Cease-fire negotiation complexity scales with the number of nested party levels.

Evidence

Robert Putnam has highlighted the extent to which negotiations between states are “two level games” in which diplomats negotiate simultaneously with constituencies within their country and with their counterparts from the other country. In a parallel analysis, Huntington showed how reformers in an authoritarian government negotiating a transition to democracy with moderates in the opposition must also negotiate with or counter the hard-liners within the government while the moderates must do the same with the radicals in the opposition. These two level games involve at a minimum four parties and at least three and often four relations between them. A complex fault line war, however, is a three level game with at least six parties and at least seven relations among them. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 810

Categorization

• XREF: Extends Putnam’s two-level games framework into a three-level model for civilizational wars; connects to theories of nested negotiation in international relations.
• SEED: Could be an essay on how negotiation complexity grows superlinearly with party count in multi-level conflicts, from two-level to n-level games.