Why Peace Fails: The Causes and Prevention of Civil War Recurrence

1. What Do We Know about Why Peace Fails?

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT why peace fails? Most relevant for answering this question are two key literatures that overlap: that on civil wars, and that on peacebuilding. The former addresses the causes and character of civil wars: why they occur, why they end, what makes them persist, what consequences they have, and so on. Part of this analysis involves the roles of external actors, but the unitsofanalysisaregenerallycountries(thatexperiencecivilwarsordonot)and civil wars themselves. The latter literature—on peacebuilding—proposes and tests claims about the role of external, and sometimes internal, actions or interventions on the process of peace consolidation, stabilization, or war recurrence. Although the term “peacebuilding” has expanded to encompass preconflict prevention and wartime peacemaking efforts at mediation or negotiation, the bulk of publishing on peacebuilding refers to postconflict societies, and thus de facto exclusively addresses those societies that have experienced conflict and a cease-fire, either through victory or a negotiated settlement. Therefore, the bulk of peacebuilding research directly addresses the recurrence of armed conflict; however, the unit of analysis is not so much wars and countries at war as peace processes; international organizations and their structures, policies, or programs; or the combination of programs and actions undertaken by external and/or internal actors. Although some quantitative works can be considered to lie in this field (as well as in the “civil wars” literature, in some cases), the majority of the research in this peacebuilding literature is qualitative, either case studies, comparative work, policy analysis, or midlevel generalizations across several cases of peace processes or institutional structures or programs. In this chapter I first examine the literature on the onset and recurrence of civil wars. Some of this research is qualitative, but most works that are both influential and recent have tended to rely upon quantitative methods. The chapter then presents the dominant approaches found in the peacebuilding literature. I focus on four broad categories of understandings: the “liberal,” “republican,” 1 What Do We Know about Why Peace Fails? 26 Why Peace Fails: Theory “state-building,” and “critical” approaches to peacebuilding. The concluding chapters (8 and 9) revisit these theoretical approaches in light of the book’s empirics . The third and final section of this chapter seeks to define and clarify the key concepts used throughout the book: exclusion, inclusion, and legitimacy. What We Know about Civil Wars and Ethnic Conflict Civil war theorizing reflects the multiple disciplines of history, sociology, political science, social psychology, and economics. Influential understandings of civil war from the 1950s to the 1970s focused on national or ethnic groups and their desire for autonomy. Much of the early literature examined whether, and to what extent, ethnicity played a role in civil wars (e.g., Deutsch 1953; Shils 1957). Different perspectives prevail.1 Early analyses of the postcolonial struggles recognized the role of international power configurations, including the interaction of colonial authority patterns and tribal elites (Young 1965; Geertz 1963). Other approaches emphasize the role of social group (especially ethnic) composition, group capabilities, and group opportunities for insurrectionary challenges to the state. Gurr (1970) emphasized rational response to frustration, ethnic group capacities , and later the social opportunities for overcoming the collective action problem (Gurr 2000; Hegre et al. 2001). Following the Cold War, some researchers adapted the “security dilemma” to internal armed conflict, arguing that ethnic group misperceptions and fears regardingothergroups ’actionstriggeroffensivearmedactions(WalterandSnyder 1999; Posen 1993). In such approaches, externally provided guarantors of credible commitments (Fearon 1998) or third-party guarantees (Walter 1997, 2002) played a role in overcoming the security dilemma and ensuring peace. Others (Gagnon1994)arguedthatethnicityisatoolofentrepreneurialpoliticalleaders, or more broadly a basis for political or economic organization. Under this view, ethnic composition is not so determinative but interacts either with individual leadership or with forms of participation and representation that shape whether mass violence occurs. These approaches all share an emphasis on political or group grievance in civil wars’ onset. Greed over Grievance? In the 1900s scholars began to challenge the emphasis on grievance and identity. Most prominently, the Development Research Group of the World Bank, under the direction of Paul Collier, produced influential research that “spurred the creation of new paradigms for the study of civil war and its associated resource curse” (Ron 2005). This work was initially presented under the catchy moniker “greed versus grievance,” and its earliest formulations emphasized the predatory What DoWe Know aboutWhy Peace Fails? 27 acquisition of primary commodity exports, using the examples of...