Sharing Power to Settle Civil Wars

Abstract

Crafting Peace: Power-Sharing Institutions and the Negotiated Settlement of Civil Wars. By Caroline A. Hartzell, Matthew Hoddie. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 208 pp., $55.00 (ISBN-13: 978-0-2710-3207-8). In Crafting Peace , Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie intend to show that enduring settlements to civil wars can be created through the careful crafting of agreements that institutionalize comprehensive power-sharing arrangements among former combatants. In some regards this is well-trodden territory; the book represents a refinement and expansion of arguments and analyses the authors previously published in an edited volume (Hoddie and Hartzell 2005). Further, more than a decade ago Sisk (1996) argued that power sharing agreements represent the likeliest path to a lasting settlement of ethnic conflicts, a topic which he and a coauthor revisit in a more recent case study of peace building in South Africa (Sisk and Stefes 2005). Where Crafting Peace makes its contribution is in going beyond the single case of ethnic conflict to examine more broadly whether power-sharing deals represent a general solution to the challenge of establishing a lasting peace to civil wars of all stripes, not just ethnic ones. Crafting Peace also goes beyond prior work by rooting its conclusions in a series of cross-national statistical analyses that make up the heart of the book. But while those tests make this a novel and potentially important study, they also represent the weakest elements of what is an overall compelling argument. Noting that in the 1990s, the most common manner of settling civil wars was through negotiated agreements, the authors set out to resolve a fundamental question: What makes those settlements stick? The answer, they contend, lies in the details of the settlement itself: “…the most extensively institutionalized …