Crafting Peace: Power-Sharing Institutions and the Negotiated Settlement of Civil Wars

1 After the Fighting Stops: Security Concerns, Institutions, and the Post-Civil War Environment

1 after the fighting stops: security concerns, institutions, and the post–civil war environment Institutions play a critical role in civil war settlements. As Harvey Waterman observes, ‘‘civil wars [often] end in a deal and that . . . deal is about political institutions.’’1 Institutions, defined as rules regarding the manner in which competition among actors should take place, prohibit particular behaviors and require others. It is because institutions serve to reduce uncertainty regarding the regulation of human behavior that they can help facilitate peaceful social interactions. By clarifying the means by which social conflict is to be managed in the future, institutions enable groups to contemplate relying on methods other than violence to secure their goals. When armed opponents negotiate an end to a civil conflict, institutions structured to share and/or divide power among the groups in question are likely to play a central role in the design of the settlement. Power-sharing and power-dividing institutions, which define how decisions are to be made within a divided society and the distribution of decision-making rights within a state, have been a central element of recent peace settlements negotiated in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Sudan. Among the thirty-eight fully negotiated civil war settlements examined in this book, for example, only Angola’s 1989 Gbadolite Accord neglected to specify some form of power-sharing or power-dividing institution . As we argue in this chapter, the principal reason adversaries design such institutions is to address the security concerns they confront in the postwar environment. By creating power-sharing and power-dividing insti1 . Waterman 1993, 292. 22 crafting peace tutions, settlement architects seek to ensure that state power—particularly forms of power that can be used to threaten others—will not be concentrated in the hands of any single group. The institutions designed as part of the 1992 Chapultepec Agreement to end El Salvador’s civil war illustrate this point. Having fought for more than a decade (1979–92) to rid the country of coercive and exclusionary institutions, the Farabundo Martı́ Front for National Liberation (fmln), representing the interests of peasants, workers, and students, pressed hard for institutional reforms that would ensure that the country’s economic and political elites would no longer be able to use the power of the state to repress these groups. The fmln also sought to ensure that once its members surrendered their weapons the state would comply with its commitments, particularly a guarantee of protection for the unarmed insurgents. These goals were secured through the design of a variety of powersharing and power-dividing institutions specified in a series of accords. Central among these was an agreement to reform the state’s security forces by incorporating some fmln members into a new civilian police force, eliminating some elements of the security forces, reducing the overall size of the armed forces, and purging the military officer corps. Joined to the military power-sharing measures were agreements to legalize the fmln as a political party and provide it with representation on the new Supreme Electoral Tribunal , a body designed to supervise voter registration and elections. By making it difficult for any group to use the powers of the Salvadoran state to attack and repress others, these institutional reforms provided former adversaries with a stable foundation on which to build an enduring and selfenforcing peace. In this chapter we further develop our claim concerning the central importance of power-sharing and power-dividing institutions following the negotiated resolution of civil war. We begin by examining the kinds of security concerns facing civil war antagonists in a post–civil war environment. This is followed by a discussion of the influence of those security concerns on the process of institutional choice and the crafting of power-sharing and power-dividing institutions. In the third section we offer a detailed description of the four sets of power-sharing and power-dividing institutions groups may construct as part of a negotiated settlement. Our discussion of these institutions centers on the individual and cumulative effects they have on the management of conflict in post–civil war societies. In the fourth and final section we consider how our understanding of power-sharing and after the fighting stops 23 power-dividing institutions contrasts with previous conceptualizations that have appeared in studies of conflict management. Security Concerns in the Post...