Violence after War: Explaining Instability in Post-conflict States by Michael J. Boyle (review)

When wars end, violence frequently continues, sometimes to revive the war, sometimes not. Groups that fight after conflict officially ends are often not those that settled the war or those motivated by the issues that led to war. New opportunities for violence alter the incentives of leaders or followers, whether they oppose the settlement, see a personal gain, want revenge, or just enjoy fighting. Of these, Boyle concentrates on “strategic violence,” the sort that intends to reorder relative power or resources among combatants. He argues that the likelihood and amount of postconflict strategic violence depends on whether groups accept the peace settlement and whether their leaders continue to control their followers. Accordingly, groups engaging in postconflict strategic violence either try to alter the settlement or ignore it but fragment into factions, usually local, which attack each other for rewards unrelated to the settlement. Either form of postwar violence tends to surprise the external negotiators who mediated those settlements and the peacekeepers concerned to maintain them.

Boyle measures the onset and severity of postconflict violence by way of a fifty-two-case data set, between 1989 and 2007, that he devised and by case studies of strategic violence in East Timor, Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Iraq after the wars there had ended. He traces the violence during the succeeding five years where a settlement was challenged as well as violence opening new fault lines without disturbing the existing settlement. Focusing attention on the latter is his most original contribution. He warns that peacekeepers ought to think twice about disarming fighters after wars where factional leaders have little control over their followers. The strength of Boyle’s account rests on the multiplicity of variables that he introduces and the plausible causal paths that he outlines. Its weaknesses result from the difficulties of comparison and thus explanation when so many factors are in play and from his insistence on quantifying violence by presenting tables of casualties in which he heroically but misleadingly distinguishes among types of aggression in order to draw conclusions about strategic violence. His sources (mainly crime statistics and newspaper accounts) do not permit him safely to separate strategic from personal or expressive violence. Valuable as his work is, we need to look elsewhere for Boyle’s law.