Does liberalization make peace? Political opening and the Karen insurgency in Myanmar.

The literature on civil wars highlights how parties involved in a conflict face a variety of problems when negotiating a solution aimed at terminating a conflict. Main obstacles concern coordination, asymmetric information and commitment. These problems are related mainly to the capacity of the parties to seriously commit to a course of action, prevent cheating and dismiss incentives to misrepresent their strength or revolve. The chapter highlights how the process of opening decisively influences the outcome of negotiations. The chapter considers the case of the Karen insurgency in Myanmar, one of the longest ongoing civil conflicts in the world. The literature on the subject describe the relation between openness of the domestic regime and conflict as a inverse U shaped relation, portraying the phase of transition as the most conflict prone. The proposed paper, on the contrary, evidences how in the case of Myanmar, the transition has been favoring a negotiated settlement, due to the emergence of incentives such as side payments and issue linkages.