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Third Parties, War Systems’ Inertia, and Conflict Termination The Doomed Peace Process in Colombia, 1998–2002 167 Why some civil wars are difficult to terminate has become a major puzzle for those seeking to understand and resolve violent conflict. The average duration of civil wars increased in the post–cold war period to 15.1 years from a median duration of 5.5 years in 1999.1 Of the civil wars that started after 1945, one-fourth lasted two years, another one-fourth lasted at least 15 years, and thirteen lasted 20 years or more.2 The problem of these protracted wars poses a series of theoretical and empirical challenges to students of civil wars that have, in turn, generated significant literature in the last decade. In spite this attention, research has not yet provided satisfactory explanations for a range of key issues, such as why some conflicts are more protracted than others, when they terminate, and why they do so. In part, this failure may be a result of overzealous attempts to find an overarching theory that could explain the dynamics of all civil wars, or at least a preponderant number of them (large-N), while also factoring in their nuances and peculiarities. Of course, this observation invokes the traditional debate of whether we scholars should lower our theoretical ambitions—and rethink our methodological approaches—or rather focus our energies on refining large-N quantitative studies. In my view, given that scholarly research has already generated a substantial body of empirical studies, it may be time to retool and rethink “midrange theories” that are constantly enriched by the findings of both large-N studies and individual cases, and to strengthen the linkages between quantitative and qualitative research. Explanations of conflict termination can be divided into four broad categories .3 The first category argues that civil war termination is a function of the military balance, political conditions, and economic costs of the conflict that are likely to encourage the combatants to find a negotiated settlement.4 According to this perspective, when both parties are hurting from the conflict in terms of rising fatalities, the costs of the confrontation are increasing, and the region is not favoring the continuation of the conflict, then a negotiated settlement becomes viable. The second explanation – 8 – 168 SYSTEMS OF VIOLENCE argues that a negotiated settlement is possible when combatants manage to resolve their core disputes. Accordingly, a negotiated settlement is possible only when a bargain is reached.5 This reasoning is circular and does little to identify the necessary conditions for the crucial bargain that must be met in the first instance. A third explanation maintains that a successful and durable negotiated settlement depends on the guarantees third party provides as well as its capacity to enforce the terms of an agreement.6 The fourth explanation argues that the correlation of the military power balance and the costs of the war alone are insufficient to determine the “ripe moment”—to use William Zartman’s famous phrase—for a successful conclusion of conflict, unless the “real” costs are complemented by a perception among the combatants and their support bases that they could be better off with a settlement than with continued war.7 This chapter assesses the validity of some of the core propositions of each of these explanatory frameworks on the duration of civil wars by examining why the 1998–2002 Colombian peace process failed.8 Here, defining the concept of the war system as used in this chapter is useful. A “war system” is a pattern of violent interactions among actors sustained over a period of time. As such, war systems are embedded in every civil war. The emergence, consolidation, and duration of war systems depend, in part, on the evolution of the correlation of forces among warring actors and on the political economies that each of the belligerent forces construct during the course of the conflict. In this analysis, if the political, economic, and military assets that any actor obtains during the conflict exceed what it had prior the conflict, then this is considered as a positive political economy. Positive political economies may generate incentives to continue the war until one of the parties prevails. War systems are neither rational constructs nor do their perpetuation depend on one actor’s behavior. War systems are as much the product of unintended consequences of actors’ behavior or of actors’ attempts to outsmart their opponents as they are of structural constraints, such as the balance of...

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