Civil War Democracy

6 Key excerpts on "Civil War Democracy"

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  The Wartime Origins of Democratization

  Civil War, Rebel Governance, and Political Regimes

  • Reyko Huang(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 War-Making, Mobilization, and Democratization When do states emerging from civil war enter the path toward democracy? When do they instead become authoritarian? What explains the divergence in political regime trajectories among post–civil war states? The search for the causes of democracy and autocracy has a long and venerable pedigree in political science, and lively debates on the issue continue along various theoretical lines. The question of democra- tization among post–civil war states, however, takes on a new urgency at this point in our historical and scholarly development due to a peculiar convergence of phenomena in the realms of knowledge, ideas, and practice. In terms of knowledge, a large body of research has examined what factors allow the elusive peace to stick and endure after violent internal conflict. Some of these factors, such as peacekeeping, could be directly translated into domestic or international security policy. At the same time, there has been a recognition that not all peace is created equal; that more than the mere absence of war, what is of both strategic and normative importance in these fragile states is that there be a peace in which citizens enjoy basic political and socioeconomic rights (and thus we enter the realm of ideas). Aside from the security implications of different types of internal peace, this emphasis on rights, liberties, and democratic governance has emerged as part of a broader post–World War II, largely Western discourse on human rights. Systematic research that goes beyond examination of the durability of peace to explore the determinants of specific types of peace, however, remains as yet under- developed. Finally, in the domain of practice, the post–Cold War era has seen a series of large-scale international interventions in conflict and postconflict states. These interventions aimed not only at keeping the peace, but also at helping to build stable and democratic institutions.

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  Just Peace

  How Wars Should End

  • M. Fixdal(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  5 Outcomes of Wars over Government At the heart of all civil war endings is the question of institu- tional choice. At stake in these conflicts, in the most general sense, is the configuration of the political system. The question is not (or no longer) the boundaries around the state, but what type of government should rule its population. At stake too, in the after- math of war, is the issue of rebuilding a viable political system that reduces, not exacerbates, conflict. A civil war can destroy a coun- try’s infrastructure as well as administrative and political institu- tions, and typically cause a high degree of conflict and distrust between different population groups. Such conditions are not fer- tile grounds for the establishment of democracy. Thus, determin- ing the appropriate political system for a country emerging from an internal war is just the first step—the second, and often more difficult, step is determining the appropriate process of establish- ing a viable democracy. In keeping with the overall goal of this book, this chapter first discusses what we should regard as a just outcome to a war fought over government. The moral baseline in these types of conflicts is a democratic political system. Individuals have basic political rights, such as the right to vote, the freedom to assemble and asso- ciate with others, and the right to participate in the political pro- cess. These rights are best protected in a democracy. Thus, one would be hard pressed to explain why a war fought over govern- ment should not end in some kind of democracy. Who started the war and how it was fought seem irrelevant to this baseline judgment. It is implausible, for instance, to argue that if a substate group starts an armed rebellion to gain political rights, it should be denied these rights at the end of the war. The question is rather

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  Approaches, Levels, and Methods of Analysis in International Politics

  Crossing Boundaries

  • H. Starr(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Thus, rather than looking for a single set of variables linked by good theory, it makes more sense to specify several different ones. The research thus has two objectives—to see whether any set of processes and mechanisms linked to theories of democracy explain the absence of renewed civil war and, if so, to see which theory or combination does the best job. One advantage of this technique is that, while we try to sort out the utility of separate explanations, it is not necessary to think of them as nec- essarily opposed to one another (Most and Starr 1989; Russett and Oneal 2001, 53–54). We may be able to isolate particular elements of different explanations that seem to work and how elements from different theories work together in particular cases. Nonetheless, I attempted to develop hypotheses that were different for each of the explanations; ideally they would be certain and unique (Van Evera 1997, 30–35). 1. One argument is that democracy gives leaders of competing factions incentives to organize themselves differently from how they did during the 98 ROY LICKLIDER civil war. In war, relatively small groups with deep levels of commitment and access to weapons can succeed in gaining considerable influence for their leaders; indeed in two of our cases the actual numbers of people engaged in violent activities is fairly small. Democracy, however, rewards leaders who can assemble large coalitions that need not be intensely cohe- sive and may shift over time on different issues. “Effective governance in a democracy requires leaders to attend to a wide range of societal interests” (Russett and Oneal 2001, 70). We can call this the elite incentive theory according to which democracies will make civil war less likely by giving formerly competing participants incentives to cooperate with one another and, if successful, be successful in influencing the government, either now or in the future.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Resolution

  • Jacob Bercovitch, Victor Kremenyuk, I William Zartman, Jacob Bercovitch, Victor Kremenyuk, I William Zartman(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Thus, while democratization may bring a greater risk of domestic conflict, if democratic political institutions are fully consolidated, the new regime is at the lowest risk of civil war, due both to its institutional features and to its durability as a political system. The impact of political openness and political change on the occurrence of civil war is called into question by some researchers because they posit that economic opportunity costs are a more important consideration than either group grievances or the opportunity costs of redressing those grievances through democratic institutions. When controlling for the level of economic development, the residual effects of such political factors should be minimal (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Collier and Hoeffler 2004). Although the empirical evidence linking an increased risk of civil war to incomplete democratization is robust (Hegre and Sambanis 2006), more research is probably needed on economic development and democratic governance as mutually reinforcing mechanisms of domestic conflict resolution. Evidence suggests the peace between democratic states is strongest when those states are also economically developed (e.g. Mousseau 2000; Mousseau et al. 2003), and a similar dynamic may operate at the domestic level (Hegre 2003). Settlement and peace-building The conditions most conducive to preventing the outbreak of civil war are related to those most conducive to peace settlements and the reestablishment of political stability in the wake of civil war. The power of the central government must be consolidated, its legitimacy must be established or enhanced by allowing previously excluded groups access to the policy-making process, and sufficient economic resources must be mustered and allocated to support the peace-building process. The creation of each of these conditions may be assisted in various ways by external actors (Zartman 1995; Regan 2000).

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  On War and Democracy

  • Christopher Kutz(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 INTRODUCTION: WAR, POLITICS, DEMOCRACY We live in an era of belligerent democracy, an unhappy sequel to the peaceful democratic transitions that unfolded across Latin America and Eastern Europe at the end of the twentieth century. Democratic aspirations are increasingly voiced across the Mediterranean in the new century—leading more often than not to civil conflict rather than electoral transitions. 1 We live also in an era of democratic wars, when democratic states pursue violent conflict in the name of peaceable ends, ranging from disarmament to democratization to securing access to natural resources. Despite Churchill’s famous quip—“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” 2 —democracy is seen as a source of both domestic and international flourishing. Democracy, understood roughly for now as a political system with wide suffrage in which power is allocated to officials by popular election, can solve or help solve a host of problems with stunning success. It can solve the problem of revolutionary violence that condemns autocratic regimes, because mass politics can work at the ballot box rather than the streets. It can help solve the problem of famine, because the systems of free public communication and discussion that are essential to democratic politics are the backbone of the markets that have made democratic societies far richer than their competitors. It can help solve the problem of environmental despoliation, which occurs when those operating polluting factories (whether private citizens or the state) do not need to answer for harms visited upon a broad public

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  Power Sharing and Democracy in Post-Civil War States

  The Art of the Possible

  • Caroline A. Hartzell, Matthew Hoddie(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  While such an approach necessarily inhibits the development of a single grand theory regarding the relationship between power sharing and democracy, it does have the benefit of enhancing the precision and clarity of claims about exactly how power sharing shapes the political trajectory of a post–civil war state. plan of the book The remainder of this book is organized as follows. Part I contextualizes our argument. Chapter 2 offers an overview of existing research concern- ing the relationship between power sharing and democracy. Here we note that power sharing, once understood to be the mechanism through which democracy could be cultivated in deeply divided societies, is now criticized for being insufficiently democratic. We argue that there are advantages to disaggregating the concept of democracy to examine where power sharing has potential benefits and potential harms. In Chapter 3, we elaborate on the concepts and measures that are associated with our central focus: power sharing and democracy. We provide examples of power-sharing measures that have been included in peace settlements, elaborating on the distribution of the different forms of power sharing following civil war. We also examine current practices in terms of the use of power sharing and efforts to promote democracy in post–civil war states. 20 Introduction Chapter 4 advances our argument regarding the importance of focus- ing on insecurity as a characteristic of the post-conflict environment. Throughout the chapter, we support our argument regarding the central role that issues of insecurity and survival (physical, cultural, and political) play in states emerging from civil war with references to a variety of cases and survey evidence from countries that have experienced civil war. We then introduce our theory of the effects power sharing has on the transi- tion to minimalist democracy.

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