1 Sustaining the peace
Stopping the recurrence of civil wars
T. David Mason and Jason Quinn
Since the end of World War II, there has not been a single day in which there was not an armed conflict of some sort going on somewhere in the world. That observation in and of itself is, unfortunately, not especially provocative or startling to anyone who reads a daily newspaper. What may not be as obvious is that the patterns of armed conflict have changed dramatically since the end of World War II. Both the predominant form and primary locus of armed conflict have shifted dramatically from the patterns that had prevailed for the previous 300 years. First, whereas war between nations was the modal form of conflict for the three centuries prior to World War II, since 1945 the predominant form of armed conflict has been civil war (revolution, secession, ethnic conflict); interstate war has become relatively rare. Second, whereas the interstate wars of the previous 300 years took place mainly among (and on the territory of) the members of the central power system (including Europe and North America, plus Japan and China), the civil wars of the past half century have occurred almost exclusively in the Third World (Asia, Africa, and Latin America). Indeed, until the collapse of Leninist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1991, there had been no major civil wars on European soil, and only China among the major powers had experienced any conflicts of sufficient magnitude to warrant inclusion in any of the major civil war data sets.1
The frequency and destructiveness of this epidemic of civil war are well documented. No matter which data set one employs, there is no doubt that since 1945 civil wars have been far more frequent and destructive than interstate wars. Fearon and Laitin (2003) report that between 1945 and 1999, among all nations with populations over 500,000, there have been five times as many civil wars as interstate wars (127 to 25), and that civil wars have resulted in five times as many casualties as interstate wars (16.2 million versus 3.3 million). The latest version of the Correlates of War (COW) data set reveals similar patterns: COW2 lists 104 civil wars with a total of 13.3 million battle deaths as compared to 22 interstate wars with about 3.3 million battle deaths. To date, the end of the Cold War has not brought any substantial relief from the epidemic of civil wars: Wallensteen and Sollenberg (2001: 632) report that 104 of the 111 armed conflicts that they documented as occurring between 1989 and 2000 were civil wars. Indeed, what the end of the Cold War has brought is the diffusion of civil war to Yugoslavia and the republics of the former Soviet Union, regions of the world that had been more or less immune to armed rebellion during the Cold War.
Besides this change in the modal form of conflict, the predominant locus of conflict has shifted from Europe and the so-called central power system to Third World regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Whereas Europe had been by far the most war-prone region of the world for the three hundred years prior to World War II, the end of that conflict ushered in what John Gaddis (1987) has termed “the long peace”: the longest period of sustained peace among European powers since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Kal Holsti (1992: 37) notes that from 1945 until 1989, there were only four instances of the use of armed force by European states against each other on European soil: the British intervention in the Greek civil war (1945–1948), the Soviet intervention in Hungary (1956), the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) intervention in Czechoslovakia (1968), and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus (1974). These conflicts resulted in approximately 176,000 deaths, a figure that constitutes less than 1 percent of the 22 million battle deaths that Holsti claims occurred worldwide during that same period. All the remaining battle deaths presumably occurred on the soil of Third World nations. Of course, this long peace was less a matter of Kantian harmony than of nuclear stalemate. With Europe divided into two hostile alliances, each with nuclear arsenals sufficient to threaten the extinction of the human species, war between traditional rivals of the Euro-centric power system was simply not rational. Therefore, their rivalries were, to some extent, carried out indirectly, through intervention – direct and indirect, overt and covert – in the conflicts that erupted within and between the nations of the Third World.
Critical trends: the duration and recurrence of civil wars
Explaining the epidemic of civil wars in the Third World has been the subject of a steady stream of academic books and journal articles, and this is not the place to review that literature. What is relevant to the theme of this book – how to sustain the peace in the aftermath of civil war – are two other observable trends in the distribution of civil wars across time and space. First, the duration of civil wars has been gradually but steadily increasing over much of the post-World War II period. James Fearon has shown that the upward trend in the number of civil wars ongoing in a given year – a trend that peaked around 1994 – was not a function of any increase in the average number of new civil war outbreaks in a year. Instead, a gradual increase in the duration of ongoing wars meant that the number of wars ending in a given year was less than the (nearly constant) number of new war onsets, resulting in the “steady accumulation of unresolved wars” (Fearon 2004: 275).
Related to the increasing duration of civil wars is what appears to be a rather robust relationship between the duration of a civil war and its outcome: the longer a civil war lasts, the less likely it is that either the rebels or the government will achieve a decisive military victory. Mason and Fett (1996) found that the strongest predictor of a war ending in a negotiated settlement (as opposed to a military victory by either side) was the duration of the war. In a follow-up study, Mason, Weingarten and Fett (1999) found that rebel victories, if they occur at all, almost always occur in the first few years of the war, and much the same holds for government victories as well: if the government does not defeat a rebel movement within the first five years or so, thereafter it becomes increasingly unlikely that the government will ever win (see also DeRouen and Sobek 2004).
These findings imply that, contrary to Edward Luttwak’s (1999) “give war a chance” thesis, civil wars will not burn themselves out like brush fires, nor will the conditions of a more lasting peace emerge if the international community simply stands aside and allows the protagonists to fight it out to a decisive victory by one side or the other. The empirical evidence consistently shows that, past some point in the duration of a civil war, neither side is likely to achieve military victory. Instead, protracted conflicts settle into what William Zartman (1989) has termed a “mutually hurting stalemate,” whereby both sides lack the capacity to defeat the other side but both have the capacity to deny victory to their rival. At that point, the conflicts are “ripe for resolution,” lacking only the intervention of a third-party mediator to broker a settlement agreement and provide both sides with guarantees against the other side cheating on the agreement in order to achieve through surprise the victory that had eluded them on the battlefield. However, rarely are the protagonists in a civil war able to negotiate a settlement to the conflict without third-party mediation and third-party guarantees (see Walter 2002). Contrary to Luttwak’s recommendation, if the international community does choose to stand aside and “give war a chance,” this amounts to tacitly condoning a protracted bloodletting that is not likely to end on its own and, even if it does, will leave the nation so decimated that it immediately becomes a prime candidate for a new civil war.
This leads us to the second readily observable trend in civil war occurrence that is directly relevant to the question of how to sustain the peace in the aftermath of civil war. Since 1945 the number of nations that have experienced civil wars is considerably less than the total number of civil wars that have occurred, indicating that many nations have experienced multiple civil wars. As Table 1.1 indicates, the 104 civil wars that the Correlates of War lists as occurring between 1944 and 1997 took place in only 54 nations. Only 28 of those nations experienced one and only one civil war. Eight had two civil wars, 13 had three, four had four, and one nation experienced five civil wars (Sarkees 2000). The Doyle and Sambanis (2000) data set of 124 civil wars occurred in just 69 nations. Only 36 of these nations had one and only one civil war, while 18 had two separate conflicts, nine nations had three, five nations had four, and one nation had five. It is evident, then, that once a nation experiences a civil war, it is very likely to experience another one.
Table 1.1 The frequency of civil war occurrences in nations, 1944–2001
Given these two trends, the practical task of peacebuilding in the contemporary international community is not so much a matter of developing early warning systems to predict which nations are likely candidates for a new civil war in the near future. Rather, the more practical (and probably cost-effective) task is, first, to identify those civil wars that are “ripe for resolution” (because of their duration); second, to design effective third-party intervention strategies to persuade them to negotiate and devise a mutually acceptable settlement agreement; and, third, to support that agreement with a sustained and effective post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation program that inoculates that nation against the recurrence of civil war. In short, the challenge for sustaining the peace is how first to bring a civil war to a peaceful conclusion and, second, how to prevent it from recurring.
With these observations in mind, we turn now to the task of presenting a theoretical framework with which we can analyze the conditions that make the parties to a civil war more or less likely to agree to a negotiated settlement (as opposed to continuing to fight in anticipation of eventually achieving victory). We will then use this framework to analyze the features of the post-civil war environment that make a nation more or less susceptible to the resumption of civil war. In explaining the outcomes of civil war and the conditions that make the recurrence of civil war more likely, we will also be able to highlight those features of the civil war environment that are subject to policy manipulation by the international community in such a way as to increase the incentives of both sides to stop the killing and agree to a settlement. Similarly, in explaining the conditions that make a nation more likely to experience a relapse into civil war, we will also be able to identify those features of the post-civil war environment that are subject to intervention by the international community in such a way as reduce the incentives to resume conflict by building a post-conflict environment that can sustain the peace.
How civil wars end . . . and start again
The initiation – and recurrence – of a civil war require two general preconditions. First, what Charles Tilly (1978) has termed a revolutionary situation must emerge, leading potential combatants to conclude that civil war is both necessary and feasible. Tilly (ibid.: 200) describes a revolutionary situation as the emergence of a condition of dual sovereignty, marked by
the appearance of contenders or coalitions of contenders, advancing exclusive alternative claims to the control over the government . . .; commitment to those claims by a significant segment of the subject population . . .; the incapacity or unwillingness of the government or its agents to suppress the challenger coalition.
A condition of dual sovereignty represents the structural antecedent of civil war in the sense that civil war becomes possible when dual sovereignty emerges. It also represents a necessary precondition for the recurrence of civil war as well: sustaining the peace in the aftermath of civil war will be more difficult to the extent that the outcome of the previous war preserves intact a condition of dual sovereignty, or at least makes it possible for such a condition to re-emerge with relative ease.
There is also an element of agency in the onset and recurrence of civil war: one or both of the potential combatants must conclude that renewing armed conflict is preferable to the post-conflict status quo. This implies that, for that actor, the expected benefits of eventual victory exceed the benefits of sustaining the peace, even when the benefits from victory are discounted by the probability of winning and the accrued costs that will have to be absorbed in order to achieve victory.
Tilly’s concept of dual sovereignty underlies the often-cited proposition that civil wars are more likely to resume following negotiated settlements than following decisive military victories by one side or the other (Lick-lider 1995; Walter 1997; Hartzell and Hoddie 2003). Military victories are assumed to create a more stable (though not necessarily more abundant, democratic or humane) post-war environment because military victory by one side usually involves the destruction of the other side’s ability to wage war. In effect, military victory reduces the probability of civil war recurrence by eliminating the condition of dual sovereignty.
Even among conflicts that end in negotiated settlements, the probability of civil war recurrence declines with settlement conditions that weaken or dismantle the condition of dual sovereignty. Hartzell’s analysis of the sustainability of peace agreements implies that dual sovereignty must be replaced by enforceable power-sharing arrangements (see Hartzell et al. 2001). The power-sharing arrangements to which she refers – military, political, economic, and territorial – involve dismantling the organizational machinery of two combatant organizations and merging them under the institutions of a single state. The consistent finding across her studies is that the more dimensions of power sharing that are included in the settlement agreement, the less likely the settlement is to break down into a resumption of armed conflict. Implicit in this argument is the notion that multi-dimensional power sharing dismantles the condition of dual sovereignty.
The question of agency in the recurrence of civil wars involves the decision calculus by which potential combatants choose between sustaining the peace or resuming war. Mason and Fett (1996) presented an expected utility model of that choice, derived from the works of Wittman (1979) and Stam (1996) on how interstate wars end. This model has proven to be useful in identifying the factors that predict whether a civil war will end in a military victory or a negotiated settlement (Mason and Fett 1996), whether such conflicts will end in a government victory, a rebel victory or a negotiated settlement (Mason et al. 1999), the determinants of the duration of a civil war (DeRouen...
