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"Peace agreement"
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Armed conflicts, 1946–2013
In 2013, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) recorded 33 armed conflicts with a minimum of 25 battle-related deaths, up by one from 2012. Seven of these were recorded as wars, that is conflicts leading to 1,000 or more battle-related deaths in a calendar year. There have been 144 armed conflicts (47 wars) since 1989 and 254 armed conflicts (114 wars) since 1946. For the past ten years the amount of active armed conflict has fluctuated between 31 and 37. Six peace agreements were signed during the year 2013, two more than in the previous year. For the first time, this article also provides data on trends in battle-related deaths since 1989. These data do not show a clear time-trend. However, there is a particular difficulty in mapping the conflict in Syria, for which no credible battle-related deaths in 2013 can yet be reported.
Journal Article
Who Brings Which Peace? Neutral versus Biased Mediation and Institutional Peace Arrangements in Civil Wars
This study examines the effect of biased versus neutral mediation on the content of peace agreements. The author argues that neutral mediators, who are engaged primarily because of their interest to end the war, will have incentives to hasten the reaching of an agreement to the expense of its quality. By contrast, biased mediators, seeking to protect their protégés, will take care to ensure that there are stipulations in an agreement guaranteeing the interest of \"their\" side or use their particular access and leverage to make their side agree to costly concessions. Biased mediation processes are therefore more likely than neutral mediation processes to lead to elaborated institutional arrangements that are generally considered conducive to democracy and durable peace, such as power sharing, third-party security guarantees, and justice provisions. Empirical analysis, covering the 1989–2004 period and building on data from 124 peace agreements, supports these claims.
Journal Article
Intrastate peace agreements and the durability of peace
The article debunks the conception that peace agreements are all equal. Distinct from the conventional monocausal assessment, I view the peace agreement as a cohesive whole and evaluate its strength in terms of its structural and procedural provisions. I use data on the length of intrastate peace episodes during the period from 1946 to 2010. My key finding is that the design quality of the peace agreement has a significant impact on the durability of peace. Agreements that are carefully designed to deal with all obstacles to cooperation have the strongest pacifying effect among armed conflict outcomes. The article sets forth ways to sharpen the performance of conflict management operations in war-torn countries.
Journal Article
Masters of their domains: The role of state capacity in civil wars
Civil wars are complex events affected by numerous factors. Recent research, however, seems to have concentrated on the rebels and their motivations to the exclusion of how the state can affect the onset and outcome of civil wars. This special issue addresses this lacuna by looking at the role of state capacity. In particular, state capacity is a multi-dimensional concept that encompasses not only the extractive abilities of a state but also economic development and bureaucratic quality. Despite the various ways in which state capacity can be measured, the articles clearly show that strong states have a decreased risk of experiencing a civil war, although there is evidence that civil violence decreases state capacity, implying a reverse causality. In addition, it appears that the capable states that do experience civil violence are more able to credibly commit to a negotiated solution, which increases the possibility of a bargained end to the violence. While these articles do not represent the last word on the subject, they do provide convincing evidence that state capacity plays a critical role in the onset and conduct of civil violence.
Journal Article
Power parity and peace? The role of relative power in civil war settlement
Theories of civil war highlight how relative power affects conflict onset, dynamics, strategy, outcome, and duration. Yet most studies of civil war have not been able to capture rebel power adequately and often rely on national-level characteristics to infer relative power distributions. This study addresses this shortcoming by using a troop strength measure to test arguments about how relative power affects the likelihood of civil conflict settlement. Drawing on the international crisis bargaining literature, while noting the inherent differences between interstate and intrastate conflicts, this study argues that the condition of power parity increases the likelihood of negotiated settlement and ceasefire. Weak rebels are unable to achieve concessions through negotiation since governments view them as minor threats. Yet governments have difficulty defeating weak rebels due to an emphasis on guerrilla warfare. On the other end of the spectrum, rebels that are superior to the government in strength are unlikely to settle given their power advantage. Strong rebels that can rival the strength of the government (i.e. they are near parity) can exact more concessions because fighting at parity exposes information about how long each side can hold out while escalating the costs of war, giving each side a greater incentive to negotiate and eventually seek a ceasefire or peace agreement. This argument is supported using data on 112 dyads in the post-Cold War period.
Journal Article
Distributive justice and the durability of peace agreements
This study explores the relationship between principles of distributive justice (DJ) and the durability of negotiated agreements. Sixteen peace agreements negotiated during the early 1990s were coded for the centrality of each of four principles of DJ – equality, proportionality, compensation, and need – to the core terms of the agreement. The agreements were also assessed on scales of implementation and durability over a five-year period. Another variable included in the analysis was the difficulty of the conflict environment. These data were used to evaluate three sets of hypotheses: the relationship between DJ and durability, the role of the conflict environment, and types of DJ principles. The results obtained from both statistical and focused-comparison analyses indicate that DJ moderates the relationship between conflict environments and outcomes: when principles of justice are central to an agreement, the negative effects of difficult conflict environments are reduced; when principles are not central, the negative effects of difficulty are heightened. These relationships are accounted for primarily by one of the four DJ principles – equality. Implications of these findings are discussed along with a number of ideas for further research.
Journal Article
Organized violence, 1989–2018 and peace agreements
This article reports on trends in organized violence and peace agreements collected by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). The number of fatalities in organized violence decreased for the fourth consecutive year, to reach the lowest level since 2012. In 2018, UCDP recorded almost 76,000 deaths: a decrease of 20% compared to 2017, and 43% compared to the latest peak in 2014. State-based armed conflict drives this downward trend in organized violence, with Syria accounting for much of the change. The number of civilians killed in one-sided violence also dropped in 2018, reaching its lowest level since 2012. In contrast, non-state conflict remained on a high level. The general decline in fatalities from organized violence does not correspond with the trend in the number of active conflicts. In fact, the world has seen a new peak in the number of conflicts after 2014, matched only by the number of conflicts in the early 1990s. In 1991, the peak in the number of armed conflicts corresponded with a similar peak in the number of signed peace agreements. This was followed by a decrease in the number of conflicts in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, the most recent rise in armed conflicts has not been matched by a similar rise in the number of peace agreements. Two circumstances that characterize the recent rise in conflicts have also been found to make conflicts harder to solve: explicit religious claims and high levels of internationalization.
Journal Article
The People's Peace? Peace Agreements, Civil Society, and Participatory Democracy
This article, drawing on an extensive collection of peace agreements dating from 1990 until the present day, analyzes peace agreement provisions for civil society involvement and considers the extent to which peace agreements proffer new models of participatory democracy. We begin with some background and a short overview of political theory on participatory democracy, identifying key dilemmas. The body of the article sets out a comprehensive analysis of peace agreement provisions for civil society, indicating how peace agreements negotiate the dilemmas identified in theory. We then evaluate this negotiation in the context of post-agreement implementation difficulties. In conclusion, we discuss the implications for future research. /// Cet article, examinant une vaste collection d'accords de paix de 1990 jusqu'à aujourd'hui, analyse des dispositions des accords de paix quant à la participation de la société civile et étudie dans quelle mesure les accords de paix offrent de nouveaux modèles de démocratie participante. La première partie expose une brève vue d'ensemble de la théorie politique sur la démocratie participante, identifiant des dilemmes clefs. La seconde partie, corps de l'article, expose une analyse complète des dispositions des accords de paix relatives à la société civile, présentant comment les accords de paix composent avec les dilemmes identifiés dans la théorie. La troisième partie évalue cette négociation dans le contexte des difficultés de mise en oeuvre après accord. Finalement, nous discutons de la portée de ces travaux pour la recherche future.
Journal Article
Consociational Settlements and Reconstruction: Bosnia in Comparative Perspective (1995–Present)
Both Bosnia in 1995 and Northern Ireland in 1998 were extremely fragile in the immediate aftermath of brokered peace negotiations. Each instituted a form of consociationalism—a government that institutionalizes a voice for each ethnic group—as an element of brokered peace. In this article, I examine Bosnian postwar governance with comparative insights from Northern Ireland. Bosnia was the recipient of a large amount of international aid. While this aid was crucial to the initial state-building effort, the problems Bosnia now faces are due to its consociational governance structure. Some of the group-based aspects of consociationalism are in tension with individual rights, a problem that cannot be addressed by aid alone.
Journal Article