Mapping resolve in crisis bargaining through leader public statements: an examination of the United States’ statements about Bosnia and Kosovo

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to explore how past experiences impact the credibility of external states and change their public statements regarding other civil conflicts. While existing research on third-party intervention often explores the reasons behind external states’ involvement in conflicts, there has been a notable oversight in understanding how verbal expressions evolve across diverse conflicts. The paper compares the United States’ presidential statements regarding the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts and highlights how the United States employs different frames for these distinct conflicts to restore its credibility. The paper concludes by proposing the need for a new measure of third-party attitudes towards civil conflicts to gain a more nuanced understanding of the role of external states in civil conflicts by measuring their resolve.

KEYWORDS:

• Reputation of resolve
• third-party intervention
• leader statements
• civil conflicts
• text-as-data

Acknowledgment

I appreciate comments and suggestions from Meltem Müftüler Baç and two anonymous reviewers. All errors remain our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Retrieved from https://www.clintonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/documents/kosovo-press-1999.pdf, at 29.04.2023.

2 The keywords used to filter all statements are as follows: Bosnia Bosnia, Bosnian; Serbia: Serbia, Yugoslavia, UCK, Kosovan, Kosova, Kosovo.

3 Please see https://bnosac.github.io/udpipe/en/index.html for more information about the UDPipe package.

4 Retrieved from https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu//documents/interview-mtvs-enough-enough-forum.