Doctoral Dissertation, The Australian National University, May 2024. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/317367

Non-decisive outcomes of conflict—instances where violence ends without a clear victory or formal settlement—are the most frequent and yet understudied scenarios in civil wars. The study of war termination and rationalist bargaining approaches typically relies on a 'Win, Lose, or Draw' framework. Yet this approach fails to capture the more complex processes of conflict ending without the clear symbols of a war’s termination. This omission limits the theoretical understanding of the bargaining process to reach non-decisive outcomes and narrows the perceived range of rational options available to conflict actors, particularly those seeking an off-ramp when neither victory nor a negotiated settlement is attainable. Addressing theoretical and empirical gaps, this article makes four contributions to bargaining and civil war outcomes literature: I) it conceptualizes non-decisive conflict outcomes with a typology; II) it refines rationalist bargaining approaches by accounting for unique commitment challenges in civil wars that explain why actors may avoid negotiations and fighting; III) it illustrates the variation of non-deceive outcomes through a case study on Myanmar’s armed conflicts; and IV) it advances theoretical explanations for previously overlooked empirical cases of intrastate conflict outcomes—covering long wars, mutually beneficial stalemates, and the transformation of conflict actors—helping scholars and policymakers more effectively recognize and study these alternative endpoints.

Between 1945 and 2012, nearly half of the countries affected by internal conflict faced more than one rebel group. This study examines ways rebel fragmentation shapes prospects for war termination, including peace agreements, rebel victory, government victory, and non-decisive outcomes. I examine mechanisms of fragmentation—including rebel splintering, when new rebel groups emerge from an existing organization, and overlapping conflict in which more than one original rebel group is actively fighting—using random-effects multinomial logistic regression to analyze conflicts from 1946 to 2012. Findings demonstrate that fragmentation shapes civil war termination by reducing the chances for decisive military victories and increasing the likelihood of non-decisive scenarios, which include mostly low or no activity conflict—with states and rebels sometimes entering into mutually beneficial stalemates—and conflict actor transformations, such as rebels merging or becoming less threatening over time. Rebel fragmentation reduces the relative risk of government victory over non-decisive outcomes by approximately 70 percent and decreases the odds of rebel victory by 78 percent. Peace settlements—reached through a series of partial agreements with some but not all rebels, rather than all-inclusive outcomes—emerge as the second possible outcome to non-decisive scenarios in fragmented conflicts. Sequential and partial peace represents a positive alternative to long-term conflict management, given the persistent risks of violence escalation and rebel proliferation when conflict causes remain unaddressed.