Spoiling Inside and Out - Internal Political Contestation and the Middle East Peace Process - Wendy Pearlman

Oct 13, 2026

Spoiling Inside and Out analyzes why peace accords often collapse by focusing on “spoilers,” actors who use violence or other disruption to prevent negotiations from reaching settlements that would threaten their power or interests. Challenging conventional external-utility explanations, the article argues that domestic politics both constrain and motivate negotiators and spoilers. It develops a framework treating negotiating and spoiling as mechanisms of internal political contestation and tests two hypotheses through Palestinian episodes from the PLO’s Geneva bid and the Oslo process.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryGeneral

FormatPDF

Pages31

Reading Time11 min

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Spoiling Inside and Out

Internal political contestation and the Middle East peace process

Spoilers and the limits of external utility explanations

Research hypotheses and framework

Palestinian cases: Geneva and the Oslo peace process

Organization of the article and implications

Spoiling Inside and Out Internal Political Contestation and the Middle East Peace Process Wendy Pearlman Of the thirty-eight peace accords signed between 1988 and 1998, thirty-one failed to last more than three years.1 Contributing to their failure was the behavior of so-called spoilers: those who use violence or other means to undermine negotiations in the expectation that a settlement will threaten their power or interests.2 The stakes for understanding spoiler behavior are high. Where parties kept spoilers at bay, such as in Guatemala and South Africa, years of bloody conºict gave way to successful transitions to peace and democracy. Where spoilers proved triumphant, such as in Angola and Rwanda, the violence ensuing after a peace accord failed was more horriªc than what had preceded it. Conventional explanations of conºict resolution assume that both negotiators and spoilers act primarily to achieve objectives vis-à-vis their external opponent. Politics internal to their national community are relevant only insofar as they increase or decrease audience costs, that is, the domestic price that political actors pay for their foreign policy decisions. This explanation, however, neglects the meaningful ways in which domestic politics are not only a constraint on actors’ conºict strategies but a motivator as well. Actors turn to negotiating or spoiling to contest both what a proposed settlement entails and who has the power to decide this and other matters on behalf of their community. For competing factions in a nonstate group, in particular, participation in or spoiling of negotiations offers an opportunity to advance their struggle for political dominance. This article develops a framework for understanding negotiating and spoiling as mechanisms of internal political contestation. It takes the notion of“nested games,” which George Tsebelis uses to explain Western European electoral politics,3 and applies it to the uniquely ºuid context of nonstate groups. | Wendy Pearlman is the Crown Junior Chair in Middle East Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Sci ence at Northwestern University. | | --- | | 1. John Darby, The Effects of Violence on Peace Processes (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001), p. 8.
2. Stephen John Stedman,“Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes,” International Security, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Fall 1997), pp. 5–53.
3. George Tsebelis, Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) . | International Security, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Winter 2008/09), pp. 79–109 © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. International Security 33:3 80 The article puts forth two hypotheses. First, negotiating and spoiling as internal contestation are more likely when at least one party to a conºict lacks an institutionalized system of legitimate representation. Second, whether internal contestation motivations lead factions to act as peace makers or peace breakers depends not only on their policy preferences but also on the balance of power within their community. The article examines these hypotheses through a comparative analysis of two episodes in the history of the Palestinian national movement: the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO’s) bid to join the Geneva peace conference in 1973–74 and its engagement in the Oslo peace process from 1993 to 2000 . In both instances, the ofªcial Palestinian leadership sought to participate in negotiations while smaller factions carried out attacks to undermine them. Relying on external utility models, most commentators interpreted these actors’motivations as stemming exclusively from their stance in the conºict with Israel. An analysis of a range of primary and secondary sources, however, suggests that these actors were no less motivated by their struggle over representation of the Palestinian cause. The article proceeds in

FAQs

Which Palestinian episodes does the article use to test its framework?

It examines the PLO’s attempt to join the Geneva peace conference in 1973–74 and the PLO’s engagement in the Oslo peace process from 1993 to 2000.

Oct 13, 2026

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