Power Sharing after Civil Wars: Matching Problems to Solutions

Abstract

The trend towards negotiated settlements in civil wars in the 1990s and 2000s, as opposed to military victories, has now become clear. In 2000, Wallensteen and Sollenberg reported that of the 108 conflicts since 1989, 75 have ended by 1998. ‘Of these’, they write, ‘21 were ended by peace agreements, whereas 24 ended in victory for one of the sides and 30 had other outcomes (ceasefire agreements or activity below the level for inclusion). Many new peace agreements were signed in the middle and late parts of the period, particularly 1995–1996.’1 The trend of conflicts ending in peace agreements rather than on the battlefield persisted into the 2000s such that by 2006 the Uppsala project reported that 34 per cent of the conflicts in the post-Cold War period (1990–2005) as a whole ended in negotiated settlement, double the historical average; between 2000 and 2005 there were nearly quadruple the number of conflicts ending in negotiation than by military victories (16 to 4). Starkly, in the 1990s, more conflicts (41) ended in negotiated settlements than through outright military victory (23).2 KeywordsElectoral SystemPeace ProcessUnited Nations Security CouncilEthnic ConflictPower SharingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.