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Why peace endures: an analysis of post-conflict stabilisation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2017

Richard Caplan  and
Anke Hoeffler
Richard Caplan*
Affiliation:
Professor of International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford
Anke Hoeffler
Affiliation:
Research Officer at the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE), University of Oxford
*
*Correspondence to: Richard Caplan, Professor of International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. Author’s email: richard.caplan@politics.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article is concerned with explaining why peace endures in countries that have experienced a civil armed conflict. We use a mixed methods approach by evaluating six case studies (Burundi, East Timor, El Salvador, Liberia, Nepal, Sierra Leone) and survival analysis that allows us to consider 205 peace episodes since 1990. We find that it is difficult to explain why peace endures using statistical analysis but there is some indication that conflict termination is important in post-conflict stabilisation: negotiated settlements are more likely to break down than military victories. We also consider the impact of UN peacekeeping operations on the duration of peace but find little evidence of their contribution. However, in situations where UN peacekeeping operations are deployed in support of negotiated settlements they do seem to contribute to peace stabilisation.

Keywords

Civil WarPeace DurationSurvival AnalysisPeacekeeping Operations
Type
Research Article
Information
European Journal of International Security , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , July 2017 , pp. 133 - 152
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2017 

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References

1 See, for instance, the US’s National Security Strategy (2015), the UK’s Building Stability Overseas Strategy (2011), France’s White Paper on Defence and National Security (2013), and Germany’s For a Coherent German Government Policy towards Fragile States (2012).

2 For an overview, see Rittberger, Volker and Fischer, Martina (eds), Strategies for Peace: Contributions of International Organizations, States, and Non-State Actors (Opladen, Germany: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset v.4-2014a, 1946–2013.

4 Collier, Paul, Hoeffler, Anke, and Söderbom, Måns, ‘Post-conflict risks’, Journal of Peace Research, 45:4 (2008), p. 465 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Different studies yield different estimates of conflict relapse depending on the data, criteria, and methodology employed. For a critical discussion of the varying estimates, see Suhrke, Astri and Samset, Ingrid, ‘What’s in a figure? Estimating recurrence of civil war’, International Peacekeeping, 14:2 (2007), pp. 195–203 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Authors were: Jeremy Allouche (Sierra Leone); Charles T. Call (El Salvador); Paul Jackson (Nepal); Mike McGovern (Liberia); Janvier Nkurunziza (Burundi); and Kate Roll (East Timor/Timor-Leste).

6 See, for example, Hegre, Håvard, Ellingsen, Tanja, Gates, Scott, and Gleditsch, Nils Petter, ‘Toward a democratic civil peace? Democracy, political change, and civil war 1816–1992’, American Political Science Review, 95:1 (2001), pp. 16–33 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fearon, James D. and Laitin, David D., ‘Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war’, American Political Science Review, 97:1 (2003), pp. 75–90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Collier, Paul and Hoeffler, Anke, ‘Greed and grievance in civil war’, Oxford Economic Papers, 56:4 (2004), pp. 563–595 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See, for example, Monica Duffy Toft, Securing the Peace: The Durable Settlement of Civil Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Joakim Kreutz, ‘How and when armed conflicts end: Introducing the UCDP Conflict Termination dataset’, Journal of Peace Research, 47:2 (2010), pp. 243–50; and Charles T. Call, Why Peace Fails: The Causes and Prevention of Civil War Recurrence (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012).

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13 Hultman, Lisa, Kathman, Jacob D., and Shannon, Megan, ‘United Nations peacekeeping dynamics and the duration of post-civil conflict peace’, Conflict Management and Peace Science, 33:3 (2016), pp. 231–249 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mason, David T., Gurses, Mehmet, Brandt, Patrick T., and Quinn, Jason Michael, ‘When civil wars recur: Conditions for durable peace after civil wars’, International Studies Perspectives, 12:2 (2011), pp. 171–189 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gilligan, Michael J. and Sergenti, Ernest J., ‘Do UN interventions cause peace? Using matching to improve causal inference’, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 3:2 (2008), pp. 89–122 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Collier, Hoeffler, and Söderbom, ‘Post-conflict risks’, pp. 461–78.

14 Rudloff, Peter and Findley, Michael G., ‘The downstream effects of combatant fragmentation on civil war recurrence’, Journal of Peace Research, 53:1 (2016), pp. 19–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walter, Barbara, ‘Why bad governance leads to repeat civil war’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59:7 (2015), pp. 1242–1272 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., p. 1245.

17 See, respectively, Roy Licklider (ed.), Stopping the Killing: How Civil Wars End (New York: New York University Press, 1993), ch. 13; Fortna, ‘Does peacekeeping keep peace?’; Doyle, Michael W., Johnstone, Ian, and Orr, Robert C., Keeping the Peace: Multidimensional UN Operations in Cambodia and El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paris, Roland, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Toft, Monica Duffy, ‘Ending civil wars: a case for rebel victory?’, International Security, 34:4 (2010), pp. 7–36 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Call, Why Peace Fails.

18 Mike McGovern’s case study for this project.

19 Astri Suhrke and Mats Berdal (eds), The Peace in Between: Post-War Violence and Peacebuilding (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012); Michael J. Boyle, Violence after War: Explaining Instability in Post-Conflict States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

20 Themnér, Lotta and Wallensteen, Peter, ‘Armed conflicts: 1946–2011’, Journal of Peace Research, 49:4 (2012), pp. 565–575 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gleditsch, Nils Petter, Wallensteen, Peter, Eriksson, Mikael, Sollenberg, Margareta, and Strand, Hävard, ‘Armed conflict, 1946–2001: a new dataset’, Journal of Peace Research, 39:5 (2002), pp. 615–637 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Kate Roll’s case study for this project.

22 Janvier Nukurunziza’s case study for this project.

23 Kreutz, ‘How and when armed conflicts end’; Joakim Kreutz, UCDP Conflict Termination Dataset Codebook, v.2-2015, 19 February 2016.

24 For an overview of modelling choices, see Cleves, Mario, Gutierrez, Roberto G., Gould, William, and Marchenko, Yulia V., An Introduction to Survival Analysis Using Stata (3rd edn, College Station, Texas: Stata Press, 2010)Google Scholar, ch. 3.

25 Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M. and Jones, Bradford S., Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 4.

26 The appropriateness of the application of the Cox proportional hazards model rests on the assumption of proportionality and we test whether this assumption holds. Furthermore, we need to consider the treatment of multiple spells. Our sample contains multiple spells, that is, peace spells that ended because the conflicts recurred, then the conflict ended, and a new peace episode was recorded. In order to account for possible interdependence between these peace spells, we cluster the standard errors by the conflict identifier.

27 Walter, ‘Why bad governance leads to repeat civil war’; Fortna, ‘Does peacekeeping keep peace?’.

28 For a detailed discussion of causal inference, see Box-Steffensmeier and Jones, Event History Modeling, ch. 7.

29 In her study of the initial post-Cold War period (1989–99), Fortna finds that UNPKOs are not deployed to the easiest cases (that is, where conflicts have ended in a decisive outcome). See Fortna, ‘Does peacekeeping keep peace?’.

30 χ2=2.84, p=0.09.

31 Zeigler, Sean M., ‘Competitive alliances and civil war recurrence’, International Studies Quarterly, 60:1 (2016), pp. 24–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 χ2=2.86, p=0.09.

33 We also know this from Licklider’s work. See Licklider, Roy A., ‘The consequences of negotiated settlement in civil wars 1945–1993’, American Political Science Review, 89:3 (1995), pp. 681–690 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 χ2=12.47, p=0.029.

35 Wucherpfennig, Julian, Metternich, Nils W., Lars-Erik Cederman, and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, ‘Ethnicity, the state, and the duration of civil war’, World Politics, 64:1 (2012), pp. 79–115 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 χ2=31.09, p=0.000.

37 Nkurunziza case study for this project.

38 Gates, Scott, Hegre, Håvard, Jones, Mark, and Strand, Håvard, ‘Institutional inconsistency and political instability: Polity duration, 1800–2000’, American Journal of Political Science, 50:4 (2006), pp. 893–908 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Walter, ‘Why bad governance leads to repeat civil war’.

40 Collier, Hoeffler, and Söderbom, ‘Post-conflict risks’.

41 Howard, Lise Morjé, UN Peacekeeping in Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, updated by Kate Roll.

42 International Peace Institute (IPI), IPI Peacekeeping Database, available at: {www.providingforpeacekeeping.org database}.

43 Cleves, Gutierrez, Gould, and Marchenko, An Introduction to Survival Analysis Using Stata, provide a guide to the interpretation of interaction terms (see pp. 186–9). They stress that the inclusion of interaction terms does not necessitate the inclusion of the corresponding main effects. The shift of the baseline hazard is calculated in the following way: the coefficient estimates are simply the natural logarithms of the hazard ratios. For settlement the coefficient is ln(2.6714)=0.9826 and for the interaction term UNPKO*settlement the coefficient is ln(0.2091)=−1.5651. The hazard ratio for observations that experienced a settlement and a UNPKO is thus exp(0.9826 – 1.5651)=0.558.

44 In total there were 33 peace episodes that received UNPKOs at some stage: 20 after settlements, six after victories and seven in situations of ‘other’.

45 On rebel group competition/fragmentation and its impact on peace duration, see Zeigler, ‘Competitive alliances and civil war recurrence’ and Rudloff and Findley, ‘The downstream effects of combatant fragmentation on civil war recurrence’; on other organisational characteristics of rebel groups, see Ishiyama, John and Batta, Anna, ‘Rebel organizations and conflict management in post-conflict societies 1990–2009’, Civil Wars, 13:4 (2011), pp. 437–457 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on features of power-sharing arrangements and their impact on peace duration, see Badran, Remzi, ‘Intrastate peace agreements and the durability of peace’, Conflict Management and Peace Science, 31:2 (2014), pp. 193–217 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martin, ‘Coming together’; and Cammett, Melani and Malesky, Edmund, ‘Power sharing in postconflict societies: Implications for peace and governance’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 56:6 (2012), pp. 982–1016 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on inclusive peace settlements, see Call, Why Peace Fails.

46 Wucherpfennig et al., ‘Ethnicity, the state, and the duration of civil war’.

47 Own calculations.

48 Fortna, ‘Does peacekeeping keep peace?’.

49 Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

50 Walter, ‘Why bad governance leads to repeat civil war’.

51 Håvard Hegre, Lisa Hultman, and Håvard Mokleiv Nygård, ‘Evaluating the Conflict-Reducing Effect of UN Peacekeeping Operations’, mimeo (2014), available at: {https://www.dropbox.com/s/m1k612fg8vg1syc/PKO_prediction_2013.pdf}.

52 Call case study for this project.