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Paper short abstract

Short abstract: This paper examines why non-warring actor inclusion in peace negotiations diffuses across certain civil wars. It argues that elites learn from international precedents via cross-border social and economic ties. Network analysis of conflicts from 1989–2023 demonstrates that these rela

Paper long abstract

Why is the inclusion of non-warring parties in peace negotiations more likely in some civil wars than others? This paper argues that inclusion spreads across conflicts through consequences-focused learning: warring-party elites deliberate under acute uncertainty about inclusion's costs, reasoning over which precedents are representative rather than weighing every case exhaustively. Cross-border ties function as information channels that transmit whether inclusion succeeded or failed elsewhere, leading elites to update positively from successful precedents and negatively from failed ones. To capture these channels, I construct two original composite indices of the inter-state network: a social tie index, which carries the survivability-relevant information that drives this updating, and an economic tie index, which does not. I test this argument using the Peace Observatory dataset on non-warring actor inclusion, linked to UCDP conflict data and to the bilateral source datasets underpinning each index, across all intrastate armed conflicts, 1989–2023. Employing Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models, I find that inclusive practices diffuse through conflicts sharing social and economic ties, raising the probability that non-warring actors gain a seat at the table. The findings carry implications for diffusion theory, the determinants of inclusive peace processes, and the design of mediation strategy in a densely connected international system.