| Description |
A nuanced understanding of negotiation is essential to combating civil wars, transnational challenges to order, and threatening nonstate actors in the global political arena. This quantitative study goes beyond structural explanations and evaluations of negotiations as mere outcomes to explore the processes and factors that cause nonstate armed groups in civil wars to pursue negotiations sooner. With the use of data on all civil wars from 1946-2011, this study utilizes competing risks survival analysis to demonstrate the relative importance of cultural loyalty to the local population, governing ambitions in the area, and assistance from a third party in the timing of negotiation pursuit by rebel groups. The central findings suggest that, regardless of a nonstate armed group's strength relative to the state, having an outside backer or the goal of defending a cultural identity is associated with earlier attempts at negotiation, while access to lootable resources appears to delay settlement pursuit. |
