Fearon-Kalyvas Model: Toward a Unified Model of Battles and Violence in Civil War

Fearon (1995) and Kalyvas (2006) are arguably the most influential contributions to conflict studies in recent decades. However, scholars tend to use their models separately—Fearon’s for conflicts between armed groups and Kalyvas’ for violence against civilians—overlooking how they could speak to each other. We propose a model that unifies these classical theories. The new model, Fearon-Kalyvas model, highlights the crucial role of the relative efficacy of battles and violence. When fighting has better prospects than violence, armed groups attack their adversaries, thereby avoiding intermediate territorial control and violence. Thus, contrary to Kalyvas (2006), intermediate territorial control does not necessarily result in violence. Theoretically, this suggests that the “cost of peace”—maintaining control through violence—can result in a bargaining failure and battle. Empirically, our model implies a selection bias; territorial control is endogenous to the efficacy of violence, and this endogeneity can bias naïve regression estimates.