Where Have All the Victories Gone? Hypotheses (and Some Very Preliminary Tests) on War Outcomes in Historical Perspective.

This paper is part of a project, still in its infancy, on historical changes in war termination. Here, I document an empirical trend: a marked increase over time in the number of wars ending in a draw, occurring for interstate wars after WWII, and for civil wars after the end of the Cold War. I then develop a number of possible explanations for the trend, and begin to test a few of these. For war to end in a draw, two conditions must hold: neither side is able to defeat the other outright, and the belligerents can reach a compromise settlement, allowing them to stop fighting rather than continuing the war in the hope of eventual victory. Using this framework, I outline a number of hypotheses derived from existing literature on war outcomes and duration. I also explore the possibility that the increase in the number of draws is an artifact of the coding. However, at least two possible explanations for such an artifact point to fundamental changes in the nature of war, suggesting interesting avenues for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]