The 1958 and 1960 United Nations conferences were of a piece, with the second convened to settle the unresolved questions from the first: the breadth of the territorial sea and fishing limits. At the earlier conference, the maritime powers had been preoccupied with disputes among themselves, but by 1960 they were forced to meet the challenges presented by states from the global South. Delegates from the latter took the view that the old maritime system upheld a discredited imperialist order, and they sought to bend the law of the sea to their own ends. Their campaigns to regulate the passage of warships through the territorial sea and to claim exclusive fishing zones and preferential fishing rights gave rise to disagreements with the powers, who sought to maximise the scope of their own naval and fishing operations. These differences would lead to the breakdown of the conference.

This chapter introduces the second general class of bargaining failure: information problems. If one side does not know how costly the other side views war, it may make an onerous demand. Opponents that have low costs reject, leading to war. Although this explanation for conflict is well known, many of its implications are misunderstood. The remainder of the chapter dispels some of them, showing that the probability of war can change as a function of the distribution of power and that more information might cause more conflict.