This chapter discusses whether and in what circumstances states can resort to the use of force

This chapter examines four cases of collapsed states from the Middle East and North Africa – Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. State collapse was marked by the breakdown of national institutions and the effective loss of a functioning central government. Different governance arrangements appeared across the territory of the country. This chapter discusses the nature of state collapse and its bearing on constitution-making processes and constitutional design. International actors may be drawn in as partisans of different factions or as potential mediators and facilitators of conflict resolution and state reconstruction. Peace-making requires the main factions to accept that the costs of fighting outweigh any benefits and to agree on structured negotiations. Sustainable peace requires agreements on governance, including potentially interim power-sharing, a constitution-making process, transitional security arrangements, and some guiding principles for a reconstructed state. While a federal or devolved governance arrangement may seem logical, the factional elites may prefer power-sharing at the center. If they do opt for a federal or devolved structure, they face vexing issues in defining the constituent units, the allocation of powers, and the nature of central institutions, which may result in an extended period of muddled governance and power politics with no constitutional clarity.

Given the huge number of writings covering power sharing in general, and its relationship to internal conflict in particular, it is essential to summarize what has been written in order to position the current work in this context. Thus, the first half of the chapter offers a straightforward overview of the relevant literatures. While this summary pays attention to conceptual issues and how the literature has analyzed the consequences of power sharing in broad terms, the primary focus is on conflict. Proceeding chronologically, the chapter starts with an account of the central divide in comparative politics between those perspectives that endorse power sharing, and those that oppose it. We retrace this classical divide back to the early writings of Lijphart, who introduced his consociational approach to stable democracy in divided societies in opposition to majoritarian democracy as practiced in Anglo-Saxon countries. The review of the literature covers its main stages together with work by other scholars working within this tradition as well as its main critics, including most prominently Horowitz, Rothchild and Roeder, and more recently research by Gates, Strøm and others. We then turn to the literature on post-conflict agreements. A section summarizing the main arguments for and against power sharing follows. The chapter ends with a discussion of the four challenges identified in Chapter 1.

This chapter begins with an overview of police integration worldwide. Nearly 40 percent of modern peace agreements include police reforms, and the makeup of the police rank and file is often central to these reforms. Yet, despite the police’s central role in peace-building, existing literature on power sharing pays little attention to this critical institution. I argue that in divided societies, the police rank-and-file’s unique combination of three characteristics – visibility, discretion, and capacity for violence – makes it especially influential in shaping citizen–state relations. The second half of the chapter details causal mechanisms linking police integration with citizens’ attitudes and expectations. For example, language differences between officers and citizens may make citizens feel less comfortable communicating with officers, or citizens may fear that cultural differences will prevent officers from understanding their situation. When the police are integrated at the patrol-level, officers can monitor their colleagues’ treatment of coethnic citizens and deter bad behavior.

The conclusion examines my argument’s implications for both scholarship and policy. For scholars, the evidence I offer here challenges the strict geographic and chronological separation between time periods and peacekeeping missions that some studies take as given. For policymakers, the arguments and evidence I advance contribute to ongoing debates about the future of peace operations.Peacekeeping today is turning increasingly towards a more military posture—but key among my argument’s implications is the idea that if the reconstruction, investment, and refugee resettlement services the international community can provide are more important than security protection to some combatants, then tying negotiation, peacekeeping, and intervention more tightly to the UN’s aid and humanitarian agencies may represent another, better direction for the UN.

The United Nation’s 1990s peacekeeping and peacemaking provoked introspection at the UN, but did not doom the UN’s peacekeeping or peacemaking enterprises. Why does UN peacekeeping remain a desirable part of peace processes despite its reputation as an ineffective measure of protection for civilian populations and warring parties alike?  This book investigates why peacekeeping survived its early catastrophes and how this survival should lead us to reconsider how peacekeeping works. I advance two key claims: first, I argue the UN’s central role in peacemaking and peacekeeping worldwide means peace operations have structural consequences: what the UN does in one place can shift strategies, outcomes, and options available to parties to conflict in other places. Second, drawing peace processes in Rwanda and Guatemala, I argue combatants turn to the UN because its presence enables unique tactical, symbolic, and post-conflict reconstruction outcomes that have little to do with the end of fighting. Combatants who negotiate with the UN’s assistance after peacekeeping failures may do so because negotiation affords them benefits even when they are neither invested in peace nor convinced the UN can help them achieve it. The introduction outlines the problem, situates the answer, and summarizes each chapter of the book.

Chapter 3 examines the international law attempts to regulate the financial aspects of war economies, in particular through UN sanctions. The chapter examines UN sanctions, in particular assets freezes and commodity sanctions, counterterrorism financing, attempts by the Council to police natural resource extraction in war zones, and efforts to create standards governing the regulation of commodity chains from conflict zones.

Experiments are increasingly used to better understand various aspects of civil conflict. A critical barrier to peace is often conflict recurrence after a settlement or other attempt to end fighting between sides. This chapter examines the growing literature on experiments in post-conflict contexts to understand their contributions and limitations to our understanding of the dynamics in this period. It argues that work on post-conflict contexts takes two different perspectives: a peace stabilization approach emphasizes special problems from civil conflict, including how to sustain peace agreements, while a peace consolidation approach emphasizes problems common to statebuilding, including how to reconstruct communities. Both seek in part to prevent conflict recurrence, though, and that is the focus of this chapter. Although more existing theory links stabilization programs with enduring peace, more existing experiments examine consolidation programs. Both approaches would benefit from new work. Post-conflict contexts in general, however, are difficult environments in which to work, and so experiments face three interrelated challenges: first, these contexts present special ethical challenges due to both the high stakes of peace and the sensitivity of subjects; second, these are complex treatments often conducted simultaneously by different actors, and these are treatments that depend on both institutional change and behavioral responses, so change is the constant in these contexts; and, third, these contexts also face heterogeneity in terms of programs but also contexts that mean the lessons may not travel even among post-conflict settings. Despite these challenges, experiments in post-conflict contexts hold promise for advancing our understanding of enduring peace.

In 1999 the United Nations performed a significant about-face in its policy concerning the use of amnesties in peace negotiations. Where once it had condoned and even supported the use of amnesties, including those that immunise perpetrators of human rights violations against prosecutions and punishment, the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, now issued a statement prohibiting UN peace negotiators from offering amnesties for human rights violations, even when the signing of a peace agreement was at stake. This chapter introduces the United Nations’ anti-amnesty policy, provides an overview of its theoretical underpinnings, development, establishment as a policy norm, and considers its implications for peace negotiators.

Drawing on a new peace agreements dataset, this chapter maps general trends in the use of amnesties in peace agreements from 1980 to 2015 and situates Asian peacemaking practice within them. Focusing on a range of conflict-related, economic and political variables, as well as the engagement of the United Nations (UN) in peace negotiations, it provides a set of preliminary explanations for the continued persistence of amnesties in Asian peace processes. The chapter highlights the existence of an unusually strong relationship between separatist conflict and the rejection of the UN’s anti-amnesty policy in Asia, demonstrates that, in contrast to the global sample, Asian democracies are no more or less likely to allow amnesties for human rights violations than authoritarian regimes, and shows that the relative lack of engagement by the UN in Asian peace negotiations is a significant factor in the continued use of amnesties for human rights violations in the region.

This concluding chapter revisits some of the key issue areas in peace settlements, which have been covered in the International Law and Peace Settlements volume, to demonstrate how past settlement practice has added to the repertoire of legal tools that can be deployed in conflict settlement, and to highlight the contours of the relationship between this settlement practice and international law. By reflecting on the ‘patterns’ of approaches and provisions that have emerged in settlement practice in addressing these key issues, the chapter lays some empirical foundations to interrogate the normative character of these emerging ‘patterns’ of legal tools in peace-making. The normativity to legal tools for peace-making is considered in the context of the diversity in settlement actors and in the legal character of settlements, with a view to identifying how settlement practice has affected international law, and whether it is possible, helpful or necessary to proclaim the existence of a lex pacificatoria.

nternational lawyers and political economists look at exits from armed conflict from different perspectives. From a legal perspective, the role of law has been to provide a framework to regulate the use of force and to articulate a common vision of the pathways towards constitutional democracies. In the post-Cold War period, the UN and other international actors hoped to end armed conflict through peace agreements, peacekeeping, statebuilding and peacebuilding – summarised as creating a ‘liberal peace’. But armed conflicts have become internal and complex – and there has been widespread recognition that the ‘liberal peace’ has not, and cannot, deliver. From a political economy perspective, the process of forming political settlements gives some explanation: law is less relevant than the reordering of partisan interests of power holders. This questions the viability of attempts to build a ‘liberal peace’. The insights of political economy are thus a reality check to inform the search for viable alternatives to prevent or exit violent conflict.

Although democratisation can be a vital component of peace settlements, formulaic applications of supposed international norms of democratic governance are potentially counterproductive. Each conflict situation is different; many situations do not admit of prefabricated solutions that one can justly expect all reasonable contestants to accept, either at the outset or as events develop. Procedural standards associated with the ‘democratic entitlement’ obscure the underlying purposes that democratic forms, to be meaningful, need to fulfil. Post-conflict conditions, typically marked by sharp social divisions and a lack of agreement on the political community’s basic premises, are precisely the conditions in which it cannot be taken for granted that standard procedural norms will work to produce democratic social realities. Improvisation is thus essential. Peace and democracy may both be better served if the international lawyers stand aside.

Peace settlements are notoriously difficult to reach in religiously associated conflicts, particularly in intra-state armed conflicts where the religious identity and nature of the state is at stake. Despite that apparent intractability, however, some peace settlements have been crafted for contemporary intra-state armed conflicts where there have been religious incompatible claims and aspirations. This chapter explores the legal tools developed in such settlements and discusses their wider applicability as conflict resolution mechanisms. The analysis identifies seven specific conflict resolution mechanisms that have been utilised to address the religious dimensions of armed conflicts: constitutional secularism, religious freedom, religious power-sharing, religious autonomy, legalisation of religious political parties, inclusion of religious civil society actors and religious bonding. These seven mechanisms are analysed as part of two fundamentally different approaches to conflict resolution of religious dimensions: division vs integration; and reinforcement or decrease in the role of religion. The chapter demonstrates how religiously defined conflicts can also be transformed and brought to peaceful, negotiated endings.