The Peace In Between

Post-War Violence and Peacebuilding

Astri Suhrke, Mats Berdal, Astri Suhrke, Mats Berdal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415609326
• eBook ISBN: 9781136671920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume examines the causes and purposes of 'post-conflict' violence.

The end of a war is generally expected to be followed by an end to collective violence, as the term 'post-conflict' that came into general usage in the 1990s signifies. In reality, however, various forms of deadly violence continue, and sometimes even increase after the big guns have been silenced and a peace agreement signed. Explanations for this and other kinds of violence fall roughly into two broad categories – those that stress the legacies of the war and those that focus on the conditions of the peace. There are significant gaps in the literature, most importantly arising from the common premise that there is one, predominant type of post-war situation. This 'post-war state' is often endowed with certain generic features that predispose it towards violence, such as a weak state, criminal elements generated by the war-time economy, demobilized but not demilitarized or reintegrated ex-combatants, impunity and rapid liberalization.

The premise of this volume differs. It argues that features which constrain or encourage violence stack up in ways to create distinct and different types of post-war environments. Critical factors that shape the post-war environment in this respect lie in the war-to-peace transition itself, above all the outcome of the war in terms of military and political power and its relationship to social hierarchies of power, normative understandings of the post-war order, and the international context.

This book will of much interest to students of war and conflict studies, peacebuilding and IR/Security Studies in general.

1 The peace in between¹

Astri Suhrke

Framing the issues

The end of a war is generally expected to be followed by an end to collective violence, as the term ‘post-conflict’ that came into general usage in the 1990s signifies. In reality, however, various forms of deadly violence continue and sometimes even increase after the big guns have been silenced and a peace agreement signed. Why is this so? What form does such violence take? What purposes – and whose purposes – does it serve? The present book is framed around these questions as they relate to contemporary, internal wars.

The idea that wars affect the level of violence in post-war societies goes back centuries, long before the more recent interest in ‘post-conflict’ societies. The phenomenon of post-war violence has been explored by philosophers (Erasmus), statesmen (Sir Thomas More) and sociologists (Emile Durkheim), and was methodically examined by social scientists in the early twentieth century. But while the idea has ‘a rich history’, as Archer and Gartner (1976) note in their seminal work in criminology, systematic studies are rare. The Archer and Gartner study is the most comprehensive and methodologically rigorous comparative analysis in recent years. Analysing the aftermath of international wars in the period 1900–76, they found that, as a rule, post-war societies are considerably more violent than they were before the war. In some cases, the homicide rate doubled; in Italy, the murder rate in a five-year period after the Second World War increased 133 per cent compared to a similar period before the war (p. 948). A similar study looking at homicide rates after internal wars came to a similar result (Collier and Hoeffler 2004)

In light of this, it is unsurprising that the aftermath of the civil wars in Central America in the late twentieth century was marked by extraordinarily high levels of violent crime. In El Salvador, homicides peaked four years after the war at an amazing rate of around 150 per 100,000 inhabitants, which was about five times higher than the pre-war rate and the highest in all of Central America (Call 2007: 41; Savenije and van der Borgh 2004: 156). In Guatemala, violence increased to the point where 40 per cent of the population of Guatemala City in 2006–7 expected to be a victim of violent crime within the following six months (Torres 2008: 1). This is not the only kind of post-war violence reported. Ethnically-directed violence erupted in Kosovo after the 1999 NATO intervention dismantled Serb rule. The same happened in northern Afghanistan after the US-led military intervention in 2001. In Liberia, ex-combatants forcibly seized rubber plantations. In East Timor, factions of the police and the army battled each other and triggered a major conflagration in 2006, seven years after the violent secession from Indonesia. In Rwanda, the post-genocide government methodically hunted down the genocidaires as well as tens of thousands of civilians who had fled across the border to Zaire. The list goes on. Are there some commonalities to these disparate events that reflect their proximity to war?

The literature

‘Violence and war’, Christopher Cramer reminds us, ‘have been common experiences of [societal] transition since the very early origins and spread of capitalism’ (Cramer 2006: 288), and civil war is often a key element in such transitions. War-to-peace transitions may be particularly vulnerable to social violence for reasons that are generally seen to fall into two categories: legacies of the war and conditions of the peace.

One approach emphasizes socio-cultural factors. Wars create social disorganization and a general legitimation of violence stemming from wartime reversal of customary prohibitions on killings. The violent consequences in peacetime are sometimes ascribed to a ‘culture of violence’. Societies can develop the collective equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorder, leading to a loss of basic trust in the order of things and sowing the seeds of new violence such as domestic violence, rape, kidnapping, gang violence and organized crime (USIP 2001). Both gang violence and peasant lynching in Guatemala have been related to the trauma of large-scale atrocities inflicted by the state's ‘security forces’ during the war, or a ‘democratization’ of such terror (Godoy 2002; Prophette et al. 2003). While fairly common in one form or another, ‘culture of violence’ explanations are also criticized on empirical and normative grounds (Steenkamp 2005).

An institutional approach situates problems of post-war violence in a different context. Continued or renewed violence is attributed to faltering institutions, above all a weak state, which fails to constrain unruly agents left over from the war (such as warlords, ex-combatants that are not reintegrated, or mafia groups empowered by the war economy) and creates widespread impunity for crimes. In this perspective, peasant lynching in Guatemala does not reflect ‘a culture of violence’ but expresses the community's need to establish justice given the failure of the state to do so (Fernández García 2004). Institutional approaches have informed much of the policy-oriented literature on ‘peacebuilding’ which emphasizes institution-building in public administration and the security sector (Cousens and Kumar 2001; Milliken and Krause 2003; Rotberg 2004; Junne and Verkoren 2005; Call 2007; Nilsson 2008; Toft 2009). Until such institutions are in place, an international presence is necessary to stabilize the peace, especially in the form of security guarantees (Walter 2002). This literature has significantly influenced needs assessments and policy development in the UN peacebuilding regime that has developed since the early 1990s. An increasingly standardized understanding of peace-building emphasizes security sector reform (SSR), the rule of law, good governance, rapid economic reconstruction and timely humanitarian assistance; the implication is that failure in these areas may lead to renewed violence (UN 2009).

In a political economy perspective, the problem is more fundamental. The starting point here lies in the understanding of war itself. Rather than a fight over political goals that can be settled by a compromise or outright military victory, war, and the violence it entails, serves a variety of economic, political and social functions. The political economy of violence literature emphasizes violence as a tool of accumulation and domination rather than as a means of political transformation (Duffield 1998; Berdal and Malone 2000; Keen 2000). This applies not only to entrepreneurs in the wartime economy but more broadly to a range of military and political actors. The prototype within this logic is the so-called warlord – a self-appointed military leader with armed followers and a more or less willing constituency – for whom the war is not only a source of enrichment but also a basis of political power (Giustozzi 2003). In addition, some analysts argue that violence meets a number of immediate psychological and security needs of the belligerents, particularly otherwise disempowered youths (Keen 2002; Utas 2003). The implications for peace are clear: if the violence of war serves a multiplicity of social, economic and political functions, we cannot expect it to disappear once a peace agreement is signed. When these functions are tied to distinct social and economic structures, they produce vested interests in the means of violence as a source of power and determinant of social relations. For example, warlordism and ‘warlord politics’ appear in this light as inherently violent structures that are inimical to state-building in a framework of accountability (Reno 1998), or at least rather resistant to conversion to suit a non-violent peace (Goodhand and Cramer 2002).

In a different perspective, some explanations for post-war violence focus on the nature of the peace settlement and the associated assistance and reforms to peacebuilding known as ‘the liberal peace’. Widely promoted as a model for post-war reconstruction since the end of the Cold War, ‘the liberal peace’ is based on market forces and political democracy operating within a neoliberal international economic system. Reforms of this kind are associated with systematic inequalities, marginalization and exclusion of weaker groups (Robinson 2003; Stewart 2001), which are potential sources of violence, particularly in the form of state repression and crime. In societies emerging from civil war, institutions and the national consensus are often weak and the negative consequences of liberalization and competition are likely to be especially marked (Paris 2004; Richmond 2005). National elites become increasingly oriented towards international sources of power available through international peacebuilding and less attuned to the demands of post-war development and social integration (Pearce 1999). Post-war democratization is a similarly double-edged sword. While in the long run associated with non-violent conflict resolution, in times when rules of the new order are being defined in the aftermath of war the stakes are high and the democratization process has historically been punctured by violence (Tilly 2003). Early elections in post-war societies carry a particular risk of reinforcing divisions and courting violence according to some analysts, although others consider it overstated (Sisk 2009).

Varieties of post-war states

The premise of general studies such as those cited above is that post-war environments have significant common features. That may be so, but should not obscure regional variations in post-war environments that are particularly relevant to understanding forces of conflict and violence. Studies of post-war societies in Central America typically emphasize a constellation of factors: entrenched and highly unequal socio-economic hierarchies, weak or partisan institutions of state and justice, and the negative socio-economic effects of integration into a regional international economy dominated by the United States (Hume 2009; Zinecker 2006). Studies of conflict in the post-war Balkans, by contrast, emphasize the transformation of wartime economies into post-war compacts between organized crime and political elites to establish ‘shadow economies’ of exploitation (Pugh et al. 2004). In parts of Africa, similar alignments developed after Cold War patronage disappeared, and rebels and governments alike had to finance themselves by opportunistic and often violent exploitation of local natural resources in war as well as peacetime. Some scholars have noted a fluid line between war and peace in Africa more generally. While the purpose of violence is in both cases to accumulate resources and suppress the opposition, behaviour becomes similar as belligerents fraternize during war and fight each other afterwards (Keen 2000; Nordstrom 2004).

This literature takes us some way towards understanding the dynamic of post-war violence. Puzzles remain, however. In Central America, for instance, a striking but unexplored piece of data is the very low crime rate in post-war Nicaragua, which otherwise has many features in common with El Salvador and Guatemala. Some countries have not experienced high levels of post-war violence even though the war was enormously destructive and peace initially seemed fragile. ‘There were good grounds for expecting a “violent peace” in Bosnia, the most diverse and delicately balanced of the former Yugoslav republics in terms of ethnicity’, Berdal, Celador and Zupcevic write in chapter 4 of this volume. Yet, as they go on to show, apart from immediate ‘aftershocks’ of ethnically directed violence and incidents associated with minority refugee returns, Bosnia has had relatively little overt post-war violence. As for elections, the literature is inconclusive and the debate goes on. Violent elections have taken place in countries without a recent civil war (Kenya in 2007 and recent elections in Zimbabwe), while the 1994 elections in Mozambique immediately after the peace agreement proceeded calmly and served as an essential transition mechanism from war to peace. Other war-torn countries (Iraq and Afghanistan) have had violent elections, however.

The variations are important. First, they point to a question that has so far been ignored. What is the most significant puzzle to be addressed – that societies which have descended into brutal civil war experience continuous and heavy violence afterwards, or that they experience only limited violence? Why would a brutal war in Bosnia and Liberia suggest a particularly violent peace? Put differently, what are the underlying assumptions here about ‘normal’ levels of violence in a society and particularly a post-war society? For social scientists, the question can only be addressed historically and empirically. In the absence of empirically-based, aggregate data analysis of post-war violence except for homicide (Archer and Gartner 1976; Collier and Hoeffler 2004), a case study approach that places individual country experiences in their historical context is a methodologically reasonable way to go. Second, the variations in post-war violence suggest that there is no such thing as one generic post-war environment, but rather many types. The singular term ‘the post-war state’ masks this kind of variation and inhibits a nuanced understanding.

One main purpose of this book is to start sorting out these different types of post-war environment, or what we will call difference kinds of post-war peace. The variations, as we shall see, include some of the kinds of factors that determine whether peace agreements are implemented or collapse (Hampson 1996; Stedman et al. 2002; Doyle and Sambanis 2006). More specifically, we shall look at the nature of the war, the way it ended in terms of the political bargain and balance of power on the ground, the political-normative framework for the new post-war order, and the presence and absence of institutions for managing violence, including, importantly, international forces and agencies. Four main post-war ‘peaces’ can be identified, based on empirical cases that lend themselves to the construction of ‘ideal types’. The first, which we have called the Victor's Peace, is based on an older historical case – the Spanish Civil War. Its counterpart, the Loser's Peace, is also based on an older case, namely the post-bellum ex-Confederacy states in the United States. The two remaining types are derived from contemporary situations. The Divided Peace is constructed around the relatively short post-war situation in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban (2001–4/5), while post-war Liberia is the model for what we have called the Pacified Peace. The four types, their determinants and their susceptibility to post-war violence are discussed in later sections of this chapter.

The second main purpose of the book is to present in-depth analysis of different types or dynamics of violence in various post-war environments. Recognizing the importance of regional variations, we selected contemporary cases from different geographical areas – two from Europe, two from the Middle East, three from sub-Saharan Africa (West and Central), three from Asia and one from Latin America. Two much older cases were added to provide historical depth and invite reflections on the importance of changes in the global context for post-war environments. These ‘historical cases’ are the aftermath of the Spanish Civil war in the mid-twentieth century and of the American Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century. The cases reflect the diversity of contemporary post-war environments and post-war violence. Some chapters have overall country reviews of levels and types of post-war violence; others focus on particular conflict dynamics. Individually these chapters provide insight into particular cases; collectively they offer material for identifying commonalities and variations in both the dynamics of post-war violence and the types of post-war situation where they occur.

But first, a note on concepts.

A note on concepts: violence, post-war violence and violence in the post-war state

The term ‘post-conflict’ that came into widespread use in the 1990s is somewhat awkward in an analysis that examines violence in the aftermath of war and similar kinds of armed conflict. Taken literally, ‘post-conflict violence’ is an oxymoron and we shall therefore use the term ‘post-war violence’.

Violence...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Peace In Between
• Series: Studies in Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 The peace in between ASTRI SUHRKE
• PART I Echoes from history
• PART II Europe and the Middle East
• PART III Asia
• Index