Abstract
AbstractGovernments often fight multiple civil conflicts simultaneously and each conflict can have multiple groups. Prior research on civil war termination and recurrence has been conducted at either the conflict level, once all the groups have been terminated, or the dyadic level, which examines group terminations in a conflict separately as more or less independent processes. Hence, conflict-level studies mostly tell us how to preserve peace once a civil war has already ended, while dyadic studies mostly tell us about the durability of specific group-level terminations within the larger process that led to that ending. As a result, our understanding of how ongoing civil wars are brought to a close is limited, particularly, with respect to multiparty conflicts. In this study, we put forth a systems approach that treats dyadic terminations as connected processes where group terminations influence the future behavior of other groups, incentivizing the system toward greater aggregate peace or conflict. Analyzing 264 dyadic terminations, the findings suggest that the most effective strategy for governments to reduce systemic conflict is to demonstrate to other groups that they have the political will and capacity to implement security, political, and social reforms as part of a larger reform-oriented peace process. Viable implementation can be followed by the concomitant use of military victories against remaining groups with great success. However, military victories achieved in isolation, that is, outside of a reform-process, do not reduce future levels of conflict even if they themselves are durable.
Highlights
Governments often fight multiple civil conflicts at the same time and each conflict can have multiple armed groups
We argue that a critically important dynamic in long-term conflict reduction is relational-learning by rebel groups, with respect to other rebel groups in the same system
If rebel groups learn about their opponent from the fate of other groups, every termination marks a new cycle of grouplearning, the updating of beliefs, and establishment of a new perceptual baseline
Summary
Governments often fight multiple civil conflicts at the same time and each conflict can have multiple armed groups. In the large amount of research done on the topic of how civil wars end and what makes peace last, most studies have been conducted at either a conflict level of analysis, which combines all the groups in the same incompatibility into one civil war with a single meta-outcome, or a dyadic level of analysis, which examines group terminations separately within a multigroup setting. The level of analysis at which civil war termination and recurrence is being studied is influencing the findings in a predictable fashion, leading to a great degree of ambiguity with respect to policy implications on the topic These divergent findings should not be seen as competing perspectives in our view or as resulting from errors in measurement. In the three sections we put forth a theoretical approach capable of handling multiple and sequential dyadic terminations occurring in the same country that explicitly examines the positive and negative externalities of dyadic terminations on the amount of future aggregate group conflict in a country
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