Ending Civil Wars

Abstract

London: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1997, Adelphi Paper 308, 94pp, US$25.00Canadians who believe that their country has a vocation for peacekeeping will profit from reading this book. In it Charles King, who teaches in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, analyzes the phenomenon of contemporary civil wars and how they end. Most of the. world's wars are now civil wars. Allowing for problems of definition, King claims that since 1945 at least 90 armed conflicts might be classed as 'civil wars.' Thus most of the dilemmas of peacekeeping arise nowadays from wars within, rather than between, states. Civil wars have characteristics they do not share with wars between states. If our vocation is indeed to be peacekeeping, there is, therefore, a special relevance to studying civil wars and, in particular, what is involved in bringing them to an end.Civil wars are notoriously bitter. To arrange a negotiated outcome often presents greater problems than to negotiate a settlement of a war between states. According to one calculation King cites, wars between states in this century have lasted on average about 20 months, whereas civil wars have dragged on for 120 months or more. Why should this be so? King examines some of the traditional explanations. For example, civil wars are more often fuelled by blind sentiment than by calculation. A negotiated peace can hardly be expected to emerge when the parties to the quarrel hold passionately to mutually exclusive goals and are utterly unwilling to contemplate the sort of compromises essential to a successful negotiation. King allows that this line of explanation is to some degree valid. But he pursues the analysis further, maintaining that there are structural elements in civil wars -- that is, incentives to continued violence and disincentives to compromise -- which help explain why civil wars go on being fought far past the point where the interests of belligerents are served by the fighting. Among these, King points to the all-or-nothing spirit in which civil wars are pursued. This makes factional leaders fight on blindly in the hope of victory, even if that hope be slight, rather than face a negotiated outcome which would be disastrous for them.Sheer practical difficulties of command and control in faction-ridden and loosely organized insurgencies are another such factor: a leader may decide it is time to bargain, but how can he ensure his orders are respected by all his fanatical followers, scattered in the jungle with their defective wireless sets? …