Eric Min, "Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of Conflict" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Apr 7, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Dr. Eric Min, an Assistant Professor at UCLA specializing in international security and diplomacy, reveals the nuanced role of negotiations in warfare. He distinguishes between sincere and insincere negotiations, explaining how external pressures and battlefield dynamics shape diplomatic strategies. Dr. Min highlights the impact of these negotiations on conflict resolution, showing that they can either foster peace or escalate hostilities. His innovative research combines historical case studies with data analysis, shedding light on how diplomacy functions under the pressures of war.

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INSIGHT

Strategic Nature of Wartime Negotiations

Wartime negotiations are not just for peacemaking; they can also be strategic tools to manage or win wars.
Insincere negotiations exploit diplomacy for war advantages, unlike sincere talks aiming for peace.

INSIGHT

Sincere vs Insincere Negotiations

Sincere negotiations are genuine attempts to end conflict, while insincere ones use diplomacy to gain unrelated side effects.
Insincere talks can stall, remobilize forces, or shift political blame rather than achieve peace.

INSIGHT

Factors Influencing Negotiation Types

External third-party pressures ease fears of looking weak, increasing negotiation frequency but often leading to insincere talks.
Battlefield momentum helps determine if negotiations will be sincere, with clear trends fostering genuine peace talks.

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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 Dr. Eric Min argues in Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of Conflict (Cornell University Press, 2025), 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, Dr. Min distinguishes between two kinds of negotiations: sincere and insincere. Whereas sincere negotiations are good faith honest 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, Dr. 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.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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