Developing Convergent Expectations in Slovenia’s Conflict
In: Thinking About War and Peace: Past, Present, and Future
Author:
Karsten L. de Bruijne
Karsten L. de Bruijne
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This chapter stresses the strategic similarities decision makers continue to face when embarking on the path of war: they develop similar expectations about the outcome of a war as it unfolds. The bargaining model of war posits that a Bayesian process of learning and the process of screening explain this convergence, as new information is revealed on the battlefield. In this chapter, the claims of the model are tested in the most-likely case of the short secession war between Slovenia and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991. It finds that the updating process by the Yugoslav army follows the learning predictions of the model remarkably well.