Committing to Peace

The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars

Barbara F. Walter

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691089317
  9780691089300
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400824465
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why do some civil wars end in successfully implemented peace settlements while others are fought to the finish? Numerous competing theories address this question. Yet not until now has a study combined the historical sweep, empirical richness, and conceptual rigor necessary to put them thoroughly to the test and draw lessons invaluable to students, scholars, and policymakers. Using data on every civil war fought between 1940 and 1992, Barbara Walter details the conditions that lead combatants to partake in what she defines as a three-step process--the decision on whether to initiate negotiations, to compromise, and, finally, to implement any resulting terms. Her key finding: rarely are such conflicts resolved without active third-party intervention.

Walter argues that for negotiations to succeed it is not enough for the opposing sides to resolve the underlying issues behind a civil war. Instead the combatants must clear the much higher hurdle of designing credible guarantees on the terms of agreement--something that is difficult without outside assistance. Examining conflicts from Greece to Laos, China to Columbia, Bosnia to Rwanda, Walter confirms just how crucial the prospect of third-party security guarantees and effective power-sharing pacts can be--and that adversaries do, in fact, consider such factors in deciding whether to negotiate or fight. While taking many other variables into account and acknowledging that third parties must also weigh the costs and benefits of involvement in civil war resolution, this study reveals not only how peace is possible, but probable.

PART ONE

Theory

1. Introduction

WHY DO SOME CIVIL WARS end peacefully, while others are fought to the finish? Why, for example, did the Sandinistas and Contras in Nicaragua stop their war with a negotiated settlement, while the Sandinistas and the Somoza regime did not? Why were the Sudanese able to end their conflict in 1972 in a settlement, but not the Nigerians? Why did negotiations in Bosnia bring peace, while negotiations in Rwanda brought genocide?

Between 1940 and 1992, only a third of all negotiations to end civil wars resulted in a successfully implemented peace settlement. In most cases, combatants chose to walk away from the negotiating table and return to war. In fact, civil war combatants almost always chose to return to war unless a third party stepped in to enforce or verify a post-treaty transition. If a third party assisted with implementation, negotiations almost always succeeded, regardless of the initial goals, ideology, or ethnicity of the participants. If a third party did not, these talks almost always failed.

This book tries to explain why combatants in some civil war negotiations choose to sign and implement peace settlements, while others choose to return to war. I argue that successful negotiations must do more than resolve the underlying issues over which a civil war has been fought. To end their war in a negotiated settlement, the combatants must clear the much higher hurdle of designing credible guarantees on the terms of the agreement—a task made difficult without outside assistance. The biggest challenge facing civil war opponents at the negotiating table, therefore, is not how to resolve disagreements over land reform, majority rule, or any of the underlying grievances that started the war. These are difficult issues, but they are not the most difficult. The greatest challenge is to design a treaty that convinces the combatants to shed their partisan armies and surrender conquered territory even though such steps will increase their vulnerability and limit their ability to enforce the treaty’s other terms. When groups obtain third-party security guarantees for the treacherous demobilization period that follows the signing of an agreement, and obtain power-sharing guarantees in the first postwar government, they will implement their settlement. When groups fail to obtain such guarantees, the warring factions will eventually reject a negotiated settlement and continue their war.

I have four aims in this book. The first is to uncover why so many civil wars fail to end in successfully negotiated settlements and why third-party enforcement or verification of the post-treaty implementation period is critical for success. The second is to reconceptualize the resolution of civil wars as a three-step process during which combatants must decide whether to (1) initiate negotiations, (2) compromise on goals and principles, and (3) implement the terms of a treaty. By understanding resolution as composed of three distinct stages, I hope to demonstrate that the factors held up in the scholarly literature to explain the settlement of civil wars omit a key problem. Groups who agree to meet at the negotiating table and who manage to resolve their grievances still worry that their enemy will take advantage of them after they sign a peace agreement and begin to demobilize. In the end, it is the implementation phase, long ignored by scholars, that is the most difficult to navigate and the reason so many negotiations to fail. My final aim is to collect and analyze the data necessary to test a range of competing explanations in order to draw appropriate lessons.

Before continuing, I should mention what this book does not aim to do. It does not take a stand on whether the United States should have intervened in Rwanda or Bosnia or should intervene in any country seeking a settlement to a civil war. It makes no judgment about the practicality of providing peacekeeping services around the globe, or the ethics of intervening to help stop a civil war.¹ It also does not discuss the difficulties world leaders face obtaining domestic political support for post-treaty interventions.

What it does lay out are the conditions under which peace negotiations succeed, the type of outside intervention that is necessary to get combatants through the difficult implementation period, and the timing during which third-party intervention is most valuable. This book leaves it up to policymakers to decide whether the benefits of peace are worth the money, manpower, and support needed to launch such missions.

The rest of this chapter is divided into five sections. The first presents the empirical puzzle driving the book, namely that combatants frequently choose to return to civil wars even after they have signed comprehensive peace agreements. The second section summarizes the main argument: civil war peace negotiations frequently fail because combatants cannot enforce or credibly commit to treaties that produce enormous uncertainty in the context of a highly dangerous implementation period. The third section reviews other explanations for why civil war negotiations may break down. In the next section I explain the methodology used to test these competing explanations. The final section gives a brief summary of the rest of the book.

The Puzzle

A close examination of all civil war negotiations between 1940 and 1992 shows that getting combatants to the bargaining table and resolving their grievances does not guarantee peace.² As figure 1.1 shows, 62 percent of all negotiations during this period led to a signed bargain.³ Yet as figure 1.2 reveals, almost half of these treaties were never implemented. Contrary to common expectations, combatants do not have the greatest difficulty resolving underlying conflicts of interest and reaching bargains. They have the greatest difficulty implementing the resulting terms. In short, the conditions that encourage groups to initiate negotiations and sign settlements do not appear sufficient to bring peace.

The Argument

An important and frequent reason why civil war negotiations fail is because it is almost impossible for the combatants themselves to arrange credible guarantees on the terms of the settlement. Negotiations frequently do not fail because the conditions on the ground are not “ripe for resolution,” as many have argued. Combatants in most civil wars seek a negotiated settlement at some point during the conflict. Nor do negotiations frequently fail because bargains cannot be struck, as many others have argued. Adversaries often compromise on the basic issues underlying their conflict, and they often find mutually acceptable solutions to their problems. Negotiations fail because combatants cannot credibly promise to abide by terms that create numerous opportunities for exploitation after the treaty is signed and implementation begins. Only if a third party is willing to enforce or verify demobilization, and only if the combatants are willing to extend power-sharing guarantees, will promises to abide by the original terms be credible and negotiations succeed. I call this theory the credible commitment theory of civil war resolution.

Fig. 1.1. Percentage of civil war negotiations that led to signed bargains, 1940–1992

In what follows, I show that resolving a civil war requires much more than negotiating a bargain and establishing a cease-fire. A successful peace settlement must integrate the previously warring fractions into a single state, create a new government capable of accommodating their interests, and build a national, nonpartisan military force. This process of integration, however, creates a transition period during which combatants become less and less able to survive a surprise attack and enforce subsequent terms. Thus, even under the very best conditions—when combatants have initiated negotiations and signed a mutually agreeable treaty—the desire for peace clashes with the realities of implementation, and groups frequently choose the safer, more certain option of war.

The fact that combatants have such difficulty enforcing and credibly committing to the terms of their own peace settlements, however, does not mean that the resolution of civil wars can be traced to a single cause, outside security guarantees. Combatants have no chance to settle their wars unless they are willing, first, to meet at the negotiating table and, second, to resolve their underlying grievances and strike a deal. Both of these steps are likely to be driven by a variety of factors that come into play long before third parties arrive on the scene. Although the credible commitment theory says almost nothing about these additional conditions for peace, the focus here on enforcement and commitment does serve a purpose. By emphasizing the structural problems of implementation I hope to show that in important ways, issues of post-treaty security are likely to pervade all decisions leading to settlement and play a critical role in the final outcome of civil wars. In the end, enforcement will matter a great deal.

Fig. 1.2. Percentage of signed bargains that were successfully implemented, 1940–1992

Current Theories of Civil War Resolution

Six additional theories of civil war resolution can be found in the literature, and I present them for several reasons. The first is to give skeptical readers a better sense of the many variables purported to take combatants from war to peace and allow these readers to come to their own conclusions about the efficacy of my argument. My second purpose is to begin to identify the full range of factors that are likely to play a role in each of the three stages of the peace process. This tactic is designed to impose greater conceptual rigor on the study of civil war resolution and enable me to determine what factors are doing what work at each of step along the way. My final aim is to determine whether third-party security guarantees and power-sharing pacts really do play critical, independent roles in the peaceful resolution of civil wars, or are only the end result of these other, more important, conditions.

Current theories of civil war termination can be roughly grouped into one of two camps. The first views negotiated settlements primarily as a function of the economic, military, or political conditions that exist on the ground and are likely to encourage combatants to initiate negotiations. This set of theories tends to assume that once these conditions favor negotiation, successful settlement is likely.⁴ The second set of theories views negotiated settlements primarily as a function of combatants’ ability to resolve underlying conflicts of interest. This camp assumes that once a bargain has been reached, successful settlement should follow. Both camps stand in contrast to the credible commitment theory, which argues that even if combatants reach a mutually agreeable bargain they will not implement its terms unless credible guarantees on the terms of the treaty are included.

Conditions That Affect “Ripeness for Resolution”

The most popular explanation for the success or failure of negotiations focuses on the importance of situational factors, conditions that make civil wars “ripe for resolution.”⁵ Three conditions in particular are believed to make war less attractive and encourage combatants to pursue compromise solutions: high costs of war, military stalemate, and certain domestic political institutions.

COSTS OF WAR

Expected utility choice theorists have long assumed that the decision to fight or negotiate is determined by the relative costs and benefits of a unilateral victory or a compromise settlement.⁶ Proponents of this view argue that combatants carefully estimate their chances of winning a civil war, the amount of time it will take to achieve this victory, how much it will cost, and their relative payoffs from winning versus accepting a settlement. Settlement occurs...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: Theory
• Part Two: Data and Quantitative Analysis
• Part Three: Case Studies
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography
• Index