Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of Conflict

Eric Min, Assistant Professor, Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles

Wednesday, May 7, 2025
12:30 PM (Pacific Time)
Bunche Hall, Room 10383
11282 Portola Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095

REGISTRATION COMING SOON!

ABOUT THE EVENT

This event will be a hybrid event. It will take place in-person as well as virtually. You may find the address above to the in-person event venue location.

If you register for and attend a Burkle Center virtual event, you will not be seen or heard via video or audio. We will live-stream this event on the Burkle Center’s YouTube page. The YouTube livestream will be available below at the start of the event.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Of all interstate conflicts across the last two centuries, two-thirds have ended through negotiated agreement. Wartime diplomacy is thus commonly seen as a costless and mechanical process solely designed to end fighting. But as Min argues, that wartime negotiations are not just peacemaking tools. They are in fact a highly strategic activity that can also help states manage, fight, and potentially win wars.

To demonstrate that wartime talk does more than simply end hostilities, Min distinguishes between two kinds of negotiations: sincere and insincere. Whereas sincere negotiations are good faithhonest attempts to reach peace, insincere negotiations exploit diplomacy for some other purpose, such as currying gaining political support or remobilizing forces. Two factors determine whether and how belligerents will negotiate: the amount of pressure that outside parties can place on belligerents them to engage in diplomacy, and information obtained from fighting on the battlefield.

Combining statistical and computational text analyses with qualitative case studies ranging from the War of the Roman Republic to the Korean War, Min shows that negotiations are more likely to occur with strong external pressures. A combination of such pressures and indeterminate battlefield activity, however, will most likely leads to insincere negotiations that may stoke fighting rather than end it. By revealing that diplomacy can sometimes be counterproductive to peace, Words of War compels us to rethink the assumption that it "cannot hurt" to promote diplomacy during war.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Min is an Assistant Professor of Political Science, as well as Global Studies, at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science at Stanford University, where he was also the Zukerman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation for the 2017-2018 academic year. He was a Henry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Distinguished Scholar in 2021-22. Min's primary research interests include the intersection of interstate war and diplomacy; international security and conflict management; and the application of machine learning, text, and statistical methods to study these topics. His work is published in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and the Journal of Strategic Studies.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Margaret Peters is Associate Director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Chair of the Global Studies major at UCLA. She is also a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research on the political economy of migration. She is currently working on a book project on how the process of forced displacement affects migrants’ sense of dignity and how these dignity concerns affect decisions of whether to move from the crisis zone, where to move, and when to return. She is additionally writing a book on how dictators use migration, including forced migration, to remain in power. Her award-winning book, Trading Barriers: Immigration and the Remaking of Globalization, argues that the increased ability of firms to produce anywhere in the world combined with growing international competition due to lowered trade barriers has led to greater limits on immigration, as businesses no longer see a need to support open immigration at home.