Interstate Conciliation in the Shadow of Deep Historical Grievances

Abstract

How can international adversaries and their domestic publics conciliate in the shadow of deep historical grievances? To address this question, we focus substantively on apologies for war atrocities and trace experimentally the effects of different policy counterfactuals. Conducting survey experiments dyadically in both countries, we randomized different forms of war apologies from Japan and official reactions from China. We show that direct apologies have significant positive effects. We also find two distinct sender-receiver gaps: The sender side (Japan) sees the apology signal as significantly more sincere than the receiver side (China) seeing the same signal; but the sender side also significantly underestimates the receiver’s willingness to conciliate. Finally, we trace how the receiver’s official reaction shapes both receiver-side (Chinese) domestic support for conciliation and sender-side (Japanese) public support for apologizing. These findings offer the first dyadic-level experimental evidence on the domestic dynamics of international conciliation between rival states.