Leadership Preferences and Duration of Ethno-Territorial Civil Wars

In standard conflict bargaining models, we expect internal ethno-territorial dispute outcomes to be influenced, not only by status quo conditions and relative military power, but also by leadership preferences. This presents and utilizes a new database that directly measures the ideological nationalist dimension of variation in state and ethnic minority group leadership preferences for a widely used sample of post-World War II, ethno-territorial civil wars. Controlling for the impact of other factors, we find that measures of more extreme nationalist state and rebel group leaderships are robust predictors of longer war duration.