally being accepted by their commanders) to be airlifted
into a crash site in order to defend a downed helicopter crew; a task they subsequently attempted with
gut-wrenching bravery and professionalism until overwhelmed by enemy forces and killed.
39 See Steven Lee Myers, “Female Suicide Bombers Unnerve Russians,” The New York Times, 7 August
2003. The Russian government, for example, claimed that a recent suicide bomber was drugged. According
to Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s senior advisor on Chechnya, “Chechens
are turning these young girls into zombies using psychotropic drugs” (Ibid.). In other words, the woman
did not act rationally.
46 M. D. Toft
some cases an object, the less likely self-sacrifice is seen by others as irra-
tional.40 If this underlying mechanism is right, then it makes sense to seek out
the ways human beings come to identify closely with objects ranging from
religious belief and practice (including sacred spaces) to Anderson’s imag-
ined communities to ideologies such as liberalism and socialism.41 A broad
survey of the literature—academic and popular—on the topic places these
things with which people are apt to closely identify in a kind of hierarchy:
self comes first, then family, then nationalism and religion (in the Western
canon; elsewhere the order is reversed, but still close), then modern ideolo-
gies such as Liberalism, Socialism, and so on. As Anderson notes, the idea of
a “cenotaph for fallen Liberals” sounds silly. If broadly true, then self-sacrifice
for Liberalism would be considered less rational than self-sacrifice for Allah
or for la France.
This link between death and identity lies at the heart of issue indivisi-
bility as a bargaining problem. Ethnic groups seek increased autonomy and

develop nationalist movements. When they are concentrated in a territory
they describe as their homeland these demands tend to escalate to outright
statehood and are generally met with violence. It matters less whether the
homeland possesses natural resources, developed industry, or any other tan-
gible values. What matters most is that the people who live there think of the
land—its occupation and control—as a part of themselves. Divide it or share
its control and you may as well hack off an arm or leg: what survives would
be qualitatively different. In this situation—which accurately characterizes the
fight for autonomy by the Chechens from the Russian Federation—violence
may have been the most rational course of action for both sides.
CIVIL WAR IN CHECHNYA: PRIVATE INFORMATION AND

COMMITMENT PROBLEMS VERSUS ISSUE INDIVISIBILITY
The most difficult question to answer about issue indivisibility, however, is

whether it reduces conceptually to mere public opinion. It does not. Public
opinion can make an issue indivisible, but not all issue indivisibility comes
from public opinion. A better way to conceptualize issue indivisibility is to
think of underlying and proximate indivisibility. Underlying indivisibility is
40 The logic goes further. If Anderson is right, and nations are imagined communities, it follows that
self-sacrifice in defense of something intangible or imagined is less rational than defense of something
tangible and concrete, such as a state with delimitable boundaries. Such a dynamic, if true, would explain
why many non-Arabs (and in particular, Israelis) tend to see Palestinian violence in defense of homeland
as irrational, yet have no similar apprehension concerning Israeli sacrifices in defense of the same territory
(Palestine). If Palestine is not the homeland of a Palestinian Arab people, then what legitimate or rational
purpose could the violence perpetrated by Palestinian Arabs against Israelis serve? None.
41 For a compelling account that reveals how leftist ideology can drive individuals to risk death, see
Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
an historical accretion of identity understandings extending at least decades,

but often hundreds or even thousands of years, while proximate indivisibility
is most usefully captured by the concept of public opinion. Most charismatic
political elites, for example, have some capacity to alter long-established
views on the nature of issues, including even the status surrounding reli-
gious objects or sites and parts of territory considered national homelands.
But the underlying inheritance of imaginings (to use Anderson’s concep-
tion) constrains even the most charismatic leader.42 Ancient hatreds are most
likely ancient resentments fanned into flames by demagoguery, yet without
the underlying history of resentment, even an extremely charismatic leader is
unlikely to convince followers to perpetrate violence against another group.
In sum, to paraphrase Marx, charismatic leaders are free to re-imagine issue
indivisibility, but not as they please.
How do we know that in a sub-state context, private information or
commitment problems are not as important as obstacles to non-violent dis-

pute resolution as issue indivisibility?43 What about side payments? Assuming
in the Chechnya example that the Russian Federation and the Chechen resis-
tance are each rational actors attempting to maximize their own utility, they
should have been able to locate a settlement short of violence that would
have left them better off.
According to the logic of the private information problem, disputes be-
tween rational actors may escalate to violence when either or both sides
misrepresent their true (1) capabilities or (2) resolve. Because each side has
incentives to misrepresent interests and capabilities (thus gaining a better
bargain), we should expect the private information problems to complicate
efforts to resolve disputes short of violence.44
In the case of Chechnya, private information did not play a large role
in frustrating efforts to resolve the conflict without violence. From the Rus-
sian Federation’s perspective, the conflict with Chechnya was an asymmetric
one. Russia expected it could defeat the Chechens quickly and decisively
with its military might. Russia made this clear from the beginning: it had
both the capability and the willingness to use force should the Chechens
insist on independence. In fact, Russia sent troops to Chechnya as early as
1991, three years before the official start of the 1994–1996 war. Russia be-
lieved its overwhelming advantages in force would make the Chechens back
42 On this point, see esp. Paul Brass, “Elite Groups, Symbol Manipulation and Ethnic Identity among
the Muslims of South Asia,” in Political Identity in South Asia, ed. David Taylor and Malcom Yapp (London:
Curzon Press, 1979), 35–77.
43 For an argument that commitment problems can be understood as information problems due to
uncertainty, see Eric Gartzke, “War is in the Error Term,” International Organization 53, 3 (Summer 1993):
567–87.
44 If national identities were as elastic as that supported by the logic of constructivism, bargaining
elites would then be free to over-represent the degree to which their peoples were attached to the
land, and issue indivisibility as an obstacle would be subsumed by private information as an obstacle.
Empirically, however, there is simply no good evidence to support the notion of highly elastic identities.
48 M. D. Toft
down or, failing that, any ensuing conflict would be quick and cheap. In
addition to transparency in terms of capabilities, Russia’s president, Boris
Yeltsin, made clear to his legislature that Russia’s willingness to resort to vi-
olence to prevent secession extended to any and every secession-minded
political unit within the Russian Federation, regardless of its size, natural re-
sources, strategic location, and so on, was iron clad. Yeltsin argued publicly
that allowing even the most worthless and troublesome political sub-unit to
defect from the Federation would set too dangerous a precedent, perhaps
encouraging a more serious and damaging chain reaction of such defections
in the future. In his biography, he explained his and his administration’s po-
sition, “We cannot stand idly by while a piece of Russia breaks off, because
that will be the beginning of the collapse of the country.”45 Russian territory
was therefore indivisible in two senses. First, Russian political elites were
claiming that a territory whose ethnic composition was seventy-seven per-
cent non-Russian was, in fact, Russia. Russians identify with Chechnya in the
same way many French identified with Algeria. In Russia’s case the attach-
ment was romantic and deeply rooted in Russia’s positive national identity
as a Christian empire that had at last, after nearly thirty years of bloody con-
flict, subjugated and incorporated an unruly Islamic people. Second, these
same elites were raising the issue of precedent setting. The Russian Federa-
tion refused to grant Chechnya independence as this would set a precedent
and thereby potentially obligate it to grant independence to its many other
would-be newly-independent states. In 1999, renewed fighting in Chechnya
also served another useful function for Russia: as Chechen fighters sought
sanctuary in neighboring Georgia—itself no friend to Russia—Russia felt jus-
tified increasing political and possibly military pressure on Georgia and its
internal politics. In sum, Yeltsin’s statement and many others showed that
Russia considered Chechnya indivisible for two reasons: one concerned Rus-
sian national identity, and the other involved precedent setting.
From the Chechen perspective, the collapse of the Soviet regime pro-
vided an ideal opportunity to gain independence. Chechnya’s president,
Dzhokar Dudayev, made it clear to Russia that his people would rather die
than continue to remain subject to the Russian Federation. Among Dudayev’s
first actions as president was to declare independence and establish military
units. He was out to defend the survival of the Chechen nation. He had the
support of the local population, who consistently came out in the tens of
thousands to support his calls for an independent Chechnya.46 A western
journalist visiting Grozny’s main square in 1991, the year Dudayev declared
45 Boris Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, trans. by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: Public Affairs, 2000),
58–59.
46 Edward Kline, “Conflict in Chechnya,” (working paper, Andrei Sakharov Foundation, 24 March
1995). In 1994, 200,000 demonstrators came out to support Dudayev’s call. This turn out came from a
population of just over 1million, 75 percent of whom were Chechen, and at a time when opposition to
Dudayev was supposed to be the strongest.
Chechnya’s independence, noted how an older man waved his dagger and
exclaimed he would aim it at Russian tanks if they dared come. When ques-
tioned by the journalist about what would happen, the man yelled back, “‘I
will die. I, and the entire nation with me.”’47
Chechens believed Russia threatened their survival as a nation, and un-
der Dudayev’s leadership, they persisted in demanding an independent state
as the best guarantee of that survival. Survival rhetoric abounded; Dudayev
accused Moscow of robbing Chechnya of its cultural heritage and economic
fortunes. He even rejected Russian proposals that advanced economic sta-
bility over political freedom.48 He explicitly underlined his willingness, and
the willingness of Chechens as a whole, to accept economic hardship in
exchange for political independence, which he and a majority of his fellow
Chechens viewed as necessary for ethnic survival. In other words, each side
refrained from misrepresenting its capabilities and resolve in this interaction.
But more than that, each side essentially refrained from bargaining.
Commitment problems explain violence as the result of the inability of
a strong actor to credibly commit that it will not exploit the weak at some
future date. For war to be averted, some mechanism needs to be put in place
to guarantee the stronger side’s compliance with an agreement that gives it
less than might be the case in an all-out attack and expected victory. The
most common mechanism discussed in the international relations literature
is third-party guarantees.49 An outside party promises to secure the peace
and thereby guarantee the interests of the weaker party. In domestic politics,
the functional equivalent is the government; in international politics, it is an
intergovernmental organization such as the United Nations or another state
or coalition of states.
The weakness with commitment problems as an explanation in the
Chechen case is not that they played no role—because of Russia’s posi-
tion as a nuclear-armed former superpower there was no third party capable
and willing to commit to an intervention had it been needed to guarantee
Chechen security—but rather the nature of the dispute caused it to esca-
late to violence almost at once. Dudayev declared independence and began
distributing weapons to newly-formed military units as his first act. Russia
responded to Dudayev’s attempted fait accompli by inserting troops imme-
diately. While Dudayev struggled to find a way to avoid destruction, other
Chechen leaders tried to oust him and open negotiations with Russia (nei-
ther side believed the Chechens could win a showdown with Russian armed
forces). Dudayev, however, was saved by two things. First, a large majority of
ethnic Chechens were ready to risk much for independence whether led by
Dudayev or not. Second, Russia’s ham-handed intervention made Dudayev’s
47 Yo’av Karny, “Survival and Suicide in Russia’s Shadow,” The New York Times, 28 January 1998.
48 Edward Kline, “Conflict in Chechnya.
49 See, for example, Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement.”
50 M. D. Toft
opponents look like collaborators or traitors. As one of Dudayev’s aides

declared:
We have no opposition now; resentments and disagreements have been

forgotten. We are united in the face of the threat of intervention. Not
tens but hundreds of thousands of our people are armed. The Vainakhs
[Chechens] will fight to the bitter end.50
On balance, the commitment problem does not come into play because,
again, the issue—control of Chechen territory—was indivisible for both the
Russian Federation and the Chechens, thus precluding serious bargaining.
Both sides understood this. Dudayev began by declaring a Chechen nation-
state within a federation of national minorities. In doing so, he was not
actively persuading a sullen ethnic group to risk violence in defense of its
homeland so much as articulating a pre-existing sentiment and personally
declaring his willingness to risk all for that goal. He dared the Russians to
try and stop him, and the Russians clumsily obliged. Side-payments were
tried and failed abjectly. The Chechens would not accept continued Russian
sovereignty, and Russia could not allow Chechnya to set a precedent that
might be followed by other national minorities occupying more strategic or
more valuable territories.51 In a speech before both houses of parliament
days before the war began, Russian president Boris Yeltsin asked a rhetorical
question reflecting the importance he attached to precedent-setting, “Should
Russia negotiate the status of Chechnya as part of Russia, and is the parlia-
ment ready to introduce into the constitution an amendment on the right of
Chechnya to secede, in view of the possible domino effect this would have
on other secession-minded republics?”52
Beyond issue indivisibility as a necessary explanation for the most recent
Russo-Chechen civil war, there is another complicating factor that explains
why neither the Russian Federation nor the nascent Chechen leadership seri-
ously considered bargaining short of violence: each actor maintained a differ-
ent appreciation of the value of time.53 In the next section I briefly lay out the
logic of how time horizons might constitute a fourth rational explanation for
50 V. Kharlamov, “Yeltsin’s Chechen Emergency Decree Nixed,” Pravda, 11 November 1991.

51 Note that this precedent-setting logic mirrors precisely the anti-shadow-of-the-future argument in
Garfinkel and Skaperdas, “Conflict without Misperceptions.” Instead of the problem being that war now
may bring future benefits, the problem is that unless war is fought now, the future will more likely bring
increased risks to survival (this is the same logic as that of preventive war, see below). This is especially
true because a multi-ethnic state—especially one plagued by an inheritance of central brutality toward
ethnic minorities in the past—is not likely to be faced with a secession movement as a linear function
but rather a number of simultaneous, subsequent calls for autonomy. The result could quickly diminish
the size of the state; the classic contemporary example is the rump state of Serbia-Montenegro, which is
all that remains of the much larger federation of Yugoslavia.
52 RFE/RL Daily Report, 13 December 1994.
53 Time can influence bargaining in at least three ways. First, the bargaining process itself might
impose costs over time. Second, a good’s utility can depreciate over time due to aging of the good itself
war, before again introducing the Russo-Chechen civil war as an illustrative

case.
TIME HORIZONS
Time in International Relations Theory
There remains relatively little written on the subject of how time horizons
might impact cooperation and bargaining in the international relations theory
literature.54 The bulk of research in this area has been taken up in two issue
areas: preventive war and cooperative bargaining using game theory.55
The logic of preventive war holds that one player will attack another if it
perceives that balance of power is shifting. The time element is related to the
relative power of the players or states involved. Real or perceived shifts in
relative power among adversaries causes states to attack sooner rather than
later, when conditions turn even worse for them.56 In other words, costs and
risks of war are assessed in light of the projected balance of power among
the actors.
Preventive war incorporates a time element directly into its logic. The
causal focus, however, is shifts in material resources or power (variously
or from external changes that render the good less valuable. Third, the future can be discounted on the
belief that the bargainer would like to enjoy the benefits of the good now. This third aspect of time is
considered here.
54 Some recent works of note that analyze individuals and time horizons include Stephen P. Rosen,
War and Human Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), chap. 5; and Michael Horowitz,
Rose McDermott, and Allan C. Stam, “Leader Age, Regime Type and Violent International Relations,”
Journal of Conflict Resolution, 49, no. 5 (December 2005): 661–85. Rosen shows that a particular kind of
political elite—a tyrant—will tend to have short time horizons and that this can lead to deterrence failure
when costs normally sufficient to deter a tyrant are introduced as long-term costs. Horowitz, McDermott,
and Stam postulate about how the age of a leader might influence his or her time horizon. Also see Hein
E. Goemans, War and Punishment: The Causes of War Termination and the First World War (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000).Goemans’ work on leaders and their concern for their individual survival
is relevant here as well.
55 The preventive/preemptive war literature is vast. An influential work includes Robert Gilpin, War
and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For more recent treatments
see Robert Powell, In the Shadow of Power, esp. chap. 4; and Dale Copeland, The Origins of Major War
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). See, for example, Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation
(New York: Basic Books, 1985); Robert Axelrod and Douglas Dion, “The Further Evolution of Coopera-
tion,” Science 242, no. 4884 (9 December 1988): 1385–90. Axelrod’s is the classic statement of the argument
that rational actors (egoists) in a repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game are more likely to cooperate than
defect so long as they know they will be playing the game infinitely. The logic is sound, but others have
shown that there are other logical stories which could make rational actors playing an iterated game with
a long time horizon less likely to cooperate than defect in the present. See, for example, Bruce Russett and
Miles Lackey, “In the Shadow of the Cloud: If There’s No Tomorrow, Why Save Today?” Political Science
Quarterly 102, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 259–72; Michelle Garfinkel and Michael Skaperdas, “Conflict without
Misperceptions”; and Gerald Geunwook Lee, “To Be Long or Not to Be Long: That is the Question: The
Contradiction of Time-Horizon in Offensive Realism,” Security Studies 12, no. 2 (Winter 2002/3): 196–217.
56 On this point see, Michael Scott Brown, “Deterrence Failures and Deterrence Strategies: or did
you ever have one of those days when no deterrent seemed adequate?” RAND Paper Series, P-5842 (RAND,
1977).
52 M. D. Toft
defined), rather than the preferences of the actors (which are assumed to
remain fixed). Although physical insecurity may be a powerful motivator for
most actors, it does not capture the concerns of many others, such as nation-
alists or religious followers. Consider the Chechen case again. Here was a na-
tion of only 750,000 members with no formal military to speak of confronting
a former superpower with a nuclear arsenal. Shifting balances of power were
not a prime motivator for the Chechens, although there is a preventive logic
operating on the Russian side: precedent setting. Russia preferred to attack
the Chechens sooner, not because it feared an eventual rise in Chechen
power sufficient to threaten Russian security, but because it feared that not
acting to prevent Chechen independence would encourage further indepen-
dence efforts by other component political groups within the Federation.
Another line of thinking comes from the literature on cooperative bar-
gaining, much of which relies on game theory. In its simplest form, coopera-
tive bargaining examines the interaction between two players who are trying
to maximize their payoffs in a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Similar to preventive war,
defection (war) might be risked now because either or both sides might be-
lieve they can gain more (or gain the same at a lower cost). As R.H. Wagner
argues, “[A] state might be willing to fight for a while in hopes of getting a
better deal even though it would be unwilling to forgo the possibility of agree-
ment altogether. Take-it or leave-it offers provide no insight into when and
why this might be done.”57 In other words, fighting becomes an extension
of bargaining and the costs associated with fighting are part of the pre-war
expected costs that would have to be paid until a settlement is obtained.58
In terms of game theory, the time horizons question relates most di-
rectly to a Prisoner’s Dilemma game when play is repeated.59 In a sin-
gle play of a two-person game, each self-interested player should defect
rather than cooperate, despite the fact that each would benefit the most
from mutual cooperation.60 However in repeated play, the presumption
is that future payoffs are discounted either because the present payoff is
more precious than future ones or because there is uncertainty about fu-
ture interactions.61 When discounting of the future is included and when
57 Robert Harrison Wagner, “Bargaining and War,” American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 3
(July 2000): 470.

58 War as a form of bargaining is the crux of an argument by Schelling. See Thomas C. Schelling,
The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) reprint edition; and Thomas C.
Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), esp. 135–36.
59 See D. M. Kreps, A Course in Microeconomic Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
For an application, see Peter Hwang and Willem P. Burgers, “Apprehension and Temptation: The Forces
Against Cooperation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 43, no. 1 (February 1999): 117–30.
60 R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey (New
York: Wiley, 1957).

61 On the first point see, Martin Shubik, “Some Reflections on the Design of Game Theoretic Models
for the Study of Negotiation and Threat,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 7, no. 1 (March 1963): 1–12, and
on the second see, Hwang and Burgers, “Apprehension and Temptation,” 118.
the future is valued enough, cooperative behavior, known as Tit-for-Tat, can

be obtained and sustained.62 In this context, however, time horizons are
the same for both players, and they are short.63 Time is part of the over-
all structure of the game and is often referred to as the “shadow of the
future.”64 More importantly, as Russett and Lackey point out, the coopera-
tion that obtains from a long (or infinite) shadow of the future assumes that
both actors will be physically present to suffer consequences or gain ben-
efits. When this assumption is violated, the benefits of present cooperation
disappear.
Moreover, shadows of the future make no distinction between the im-
portance of one player’s value of the future and another’s. Both players are
assumed to discount the future. In fact, the assumption of future discounting
is not an explicit or formal player preference so much as another assump-
tion of rationality. Rational actors, in other words, discount the future. But
what if players systematically discounted the present or only one player did?
Robert Axelrod concedes, “It is sad the news that if the future is important,
there is no one best strategy.”65 Although Axelrod’s discussion shows how
the future plays out in bargaining, it fails to address what happens when
one or the other players values the future more. More importantly, in this
context it is easier to see that although most social scientists would sup-
port the claim that say, suicide bombers are rational, the assumptions of
their models of conflict bargaining tend to exclude actors who discount the
present.66
62 Robert Axelrod, “The Emergence of Cooperation Among Egoists,” American Political Science
Review 75 (1981): 306–18.
63 There is some literature on the impact of variations in time horizons on bargaining outcomes.
For the most prominent and important development along these lines, see Ariel Rubenstein, “Perfect
Equilibrium in a Bargaining Model,” Econometrica 50, no. 1 (1982): 97–100. Rubenstein’s model of non-
cooperative bargaining introduces an element of dynamism in which players take turns in making and
rejecting offers and counteroffers. As part of the model, Rubenstein incorporates the notion of discounting
payoffs. Players have different discount factors, or degrees of patience and impatience. More impatient
players have lower discount factors, meaning future outcomes are worth less to them. This discounting
determines the size of the outcome for each player. The larger share of the outcome goes to the player who
is not affected by time or is more patient. Despite the model’s notoriety, there has been little application
of it to international relations problems. Also see James D. Morrow, Game Theory for Political Scientists
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 148. Morrow provides two rationales for the lack of interest
in applying the model: the model cannot explain real-world bargaining we observe, and the equilibrium
results in no real bargaining (the first offer is always accepted).
64 For a particularly good discussion, see Kenneth Oye, “Explaining Cooperation Under Anarchy:
Hypotheses and Strategy,” in Cooperation Under Anarchy, ed. Kenneth A. Oye (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986), 1–24. For an interesting application to the Cold War, see Russett and Lackey, “In
the Shadow of the Cloud.”
65 Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 15.
66 Another area of research that would be interesting in terms of cooperation would be to look at
alliances and how different alliance partners value time, and how this influences their relationship within
the alliance and among fellow alliance members.
54 M. D. Toft
Kenneth Oye develops this line of argument a bit further in his discussion
of familiar games—such as Prisoner’s Dilemma, Stag Hunt, and Chicken—
that have attracted much attention by bargaining theorists. What is common,
and hence attractive, about these games is that they model the possibility
of cooperation within structures that constrain cooperation. Oye, however,
goes on to explain that these games do not capture all the dynamics that
emerge in bargaining. One such game that has received little attention is
Deadlock.67 Deadlock refers to situations in which mutual benefit cannot be
obtained through cooperation. If one or both players would rather defect,
then cooperation as an outcome simply cannot be realized. Players’ actions,
in other words, are not contingent on the strategic interaction between them.
Oye explains that Deadlock has received little attention “precisely be-
cause cooperative and conflictual outcomes follow so directly and simply
from the payoff structure.” Clearly, the study of Deadlock and its application
to real-world conflicts runs against a normative bias toward models, theo-

ries, and ultimately policies that can enhance the chances for cooperation.
But Oye goes on to make the case that Deadlock should not be dismissed
simply because we do not like the implications. “In courses on diagnosis,
medical students are taught, ‘When you hear hoof beats, think horse before
Zebra.”’ Oye then quotes R.H. Wagner, who issued a warning to interna-
tional relations scholars, “He [Wagner] warned that Stag Hunt, Chicken, and
Prisoner’s Dilemma are often inappropriate models of international situa-
tions. When you observe conflict, think Deadlock—the absence of mutual
interest—before puzzling over why a mutual interest was not realized . . .”68
Despite Wagner’s warning and Oye’s discussion, most international relations
scholars tend to overlook Deadlock as a potential outcome to a bargaining
situation.69
The disregard for Deadlock as a potential outcome again focuses our
attention not on the logic and permutations of the game as model but on the
distribution of game analogies across the conflict spectrum. How many real
conflicts look like Prisoner’s Dilemmas or Chicken, as opposed to Deadlock?
What if, as Wagner argued, a larger proportion of international engagements
is best captured by Deadlock? What if particular bargaining environments,
such as those involving ethnic or religious groups, involve issues that more
often than not are best described by a Deadlock game setting? It is both fair
and useful, in other words, for bargaining and game theorists to explore the
67 Its corollary is Harmony, which describes situations in which one or both players prefer to coop-
erate regardless of the other’s actions.

68 Oye, “Explaining Cooperation Under Anarchy,” 7.
69 More often than not, the reason is simply based on the assumption that war is costly and therefore
to be avoided; cf. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations,” 1995; and Page Fortna, “Scraps of Paper? Agreements
and the Durability of Peace,” International Organization 57, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 337–72. For a recent
review of this literature, see Dan Reiter, “Exploring the Bargaining Model of War,” Perspectives 1, no. 1
(March 2003): 27–43.
nuances and permutations of games as models of bargaining and conflict.

But it is not fair to suggest that the results of these efforts necessarily map to
real-world bargaining and conflicts without first undertaking an assessment
of the distribution of the fit between the models and the real world.
Fearon, for example, allows that some kinds of war appear by their very
nature to over determine escalation to violence:
[P]rotracted civil wars, which are tragically common, can pose a puzzle
for received cooperation theory. There are clearly mutual gains to be had
if the warring factions can agree on a constitution to regulate the political
and economic life of the country they inhabit. Given that the shadow of
the future is likely to be long due to the frequency and expected dura-
tion of interaction among the inhabitants of the territory, why do they
not move straight away to the “cooperate-cooperate” option of common
government and constitution? Although the problem of arranging credible
commitments to observe a constitutional settlement’s term is indeed cru-

cial, the mechanism described here may sometimes be relevant as well.
Warring factions invariably have conflicting preferences over the terms
of a settlement and may hold out for better terms for a long time in a
(literal) war of attrition.70
He then goes on to explain:
Cooperation theory’s Tit-for-Tat mechanism may be inapplicable in this

context because a single “defection” by the faction that gains power can
eliminate or permanently weaken opponents, rendering conditional re-
taliation ineffective for the policing of power-sharing agreements. Thus
a commitment problem can make the object of contention (state power)
effectively indivisible and so a prime candidate for war-of-attrition bar-
gaining.71
Two points are worth noting about these passages. First, Fearon ac-
knowledges that protracted civil wars are prime candidates for bargaining
failure and that time may play a role. Second, his “shadow of the future”
model assumes that each side shares the same valuation of the future. A
shared value of the future, however, is not always or even often the case.
For example, why does Osama bin Laden, in the context of his fight with the
West, speak in terms of two hundred years to overthrow the West’s influence
in the Middle East? Game theorists have not yet incorporated the notion of
there being large variations in the ways people value time. This leads to an im-
portant, if subsidiary, observation: we are most likely to find asymmetric time
70 See Fearon, “Bargaining,” 293–94.

71 Ibid.
56 M. D. Toft
horizons—either secular-non-secular or nationalist-statist—when cultures

clash.72
The point is that asymmetry of time horizons among actors can influence
the risk of war. If both players discount the future highly, then on balance the
risks of war are reduced because the rewards of cooperation and the costs
of defection are both increased. If, however, one player or both discount the
present, they may be more willing to risk violence and death. Nationalists,
or parents, for example, might be willing to give up their lives knowing they
will live on in some other way that has special meaning for them. Consider
the time horizon dynamics in the Chechen-Russian interaction. Chechens
believed that sacrificing today for the good of the nation was not only an
obligation to current generations, but to past and future ones. Individual lives
may be sacrificed so that the nation will live on beyond the present (or that
its reputation and status will be increased, thus, by extension, increasing the
nation’s chances of survival and perpetuation). Moreover, as the Dudayev

quote above makes clear, the Chechens saw themselves fighting a war that
began three-hundred years ago. With this sort of time horizon, another few
years of fighting in the present seem less costly.
Because bargaining is an interactive process, failure and success are
contingent on the positions of both actors. The logic of time horizons, how
they play out between two players, is outlined in the table below.
Time horizons and the likelihood of violence
Actor 1
Actor 2 Discounts future Discounts present
Discounts future Violence unlikely Violence contingent

Discounts present Violence contingent Violence likely
Moving from time horizons to the likelihood of war is a matter of prob-

abilities. If both actors discount the future highly, then violence is unlikely;
however, if both actors discount the present but see their fate provided for
in the future, then violence is likely. The off-axes, where one or the other
player values the present or future more highly, is more contingent on other
factors to a greater extent; but even where contingent, the mix of different
time horizons or the same but very long time horizon makes violence a more
likely outcome than it would be in a model where both actors discount the
future.
72 See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). One thinks of Huntington’s argument in this context. Asymmetric time
horizons might count as one reason why frictions between civilizations—assuming civilizations are a
useful unit of analysis—may escalate to violence.
In conceptualizing the causal role of time horizons in conflict bargaining,

one could argue that time horizons might be usefully reduced to the concept
of payoffs. They could be reduced in this way, but not usefully. The logic is
as follows. Actor A prefers to sustain tangibly high costs today for the promise
of intangible benefits tomorrow, but since Actor A’s preferences are fixed, her
time horizon preference can be represented as a cost or benefit multiplier of a
fixed value. It follows that we can then calculate the net expected benefit as a
payoff and compare that payoff with Actor B’s utility, and so on. The problem
is that in both the secular nationalist and religious examples (keeping in
mind these are ideal-type representations), the multiplier is impossible to
fix because it may be effectively infinite. Thus the attempt to reduce a time
horizon preference to a static payoff value would be the same as attempting
to divide a positive integer by zero: we can model this equation, but it does
not follow that as a result we can determine a value.
To explore time horizons more fully, consider the potential impact of

religious belief on bargaining.
Bargaining, Time, and Religion

There is no space here for a comprehensive treatment of the subject of
religion as it relates to conflict bargaining.73 We can at least begin, however,
to assess how a religious actor’s different valuation of time may make him
or her act in ways others might think irrational.
Perhaps one of the most common elements uniting different religions
is a conception of life after death, or eternal existence and self-awareness.74
One’s conduct in life is believed to determine the possibility or quality of
an afterlife. The stronger the religious belief, the more likely a given person
is willing to exchange values in life for values in an afterlife. Death is not
viewed as something to be feared, but rather welcomed, since it promises
a trip from the temporal to the eternal and perhaps a uniting with God. As
religion scholar Mark Juergensmeyer explains:
Most social and political struggles have sought conclusion within the life-
times of their participants. But religious struggles have taken generations
to succeed . . . In some cases religious activists have been prepared to
wait for eons—and some struggles have not been expected to be com-
pleted within human history; they must await their fulfillment in some
73 Scholarly works that informed this discussion include Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and Profane:
The Nature of Religion (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1968); Karen Armstrong, A History of God (New York:
Ballentine Books, 1993); and José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1994).
74 Here I am referring to the three monotheistic religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Although
Judaism too has a conception of heaven, the Torah stresses the tasks of this world over redemption in
the afterlife.
58 M. D. Toft
transtemporal realm. There is no need, therefore, to compromise one’s

goals in a struggle that has been waged in divine time and with the
promise of heaven’s rewards.75
Juergensmeyer’s use of the term “divine time” captures the notion of

time that transcends secular notions of time measured in hours, days, years,
and perhaps decades in favor of centennials and millennia. Such a view di-
minishes the importance of the average individual human lifespan of seventy
years and people’s yearning to get ahead before they die. Again, Juergens-
meyer provides clarity on this point:
Those who accept that their life struggles are part of a great struggle, a
cosmic war, know that they are part of a grand tale that will ultimately
end triumphantly, though not necessarily easily or quickly. The epic char-
acter of the story implies that the happy ending may indeed be long
delayed—perhaps until after one’s lifetime or after the lifetime of one’s

descendants.76
He concludes that martyrdom, the sacrifice of the individual, transforms

failure—death—into victory.77
This point cannot be overemphasized because in the western canon,
physical life—the promise to secure it or the threat to take it—is the corner-
stone of all political systems. Rationality, as conceived in the western world,
is more than simply maximizing utility: it also incorporates the idea that a
rational person is one who will not deliberately injure him or herself. The
issue which follows logically from this is how big is the self? As observed
above, the further one travels from the personto family, neighbors, local
and national governments, to country, and then ideas—the less rational is
self-sacrifice.78
This conception of self and death is crucial because the system of states
rests upon a conviction that religious feeling cannot provide a predictable,
systematic, and, yes, rational basis for state interaction. The Thirty Years
War that preceded the establishment of the states system was a religious
war, and it ended only after all sides in that war reached abject exhaustion.
Bargaining theory not only assumes but requires rational actors, actors who
calculate utility within a framework seldom specified but absolutely including
the desirability of physical survival. This is the Archimedean point upon
which Thomas Hobbes founded his conception of social science: people
may disagree about many things, but all rational beings care for their own
75 Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 217.

76 Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 165.
77 Also see Kramer “Hizballah: The Calculus of Jihad” on this score.
78 For an attempt to unify different levels of identity, see Bloom, Personal Identity.
lives. Systems of belief or practice that violate this foundational concept thus
threaten the fabric of predictability and reliability that holds the state system
together.79
A key question remains whether religion is a relevant threat to the in-
ternational order such that we need to consider time horizons a potential
bargaining problem. Although available evidence indicates that religiosity
may be declining in Western Europe, these measures also indicate that reli-
gious belief remains robust throughout most of the globe and in some cases
is increasing, especially in the Islamic world.80 In addition to an increase in
religious belief, large-scale violence associated with religion has also been
increasing. Since 1940 there have been a total of 133 civil wars. In 42 of
those, at least one combatant justified its means or ends in concretely reli-
gious terms. Whereas religious civil wars were only 19 percent of all civil
wars that started or were ongoing in the 1940s, by the 1990s they had more
than doubled to 43 percent, with the biggest shift taking place in the 1970s.81
Moreover, of the 22 civil wars started during the 1990s, 45 percent involved
religion.82 Given the increasing role of religion in civil war and the close con-
nection between sacrifice and eternal life, the need for incorporating time
horizons into bargaining situations is essential to understand violence and
war today.83
If it is true that the stability of the interstate system rests ultimately on
the threat to take physical life, then it follows that those who do not fear
sacrificing their lives could eventually undermine that stability.84 It must be
79 On the important relation of the states system to predictability and rationality, see Albert O.
Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1977); and Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
80 For an accounting of the role of religion in the world, see Assaf Moghadam, “A Global Resurgence
of Religion?” (working paper, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 2004.)
For an excellent survey of global religious beliefs and practices, see Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart,
Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On
the decline of secularism, see Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion:
The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Peter
L. Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington, DC:
The Ethnic and Public Policy Center, 1999).
81 See Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War?: Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Juergensmeyer fears that the clash of religion and the
secular order could lead to a new cold war.
82 For a full accounting of the role of religion in civil wars and its impact on the international system
see, Monica Duffy Toft, “Religion, Civil War, and the International Order” (manuscript, Harvard University,
2005).
83 This is not to say that time horizons are irrelevant or could not account for bargaining breakdown
in the past; this is hardly the case. Rather, I am only claiming that it is central today, and given current
trends, likely to be so in the future.
84 One encounters this most often in recent discussions of rogue states acquiring nuclear weapons.
What if a madman got hold of a thermonuclear device? How could such a person/state be deterred? If
states’ nationals began to lose their fear of death, on what principle could interstate order be founded?
60 M. D. Toft
emphasized that religion is not the only system of belief and practice to
accomplish this. As argued above, nationalism has shown itself to be the
secular equivalent of religious belief precisely because nationalists share a
keen sense of rational—heroic—self-sacrifice for an intangible (imagined)
community.85 Also recall that the proportion of national and ethnic civil wars
has been growing since the end of the Cold War.
To put this in a bargaining context, consider two related interactions in
which the time horizon of one actor is much different than the time horizon
of another. Say that one actor considers the short-term costs of an outcome
(death) nothing compared to the inevitable and long-term gains (paradise).
Assured of an eternal post-physical existence in a paradise, she might ratio-
nally choose to escalate a dispute to violence because violence in this context
is neither costly nor risky, as assumed by most models of conflict bargain-
ing. In a second interaction, imagine an actor convinced a rival actor will
attempt—and may succeed—to occupy or control his ancestral homelands.

If that actor believes this outcome would result in his death as a national—a
national whose identity is inextricably bound up with occupation and control
of the homeland—then essentially his choice is between two deaths: physical
and identity. There being very little to choose between these two outcomes,
such a person might rationally escalate a dispute to violence because the
costs and risks of escalation and inaction appear virtually the same. In terms
of the conventional shadow of the future logic, defection in the present
makes sense not only because the benefits of defection for the defecting
egoist are fixed, but because there is no possibility of suffering the costs of
a TAT response.86
Considering the increasing role of religion and nationalism today in the
world, a better understanding of time horizons and how they impact the
likelihood of violence and war is warranted. Al Qaeda and Hamas have
been very successful in recruiting young men and women to their cause
and getting them to kill themselves in violent acts; one of the reasons for
this is because these young people discount the present, calculating that
the costs of continued survival outweigh the expected benefit of an eternal
85 Thus, the mechanism of and utility of self-sacrifice is similar insofar as the nation is imagined to
be eternal, so long as there are nationals willing to sacrifice themselves to its perpetuation (a sacrifice
that need not always demand death, but might under some circumstances). A key difference, therefore,
is that for many religions, the person sacrificing her or his life is eternally rewarded as an individual
(the sacrifice itself does nothing for a divine being or for the character or existence of an afterlife,
both of which exist independently of any one person’s sacrifice); whereas for a secular nationalist self-
sacrifice is a cost to the individual that is redeemed only by its capacity to perpetuate the imagined
community.
86 This explains the logic of Israel’s counter-terrorist strategy of bulldozing the dwellings of suicide
bombers’ family members following an attack. It is an attempt, the effectiveness of which remains in
dispute, to convince would-be suicide bombers that a TAT response will follow: Israel retains the capacity
to levy costs on the bomber even after the bomber is beyond reach of retribution.
paradise.87 As Jessica Stern relates, once a suicide bomber is trained by the

Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas, he or she is considered a “living
martyr,” one still alive but marked for death, awaiting paradise with death in
the jihad.88
The actors I have invoked here as examples represent ideal-types in
the sense that the broader distribution of negotiators in conflict bargaining
interactions willing to sacrifice their own and their followers’ lives is probably
not high. Still, Chechnya’s Dudayev represents a recent close approximation
(one also thinks of suicide bombers and the groups that sponsor them).
Even if nationalist and religious actors do not always match the ideal-types
represented here, they do come close enough on average to support a general
explanation for why issue indivisibility and time horizons so often frustrate
non-violent dispute resolution.
Civil War in Chechnya: Asymmetric Time Horizons

One curious feature of the initial framing of the 1994–1996 war in Chechnya
was the notion that this conflict was something new. In response to questions
about the causes of “the” civil war then unfolding in Chechnya, historians of
the Caucasus or even of Russian history and politics might, by contrast, have
been moved to ask “which civil war?” As noted, though seldom with proper
emphasis, the conflict between Russians and Chechens has in fact stretched
back more than two hundred years, possibly longer.
In this context, consider how different the conflict might look, and how
willing each side might be to suffer the costs of sustaining it, if each side—
Russian and Chechen—viewed the conflict with a different calculation of
its duration. Contemporary Chechens, for example, take great pride in the
fact that from 1830 to 1859, they were part of a broad-if-brittle coalition of
Muslims who successfully resisted incorporation into the Russian Empire for
nearly thirty years—and this without modern weapons (artillery, for exam-
ple) of any sort. They also maintain an abiding bitterness over Stalin’s attempt
to obliterate them (while at the same time setting a deterrent precedent for
other independence-minded political units within the Soviet Union) in a mass
deportation during World War II. Here is how Chechen leader Dzhokar Du-
dayev put it in a speech in August 1992:
In the future, any armed intervention of Russia in Chechnya’s affairs will
mean a new Caucasian war, believe me. For the last 300 years they
[Moscow] taught us to survive. To survive not as individuals but as a
87 For instance, a letter attributed to Mohammed Atta, the suspected leader of the 11 September
2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, and found at three locations and in Atta’s luggage contains
references to the Koran and poetry about the promise of eternal life and paradise, resulting from the
death of the terrorists. A translation of the letter can be found at http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/atta/
resources/documents/.
88 Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2004), 51.
62 M. D. Toft
nation. Three hundred years of bloodshed are quite enough. This will be
a war without rules.89
In short, Chechens view their most recent fight with the Russian Federation
as but one chapter in a book that has been in press for centuries. Russians,
by and large, do not.
More to the point, Russia’s leaders—presidents Yeltsin and Putin—must
necessarily operate on a more constrained time horizon than the Chechens
or their leaders. As presidents they are elected officials whose tenure has
a finite limit; their perceptions and policies must logically be constrained
by those limits.90 Consider the following statement from President Putin just
after assuming his office in March 2000:
I had already decided that my career might be over, but that my mission,
my historical mission—and this will sound lofty, but it’s true—consisted

of solving the situation in the North Caucasus. I have little—two, three,
maybe four months—to bang the hell out of those bandits. Then they
can get rid of me.91
What is so striking about this passage is that Putin gives himself only four
months to resolve what for the Chechens is a centuries-old conflict. Second,
he recognizes that for him, acting to “solve the situation” should “end his
career.”92 He clearly accepts the risk of sacrificing himself (in all but the
literal physical sense) for what he believes to be a greater benefit to the
Russian people.
Similarly, in a talk at Harvard University in 2000, Sergei Stepashin, a
former head of the Federal Secret Service during the “first” Chechen war
(1994–96) and later the Prime Minister of Russia, was pressed about events
and what led up to the war. He explained, “Unfortunately history does not
allow hypothetical answers, but if we could go back to 1994, I would prob-
ably try to do everything I could to avoid direct military conflict in 1994.”93
What is most interesting about these remarks is not that Stepashin forgot the
Murid War (the name historians gave Russia’s twenty-nine-year struggle to
subjugate the Caucasus in the nineteenth century) but rather that he forgot
89 Dzhokar Dudayev, speech broadcast by Official Kremlin International Broadcast News, 12 August
1992.
90 For an analysis of the impact of war and war termination on elite political decision making,
see Hein E. Goemans, War and Punishment: The Causes of War Termination and the First World War
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
91 Vladimir Putin, quoted in Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the
Soviet Union? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002), 63.

92 In this he is clearly referring to the corrosive effect of the war on Yeltsin’s popularity and, by
extension, power.
93 Sergei Stepashin, (speech, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, The John F. Kennedy
School of Government, Harvard University, 14 March 2000).

Russia’s military intervention of November 1991, just three years before the
start of what Stepashin remembers as “the” war. Again, we see a relatively
short time horizon.
A consequence of this structural limitation on Russia’s leaders (and those
of any state with term limits for a chief executive) is asymmetric time hori-
zons: the Russian Federation must discount the future and value the present
more highly; whereas the Chechens and their leaders also value the present
but may do so without discounting the future. In other words, they under-
stand that (a) they cannot be destroyed as a people (if Stalin couldn’t do
it, what makes Putin think he can), and (b) they have plenty of time (and
now, more motive than ever) to achieve their eventual goal of independence.
The costs of Russian occupation are exorbitant; because the Chechens have
a long-term view of the conflict, those costs are effectively lower for them
since they can be spread those costs over an essentially infinite time hori-
zon.94 They, therefore, cannot be coerced, only destroyed; and as observed

above, the Russian military does not possess the capability of destroying the
Chechens as a people even should it be given license to do so. By contrast,
the Russians experience the costs of continued occupation now, and the
current administration must take responsibility for those costs.95
A final complicating factor in the Chechen view of the war is religion.
Religion mixed with geo-strategy lay at the heart of the Russian Empire’s orig-
inal desire to subjugate the peoples of the Caucasus, including the Chechens,
and religion still plays an important role in the conflict today, as much due to
Russian chauvinism and strategy as to anything indigenous to the Chechen
resistance to Russian rule. Consider that in 1994, Dudayev and his supporters
were largely pursuing a strategy of secular independence from Russian rule.
National self-determination was the rule of the day. Yet today, after six years
of indeterminate and brutal fighting, Putin’s once patently false claim that
Russia was fighting radical Islamists bent on forming a pan-Islamic state in
the Caucasus region is becoming increasingly accurate. Russia’s strategy of
targeting non-combatants has radicalized then re-radicalized Russian oppo-
sition. Gone are most nationalists and moderates, now replaced by the likes
of a born-again Shamil Basayev who claimed, “The Chechen Mujahedin are
not fighting for me or Maskhadov, [a former president of Chechnya, who was
94 Chechens are not alone. Insurgents are typically willing to pay higher costs in terms of time to win.
For the importance of time as a mechanism in explaining outcomes in counterinsurgency wars, see Ivan
Arreguı́n-Toft, How the Weak Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005).
95 One major reason, however, that the current chapter in the Russo-Chechen civil war is not likely to
end is because the costs to the Russians—monetary and casualties—are low by recent historical standards.
Russians today still think of what they call The Great Patriotic War as a benchmark war, and by those
standards the Putin administration cannot come under much fire save from marginalized human rights
groups and the Union of Soldiers’ Mothers. International pressure to end the war ceased effectively after
11 September 2001 when Putin was able to reconstruct his fight in Chechnya as a fight against radical
and transnational Islamic terrorism.
64 M. D. Toft
killed in March 2005], they are fighting for Allah for freedom and indepen-
dence of our motherland—and with the help of Allah, we will win.”96 Given
the age-old animosity between the largely Sufi Chechens and the mainly
Wahabbi Arabs who provide cash, weapons, and recruits for their cause, this
may be a purely instrumental rhetorical strategy on Basayev’s part rather than
an accurate description of a movement completely torn from its nationalist
moorings.97 On the other hand, there is ample evidence to suggest that even
without the benefits of a strategic alliance with Al Qaeda or the Wahabbis,
religion has come to play a more central role in resistance to Russia’s occu-
pation of Chechnya.
The importance of religion is not just that it has the potential (under the
right circumstances) of uniting peoples otherwise divided by geography, his-
tory, language, or culture, but also, as noted above, that it changes the basis of
rationality of certain kinds of sacrifice. The Chechen and foreign fighters who
took hostages at Nord Ost in March of 2003 or Beslan in September of 2004

each made many statements about their own preparedness to die and their
expected rewards for such self-sacrifice (eternal paradise). In both cases the
demands involved purely secular issues—a halt to Russia’s military occupa-
tion of and violence in Chechnya. In the future, these demands may change
to more closely mirror those of Osama Bin Laden, whose goals include such
intangibles as the elimination of Western influence from the Muslim world.
The point is that asymmetric time horizons affected the Russo-Chechen war
not only as an obstacle to a settlement short of war in 1994 and 1999, but now
as an obstacle to peace. The increasing role of radical religion in Chechnya
thus threatens to make peace in the region even less likely over time.
Both Russo-Chechen wars happened because both Russians and
Chechens miscalculated. In the first war Russia thought it could win quickly
and decisively and it rushed ahead to a humiliating defeat. Chechens thought
they preferred death to continued existence under a chauvinistic, discrimi-
natory, and above all alien regime. They got a lot of death; and in Russia’s
second assault—still under way as of this writing—their sacrifices appear
unlikely to be redeemed by political independence.
In sum, however necessary, neither private information nor commitment
problems are sufficient to explain the violent outcome of the 1994–1996
Russo-Chechen war and its continuation in 1999. Issue indivisibility—in this
case control of the Chechen homeland—along with asymmetric time horizons
96 Shamil Basayev, quoted in “Chechen Warlord Basayev Threatens New Strikes Against Russia,”
Agence France Presse, 8 February 2005.

97 In interviews conducted over the summer of June 2005 in Moscow, I was unable to get a definitive
sense of whether Basayev was using religious motivations for purely instrumental reasons. Several of my
interviewees claimed he was a pragmatist who was using Islam to gain legitimacy, support, and resources,
while others insisted he is firmly committed to Islam and establishing an Islamic state in the Caucasus.
His 28 July 2005 interview on ABC News Nightline was not revealing on this score. Although the role of
Islam remains unclear, Basayev is clear that he is seeking an independent Chechnya.
undermined a non-violent resolution between these two rational actors, both

of whom could have benefited in absolute terms from a conflict resolution
short of violence.
I introduce the Chechen case not to test competing explanations or
prove that it is paradigmatic, but rather to illustrate the dynamics of three
well-established and one newly theorized obstacle to non-violent dispute
resolution. I believe the Chechen case is in fact paradigmatic, but a true test
of the general applicability of the case to the argument at hand must await a
treatment larger than journal length.98
FOUR RATIONALIST EXPLANATIONS OF WAR
If true that most rational actors within a dispute are able to conclude an
agreement short of violence that is preferable to both, it is equally true that
there are a number of logical obstacles to non-violent dispute resolution. In

this paper, I introduced four (private information, commitment problems, is-
sue indivisibility, and time horizons) and emphasized two (issue indivisibility
and time horizons).
In his early work on Neorealism and bargaining in international rela-
tions theory, Fearon argued persuasively that private information and com-
mitment problems could explain why wars break out even when each of the
belligerents would have been better off with a compromise short of war. He
recognized the logical potential of issue indivisibility to have the same effect
on bargaining, but then largely discounted it as (a) a first- or second-image
perturbation or (b) an obstacle easy to overcome with side-payments. In this
paper I have built on Fearon’s work by showing that on neither logical nor
empirical grounds should issue indivisibility be relegated to a secondary role.
In addition, I argued that asymmetric or shared-but-very-long time hori-
zons can also lead rational actors to escalate a dispute to violence against
their better interests (or, more accurately, better short-term interests). This
may be especially true of actors who hold nationalist or religious ideas that
either divide the costs and risks of action across an infinite time horizon or
promise benefits across a similarly infinite time horizon.
A potential weakness of both issue indivisibility and time horizons is
their subjective underpinnings. If rationalist explanations focus less on the
rationality of actors and more on the generalizability of the explanations’
98 The fight between Kosovo and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, for example, displayed similar
dynamics in which private information and commitment problems played a marginal role as compared
to issue indivisibility. As did Moscow, Belgrade reacted harshly and violently (though less clumsily) to
Kosovar calls for autonomy, but for an end to the execrable erosion of Kosovar Albanian civil and human
rights under Serb domination. Unlike Moscow, however, Belgrade possessed no nuclear deterrent and
geographically remained within relatively easy reach of military intervention from European and allied
armed forces. As a result, Serbia effectively lost Kosovo as a province.
66 M. D. Toft
logic, then my argument might be criticized as having identified two non-

rationalist explanations for war. I would respond to such a criticism in two
ways. First, as I noted above, although the central appeal of constructivism is
that by changing our beliefs about a thing once thought to be natural and in-
evitable (such as war), we can will ourselves into an alternate reality in which
such things as war no longer exist, there are no advocates of the argument
that socially-constructed realities are themselves unreal. Second, and related,
if certain issues are reliably socially constructed—such as homelands being
indivisible—then there is no reason why they could not also be analyzed
within the rationalist framework. This is because the common understanding
is that a territory is indivisible and because of this indivisibility, a certain type
of behavior may be expected. Reliable social constructions therefore lead to
expected, rational behavior.
One problem yet to be addressed in the field is that to date, most work
on rationalist explanations for war has been carried on in a logically rigor-

ous yet unempirical way. How often do private information problems cause
deadlock, as compared to commitment, issue indivisibility and time horizon
problems? Do different obstacles map to different types of violence, such as
interstate war, guerrilla war, revolutions, civil wars, secessionist movements,
and terrorism? Does the relative power of the conflict rivals matter? Also, does
it make sense to separate the issue of preventing war via bargaining from
ending ongoing wars by bargaining? There is no room for such an analysis
here, but in addition to further work clarifying the logic of rationalist expla-
nations for war, this sort of empirical assessment is clearly something that
needs to become a research priority.
The good news is that some research linking the type of war with the
nature of the dispute issue (and obstacles to non-violent resolution) has
already been done. Though far from conclusive, there appears to be a strong
pattern of association between issue indivisibility and intrastate conflicts—
most particularly national and ethnic violence.99 This is not to say that private
information and commitment problems play no role in civil wars, but rather
that empirically, their impact is often eclipsed by issue indivisibility and time
horizons.
In this analysis, I introduced the conflict in Chechnya as a way to illus-
trate arguments I and others have raised about conflict bargaining. The case
may or may not prove paradigmatic of conflict bargaining failures, but if it
is, then clearly we need to take issue indivisibility and time horizon obsta-
cles more seriously; and we should especially welcome further research that
takes all four obstacles to non-violent conflict resolution more seriously.
99 On intrastate wars, cf. Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence; on interstate wars, and Suzanne
Werner, “The Precarious Nature of Peace: Resolving the Issues, Enforcing the Settlement, and Renegotiating
the Terms,” American Journal of Political Science 43, no. 3 (July 1999): 912–34.
Appendix: List of civil wars, 1940–2000
State Startyr Endyr Identity? Territory? Religious?
1. USSR I 1942 1950 1 1 0

2. Greece 1944 1949 0 0 0
3. USSR II 1944 1952 1 1 0
4. China I 1945 1949 0 0 0
5. Indonesia I 1945 1949 1 1 0
6. Israel/Palest 1945 1949 1 1 1
7. Bolivia I 1946 1946 0 0 0
8. Philippines I 1946 1954 0 0 0
9. Vietnam I 1946 1954 1 1 0
10. Iran I 1946 1946 1 1 0
11. India Ia 1946 1949 1 1 1
12. Paraguay 1947 1947 0 0 0
13. Madagascar 1947 1948 1 1 0
14. Colombia I 1948 1958 0 0 0
15. Yemen North I 1948 1948 0 0 0
16. South Korea 1948 1948 0 0 0

17. Burma I 1948 1989 0 0 0
18. Costa Rica 1948 1948 0 0 0
19. Malaysia 1948 1960 0 0 0
20. Burma II 1948 . 1 1 1
21. India II 1948 1948 1 1 1
22. Korea 1950 1953 0 1 0
23. China IIa 1950 1951 1 1 1
24. Indonesia II 1950 1950 1 1 1
25. Bolivia II 1952 1952 0 0 0
26. Kenya I 1952 1956 0 0 0
27. Egypt 1952 1952 0 0 0
28. Tunisia 1952 1956 1 1 0
29. Morocco I 1952 1956 1 1 0
30. Indonesia III 1953 1959 1 1 1
31. Guatemala I 1954 1954 0 0 0
32. Algeria I 1954 1962 1 1 0
33. China IIb 1954 1959 1 1 1
34. Argentina 1955 1955 0 0 0
35. Cameroon 1955 1960 1 1 0
36. Sudan Ia 1955 1972 1 1 1
37. Cuba 1956 1959 0 0 0
38. India III 1956 1997 1 1 1
39. Vietnam II 1957 1975 0 0 0
40. Iraq I 1958 1958 0 0 0
41. Indonesia IV 1958 1961 0 0 0
42. Lebanon Ia 1958 1958 1 0 1
43. Laos 1959 1973 0 0 0
44. Iraq II 1959 1959 0 0 0
45. Burma III 1959 . 1 1 0
46. Guatemala II 1960 1996 0 0 0
47. Zaire/Congo I 1960 1965 1 1 0
48. Burma IV 1960 1994 1 1 1
49. Iraq IIIa 1961 1970 1 1 0
50. Ethiopia I 1961 1993 1 1 0
51. Angola I 1961 1974 1 1 0
52. Yemen North II 1962 1970 0 0 0
68 M. D. Toft
Appendix: List of civil wars, 1940–2000 (Continued)
53. Algeria II 1963 1963 0 0 0

54. Rwanda Ia 1963 1964 1 0 0
55. GuineaBissau I 1963 1974 1 1 0
56. Cyprus Ia 1963 1964 1 1 1
57. Colombia II 1964 . 0 0 0
58. Mozambique I 1964 1975 1 1 0
59. Indonesia V 1965 1966 0 0 0
60. Domin Republic 1965 1966 0 0 0
61. Burundi Ia 1965 1965 1 0 0
62. Chad 1965 1997 1 0 1
63. India Ib 1965 1965 1 1 1
64. China III 1966 1969 0 0 0
65. Uganda I 1966 1966 1 1 0
66. Namibia 1966 1990 1 1 0
67. Nigeria I 1967 1970 1 1 1
68. Philippines II 1969 . 0 0 0

69. Cambodia Ia 1970 1975 0 0 0
70. Jordan 1970 1971 1 1 0
71. Sri Lanka Ia 1971 1971 0 0 0
72. Pakistan I 1971 1971 1 1 0
73. Zimbabwe 1972 1979 1 0 0
74. Burundi Ib 1972 1972 1 0 0
75. Bangladesh 1972 1997 1 1 1
76. Philippines IIIa 1972 1996 1 1 1
77. Chile 1973 1973 0 0 0
78. Pakistan II 1973 1977 1 1 0
79. Iraq IIIb 1974 1975 1 1 0
80. Cyprus Ib 1974 1974 1 1 1
81. Angola IIa 1975 1994 0 0 0
82. Ethiopia II 1975 1991 1 0 0
83. Morocco II 1975 1991 1 1 0
84. Lebanon Ib 1975 1990 1 0 1
85. Indonesia VI 1975 1999 1 1 1
86. Mozambique II 1976 1992 0 0 0
87. Ethiopia III 1977 1978 1 1 1
88. Cambodia Ib 1978 1991 0 0 0
89. Nicaragua 1978 1990 0 0 0
90. Afghanistan I 1978 2001 1 0 1
91. Iran IIa 1978 1979 1 0 1
92. El Salvador 1979 1992 0 0 0
93. Syria 1979 1982 1 0 1
94. Peru 1980 1999 0 0 0
95. Uganda II 1980 1986 0 0 0
96. Iraq IIIc 1980 1991 1 1 0
97. Nigeria II 1980 1984 1 1 1
98. Iran IIb 1981 1982 1 0 1
99. India IV 1982 1993 1 1 1
100. South Africa 1983 1994 1 0 0
101. Sudan Ib 1983 . 1 1 1
102. Sri Lanka II 1983 . 1 1 1
103. Turkey 1984 . 1 1 0
104. Yemen South 1986 1986 0 0 0
(Continued on next page)
Appendix: List of civil wars, 1940–2000 (Continued)
105. Sri Lanka Ib 1987 1989 0 0 0

106. Somalia 1988 . 1 0 0
107. Burundi Ic 1988 1988 1 0 0
108. India Ic 1988 . 1 1 1
109. Azerbaijan/USSR 1988 1994 1 1 1
110. Liberia 1989 1997 0 0 0
111. Romania 1989 1989 0 0 0
112. Rwanda Ib 1990 1994 1 0 0
113. Georgia I 1990 1992 1 1 0
114. Sierra Leone 1991 2002 0 0 0
115. Moldova 1991 1997 1 1 0
116. Burundi Id 1991 1991 1 0 0
117. Yugoslavia I 1991 1995 1 1 1
118. Iraq IV 1991 1993 1 0 1
119. Georgia II 1992 1993 1 1 1
120. Algeria III 1992 . 1 0 1

121. Yugoslavia II 1992 1995 1 1 1
122. Tajikistan 1992 1997 1 0 1
123. Brazzaville Ia 1993 1993 1 0 0
124. Burundi Ie 1993 . 1 0 0
125. Yemen 1994 1994 1 1 0
126. Russia Ia 1994 1996 1 1 1
127. Zaire/Congo II 1996 . 0 0 0
128. Brazzaville Ib 1997 1997 1 0 0
129. Angola IIb 1998 2002 0 0 0
130. GuineaBissau II 1998 1999 0 0 0
131. Yugoslavia III 1998 1999 1 1 1
132. Russia Ib 1999 . 1 1 1
133. Philippines IIIb 2000 . 1 1 1

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Issue Indivisibility and Time Horizons as

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Issue Indivisibility and Time Horizons

MONICA DUFFY TOFT

This paper explores two bargaining problems—issue indivisibility and time

Organization 49, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 379–414.

2 See James D. Fearon, “Bargaining, Enforcement, and International Cooperation,” International

which they are bargaining is divisible. As the apocryphal tale of Solomon’s

I highlight the circumstances under which the shadow of an infinite future

of a subset of bargaining game structures that precludes the possibility of a

THE PROBLEM OF ISSUE INDIVISIBILITY

In “Rationalist Explanations for War,” Fearon introduces issue indivisibility as

He then goes on to express skepticism about the explanatory utility of issue

If this assessment of the distribution of divisible issues (issues are “typically”

explanation of why disputes escalate to violence sometimes but not others.

War-prone international issues may often be effectively indivisible, but the

This raises an important question: is it necessary that issues be objectively

Hassner’s definition is helpful, his assertion that it applies only to sacred

those whose indivisibility is the product of human social construction. In the

INDIVISIBLE SPACE: TERRITORY AND VIOLENCE

International relations scholars thus far have done an outstanding job of

the recent Iraq war.

cede the field to the other three approaches.)

To be sure, Fearon’s presentation of logical obstacles to non-violent

Security Studies, 14, no. 1 (January–March 2005): 182.

mobilized for increased autonomy ranging from greater political or economic

31 Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence, chap. 1.

The connection between death, sacrifice, immortality, and national iden-

No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist

consideration of the cultural roots of nationalism with death, as the last

Self-sacrifice in defense of the nation becomes a virtue, a secular path

(London: Verso, 1991), 9–10.

bility as a bargaining problem. Ethnic groups seek increased autonomy and

CIVIL WAR IN CHECHNYA: PRIVATE INFORMATION AND

The most difficult question to answer about issue indivisibility, however, is

an historical accretion of identity understandings extending at least decades,

commitment problems are not as important as obstacles to non-violent dis-

opponents look like collaborators or traitors. As one of Dudayev’s aides

We have no opposition now; resentments and disagreements have been

50 V. Kharlamov, “Yeltsin’s Chechen Emergency Decree Nixed,” Pravda, 11 November 1991.

war, before again introducing the Russo-Chechen civil war as an illustrative

(July 2000): 470.

York: Wiley, 1957).

the future is valued enough, cooperative behavior, known as Tit-for-Tat, can

to real-world conflicts runs against a normative bias toward models, theo-

erate regardless of the other’s actions.

nuances and permutations of games as models of bargaining and conflict.

commitments to observe a constitutional settlement’s term is indeed cru-

He then goes on to explain:

Cooperation theory’s Tit-for-Tat mechanism may be inapplicable in this

70 See Fearon, “Bargaining,” 293–94.

horizons—either secular-non-secular or nationalist-statist—when cultures

nation’s chances of survival and perpetuation). Moreover, as the Dudayev

Time horizons and the likelihood of violence

Discounts future Violence unlikely Violence contingent

Moving from time horizons to the likelihood of war is a matter of prob-

In conceptualizing the causal role of time horizons in conflict bargaining,

To explore time horizons more fully, consider the potential impact of

Bargaining, Time, and Religion

transtemporal realm. There is no need, therefore, to compromise one’s