Civil War Termination Research Articles

Does war improve women’s political representation?

An expanding body of scholarly work posits that war, particularly intrastate war, disrupts established power arrangements and social institutions, providing avenues for women to enhance their political influence through reforms in political structures and participation in peace-building processes. Webster, Chen, and Beardsley (2019) systematically explore the nexus between war and women’s political empowerment, demonstrating associations between both interstate and intrastate conflicts and advancements in women’s political empowerment. Extending their analysis, this study investigates the influence of intrastate conflicts on women’s representation in legislative bodies. However, nuanced findings emerge from this analysis. There is no supporting evidence that the occurrence of warfare leads to an increase in women’s legislative representation. Ongoing internal conflicts exhibit a negative impact on the progression of women’s political representation. Conversely, the termination of civil wars, particularly without their prompt resumption, correlates with a higher likelihood of adopting gender quotas, thereby enhancing women’s legislative representation. Furthermore, the correlation between the termination of civil wars and women’s legislative representation appears specific to the context of sub-Saharan Africa. No conclusive evidence supports this relationship as a global phenomenon.

Global Termination and Recurrence Macro Trends: A Follow-Up to Licklider and Dixon

ABSTRACT In this Special 25th Anniversary Issue, we (re)examine several macro historical trends concerning civil war termination and recurrence that were raised in the journal’s first issue by Roy Licklider and then followed-up on 10 years later by Jeffrey Dixon. These trends have to do with: (1) the global prevalence of recurrence; (2) the global prevalence of termination types; (3) patterns of recurrence by termination type, and (4) post-conflict patterns of civilian victimisation by termination type. With the advantage of more comprehensive and more systematised data, the analysis identifies several structural breaks in termination and recurrence trends, as well as differences in how outcomes regulate the inflow and outflow of fighting groups in countries. Over decades, conflict recurrence has been becoming more and more concentrated in a smaller subset of countries, and the majority of conflict recurrences are caused by new groups and not by previously terminated groups. Around 59 per cent of recurrences following peace accords are caused by new groups with no prior appearance in the conflict record, while 71 per cent of recurrences following government victory are caused by new groups. Since 2010, termination rates have declined by 25 per cent and recurrence rates have risen 44 per cent compared to the period 1990–2009. In addition, new conflicts entering the system after 2010 are up 150 per cent. As a result of these macro trends, the number of ongoing civil wars in the world is currently at an all time high.

Rebel diplomacy and negotiated settlement in civil wars

Rebel diplomacy in civil wars is an emerging research area, and we do not know the extent to which it contributes to the type of civil war termination. This article posits rebel diplomacy as the practices of communication and persuasion intended to generate external and internal pressures which make the government and rebel more amenable to each others’ demands. The implication of this theoretical argument is that the government and rebel groups would be able to find compromises and settle civil wars in a negotiated peace agreement. Findings from the analysis of 136 civil wars since 1950 support the theoretical argument. This finding is robust in alternative model specification and after modelling the endogenous effect of factors that explain the rebel use of diplomacy.

Promoting Peace and Impunity? Amnesty Laws after War in El Salvador and beyond

Abstract Amnesty laws are a widespread practice in the transition from war to peace. They often aim at the transformation of violent conflict by making promises about exemptions from liability for war crimes. Critics argue that amnesties are in violation of international law and reproduce impunity in post-war societies, whereas supporters of amnesty laws focus on their peace-promoting features. Previous research has extensively looked into the second aspect, and found that amnesty laws can open the door to negotiations and a short-term termination of civil war. The question of impunity, however, has not been answered extensively. Applying a Historical Institutionalist framework, we assess the impact of the adoption of amnesty laws on societal impunity, defined as any person or group being exempt from punishment or free from the injurious consequences of an action. Case-study evidence from El Salvador shows that amnesty laws are reproducing existing power relations and thus inhibit profound reforms. With the help of amnesty laws, an institutional environment will be created that acts in the favor of involved parties for years, if not decades. We subsequently test these qualitative findings with a newly created dataset on post-war justice sector governance and reform across forty different post-war countries worldwide from 1990 to 2016, and with societal, police, and military impunity as dependent variables. Statistical evidence shows that amnesty laws significantly correlate with higher levels of impunity in a country. A peace agreement, or democracy at the end of war, reduces the risk of impunity even with amnesty laws present.

Understanding Bargaining Behavior during Civil War: How Third-party Enforcement Affects Groups’ Bargaining Offers

ABSTRACT This paper provides a new approach to studying the behavior of groups engaged in civil war termination bargaining by focusing on the commitment problem. Extending the basic Rubinstein bargaining model, the model presented here has the added feature of a reneging option for the stronger group after an agreement is reached. This leads to the prediction that when groups expect the absence of an enforcement mechanism, the stronger group makes a larger concession, while the weaker group makes a more demanding offer, than would be expected according to the relative power dynamic between groups. On the other hand, when groups expect that a third-party peace operator will enforce an agreement, groups’ offers more closely reflect their relative power situation. To illustrate the causal process of groups’ bargaining behavior, five bargaining attempts during Sierra Leone’s civil wars from 1991 to 2002 are examined.

Central banks and civil war termination

The ability to finance conflict likely affects the odds of sustaining a war and succeeding in it. Recent literature explores rebel group funding, but far less is known about how states finance their own war efforts. This article posits that the design of central banks should affect civil war termination. In particular, it argues that central bank independence affects civil war termination through two channels. First, financial markets consider central bank independence as a good signal in terms of macroeconomic stability and debt repayment. In this way, independent central banks enhance the ability of the government to access credit to finance and end a civil war. Second, central bank independence is associated with lower inflation. Inflation control reduces one source of additional grievances that the civil war may impose on citizens. On a sample of civil wars between 1975 and 2009, central bank independence is associated with a substantial increase in the likelihood of war termination. When the form of termination is disaggregated, (higher) central bank independence is associated with a higher probability of government victory, relative to continued conflict and to other outcomes. Additional tests provide support for the argued mechanisms: during civil wars, countries with more independent central banks access international credit markets in better conditions – i.e. they pay lower interest rates, and receive longer grace and maturity periods on new debt. Furthermore, in countries experiencing civil wars, central bank independence is associated with lower inflation.

Pro-government militias and civil war termination

Why do governments choose to fund pro-government militias (PGMs) if doing so could extend costly civil conflict? While PGMs are active in a majority of civil wars, their impact on conflict termination remains poorly understood. We argue that the choice to fund PGMs is a strategic one for states and part of their efforts to influence wartime dynamics and conflict termination. We hypothesize that PGMs’ impact on conflict termination is conditional on whether they are government funded. Government-funded PGMs help states to ward off costly negotiations and encourage the rebellion's gradual dissolution. Using competing risks analyses on civil wars ending between 1981 and 2007, we find robust evidence that PGM funding affects conflict outcomes.

Preventing Civil War Recurrence: Do Military Victories Really Perform Better than Peace Agreements? Causal Claim and Underpinning Assumptions Revisited

ABSTRACT Existing research suggests that peace is more stable after military victories than it is after peace agreements. This article challenges this conventional wisdom. By applying survival analysis, we demonstrate that peace agreements exhibit just as strong of a relationship to enduring peace as military victories do. Moreover, we investigate the assumptions that underpin the aforementioned claim. These assumptions link peace survival to the type of civil war termination and refer to intervening variables. Using time-series data for 48 civil wars that ended between 1990 and 2009, the empirical analysis finds support for only two underpinning assumptions in favour of victories.

Central Banks and Civil War Termination

The ability to finance conflict likely affects the odds of sustaining a war and succeeding in it. Recent literature explores rebel group funding, but far less is known about how states finance their own war efforts. This paper posits that the design of central banks should affect civil war termination. In particular, it argues that central bank independence (CBI) affects civil war termination through two channels. First, financial markets consider CBI as a good signal in terms of macroeconomic stability and debt repayment. In this way, independent central banks enhance the ability of the government to access credit to finance and end a civil war. Second, CBI is associated with lower inflation. Inflation control reduces one source of additional grievances that the civil war may impose on citizens. On a sample of civil wars between 1975 and 2009, CBI is associated with a substantial increase in the likelihood of war termination. When the form of termination is disaggregated, (higher) CBI is associated with a higher probability of government victory, relative to continued conflict and to other outcomes. Additional tests provide support for the argued mechanisms: during civil wars, countries with more independent central banks access international credit markets in better conditions – i.e., they pay lower interest rates, and receive longer grace and maturity periods on new debt. Furthermore, in countries experiencing civil wars, central bank independence is associated with lower inflation.

One Dyadic Peace Leads to Another? Conflict Systems, Terminations, and Net Reduction in Fighting Groups

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.

Negotiating peacekeeping consent: Information and peace outcomes

The mixed record on civil war termination shows that it is a difficult task, one fraught with uncertainty and risk. Gaining consent for peacekeeping is one strategy policymakers and scholars forward to reduce these concerns. Formal and informal work argues that allowing peacekeeping serves as a costly signal of peaceful intentions; however, these models treat peacekeeping costs as exogenous. I argue that peacekeeping costs have an endogenous element and use consent for peacekeeping missions as a proxy measure. Three conclusions are evident. It is difficult to determine whether belligerents are insincere actors in a peace process or merely distrustful, but consent can tell us whether a ceasefire is precarious and therefore more likely to fail; peacekeeping is difficult but meaningful under some conditions, and reliable information can be taken from negotiating, not just war-fighting. These results qualify the extent to which peacekeeping, with its changing emphasis on consent, can improve its outcomes.

Buddhist extremism, anti-Muslim violence and civil war legacies in Sri Lanka

ABSTRACTA post-civil war country may cease military activity, but the social rupture impacts political discourse and ethnic relations, and can lead to collective violence against minorities. Sri Lanka has witnessed multiple examples of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence since the civil war termination, most infamously in 2014 when ethnic riots affected large numbers of people. Buddhist monks appeared to play a prominent role. The lengthy war and ethnonationalist ideologies have produced politico-religious shifts associated with ‘Buddhist extremism’, implicated in these riots and other aggressions. This paper uses interview data to explore the question: what causal mechanisms link post-civil war and extremist ideologies, and how this can lead to ethnic rioting. Interview respondents argue that promoting a monolithic national identity in a heterogeneous country enhances divisions, which can be politically expedient. An outright war victory, militarization of society and lack of peacebuilding sustain ethnic tensions that can be mobilized for further anti-minority violence.

A persuasive peace: Syrian refugees’ attitudes towards compromise and civil war termination

Civilians who have fled violent conflict and settled in neighboring countries are integral to processes of civil war termination. Contingent on their attitudes, they can either back peaceful settlements or support warring groups and continued fighting. Attitudes toward peaceful settlement are expected to be especially obdurate for civilians who have been exposed to violence. In a survey of 1,120 Syrian refugees in Turkey conducted in 2016, we use experiments to examine attitudes towards two critical phases of conflict termination – a ceasefire and a peace agreement. We examine the rigidity/flexibility of refugees’ attitudes to see if subtle changes in how wartime losses are framed or in who endorses a peace process can shift willingness to compromise with the incumbent Assad regime. Our results show, first, that refugees are far more likely to agree to a ceasefire proposed by a civilian as opposed to one proposed by armed actors from either the Syrian government or the opposition. Second, simply describing the refugee community’s wartime experience as suffering rather than sacrifice substantially increases willingness to compromise with the regime to bring about peace. This effect remains strong among those who experienced greater violence. Together, these results show that even among a highly pro-opposition population that has experienced severe violence, willingness to settle and make peace are remarkably flexible and dependent upon these cues.

Civil war termination and foreign direct investment, 1989–2012

Data on global foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows shows that civil war significantly deters investment, while post-civil war settings attract investment. Civil wars, however, can end in different ways (government victories, rebel victories, and various types of settlements) and firms should be attracted to terminations that reveal more information about the future political and economic stability of the nation. We argue that comprehensive peace agreements and their subsequent implementation convey the most relevant information to investors regarding the credibility of the conflict actors’ commitment to future peace and stability and should thus attract the most FDI. Analysis of FDI inflows to 73 post-civil war countries lends support to our argument. The policy implications of the study are straightforward: governments that wish to attract the maximum amount of FDI for economic reconstruction following a civil war should negotiate and implement a comprehensive peace agreement.

‘No peace, no war’ proponents? How pro-regime militias affect civil war termination and outcomes

Previous research on non-state actors involved in civil wars has tended to disregard the role of extra-dyad agents in influencing conflict outcomes. Little is known as to whether the presence of such extra-dyadic actors as pro-regime militias affects conflict termination and outcomes. This article develops and tests a number of hypotheses on the pro-government militias’ effect upon civil war outcomes. It proposes that pro-regime militias involved in intrastate conflicts tend to act as proponents of ‘no peace, no war’, favouring low-activity violence and ceasefires over other conflict outcomes. These hypotheses are examined using an expanded dataset on pro-government militias and armed conflict in a statistical analysis of 229 civil war episodes from 1991 to 2015. These findings shed new light on the role of extra-state actors in civil wars.

A Persuasive Peace: Syrian Refugees' Attitudes Towards Compromise and Civil War Termination

Civilians who have fled violent conflict and settled in neighboring countries are integral to processes of civil war termination. Contingent on their attitudes, they can either back peaceful settlements or support warring groups and continued fighting. Attitudes toward peaceful settlement are expected to be especially obdurate for civilians who have been exposed to violence. In a survey of 1,120 Syrian refugees in Turkey conducted in 2016, we use experiments to examine attitudes towards two critical phases of conflict termination - a ceasefire and a peace agreement. We test the malleability of refugees' attitudes to see if subtle changes in how these processes are framed or who endorses them can render a ceasefire proposal more or less favorable, or produce attitudes that are more or less open to compromise with the incumbent regime of Assad. Our results show, first, that refugees are far more likely to agree to a ceasefire proposed by a civilian as opposed to one proposed by armed actors from either the Syrian government or the opposition. Second, we find that merely describing the refugee community's wartime experience as suffering rather than sacrifice increases willingness to compromise with the Syrian government to bring about peace. This effect remains strong among those experiencing greater violence. Together, these results show that even among a highly pro-opposition population that has experienced severe violence, attitudes toward willingness to settle and make peace are remarkably malleable, depending on factors such as who proposes a deal and how wartime losses are characterized.

The Strategic Logics of Wartime and Post-War Power Sharing

Scholars have extensively studied the effects of power sharing agreements, but the dynamics behind their adoption have received scant attention. This neglect is unfortunate, as studying these processes about can shed light both on the nature of the strategic dilemmas that characterize civil war termination and on persistent concerns about bias in studies of power sharing effectiveness. This paper therefore takes an in-depth look at how and why power sharing agreements get adopted, making both theoretical and empirical contributions. First, I propose a typology of power sharing logics — stalemate, token, cynical, and coalitional — that shows how agreements that are similar in form can differ greatly in function. Second, I offer quantitative evidence and qualitative comparisons of a random sample of several dozen power sharing agreements to corroborate the theoretical claims. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of the argument for studies of power sharing effectiveness specifically and the study of civil war termination more broadly.

Lasting peace or temporary calm? Rebel group decapitation and civil war outcomes

Existing research has found that killing or capturing rebel group leaders can lead to the termination of civil wars. This paper considers the quality of those terminations, examining how wars end and whether this produces a lasting peace or only a temporary reprieve from violence. Decapitation is expected to weaken rebel groups, shifting the balance of power to the government; however, results suggest that killing or capturing a rebel group leader tends to produce termination through inactivity rather than outright government victories. Decapitation is also found to have no effect on the chances of civil war recurrence. This suggests that the removal of rebel group leaders is effective primarily as a short-term strategy that does not tend to generate a lasting peace.

The president-led peace process and institutional veto players

What makes a negotiated settlement of civil wars so complicated? This question attracts much scholarly attention. Many existing studies focus on information asymmetry and commitment problems when examining civil war termination or duration. These studies tend to assume conflicting parties as unitary, not grasping the dynamic nature within the conflicting party. This article disaggregates government actors, drawing on the ‘veto player’ framework, and examines how political relationships among them affect the peace process, using the Mindanao conflict as a case study. The Philippine case illustrates how government actors influence the peace process, shedding light on a neglected aspect of the government influence on civil war termination.

Searching for Deterrence at the International Criminal Court

Does the International Criminal Court (icc) deter acts of violence in the world? To answer this question, this article first distinguishes between three phenomena that are often confusingly grouped together under the heading of ‘deterrence’. These include the termination of ongoing civil wars (compellence), the prevention of atrocity crime recidivism (specific deterrence), and the overall prevention of war and atrocity crimes (general deterrence). The article then assesses whether state commitments to the Rome Statute and icc intervention in specific contexts can promote these three aims. It presents evidence that the icc can indeed contribute to violence prevention, though not because of its ability to sanction abusive actors. Instead, the Court’s role as a ‘stigmatizer’ in the international community has likely contributed to declines in certain types of violence over time. As such, the article concludes that the icc is more important for what it is than what it does.