The Ongoing Process of Peace After Civil Wars

Abstract

Strengthening Peace in Post-Civil War States: Transforming Spoilers into Stakeholders. Edited by Matthew Hoddie, Caroline A. Hartzell Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 256 pp., $29.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35125-4). Why Peace Fails: The Causes and Prevention of Civil War Recurrence. By Charles T. Call Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012. 315 pp., $32.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-58901-894-5). Barriers to Peace in Civil War. By David E. Cunningham New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 282 pp., $94.00 hardback (ISBN-13: 978-1-107-00759-8). One need hardly justify the relevance of scholarship on the resolution of civil wars. The contemporary geopolitical landscape is rife with prominent examples of costly ongoing civil wars and tenuous peace processes whose prospects remain unsettled and uncertain. The three works under consideration here undertake a critical examination of the elements essential to the sustainment of peace and build on a significant body of prior findings with regard to the causes of war and peace, peacekeeping, barriers to settlement, and civil war duration (Blainey 1988; Wagner 1993; Balch-Lindsay and Enterline 2000; Regan 2002; Reynal-Querol 2002; Fearon 2004; Fortna 2004). In so doing, they credibly establish a differentiation between ending the violence and maintaining the peace. Together they provide a timely and relevant addition to the growing subfield of civil war research in political science. In Strengthening Peace in Post-Civil War States, Hoddie and Hartzell draw together a diverse group of researchers to analyze the process of post-conflict state-building. In their introduction, Hoddie and Hartzell specifically target for critique the current focus on the role of military force via international peacekeeping and the accompanying emphasis on a rapid transition to liberal democratic and economic institutions. In their place, the authors advocate increased soft interventions to restructure institutions for a stable peace capable of accommodating fluctuations in power relations in the years after a civil war. The first two essays by Lake and Roeder establish the tenor of the volume with an excellent counterpoint on how best to achieve the goal of sustainable peace. Lake emphasizes the need for rebuilding support for the underlying social contract—“the interest of the ruled in social order” (p. 37)—and that only through this type of grass roots legitimacy, in contrast to legitimacy bestowed by the international community, can the social …