Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Pathways To Civil War, Susumu Suzuki

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is about conflict escalation to civil war, and examines why some political confrontations escalate and why principal conflict actors continue fighting rather than reaching a number of political arrangements at various points of the course of conflict. Unlike previous studies, this study treats the progression to civil war as one of complex alternate paths. In so doing, building on the perspective of asymmetric information (i.e. uncertainty) problems as a cause of war, this study claims that involving each conflict actor's cognitive variances about its opponent's willingness to resolve and military strength would bolster either side's costly military mobilization …