Supporting peace after civil war: what kind of international engagement can make a difference? (original) (raw)
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Identifying Pathways to Peace: How International Support Can Help Prevent Conflict Recurrence
This article provides new evidence on how the international community can effectively foster peace after civil war. It expands the current literature's narrow focus on either peacekeeping or aggregated aid flows, adopting a comprehensive, yet disaggregated, view on international peacebuilding efforts. We distinguish five areas of peacebuilding support (peacekeeping, nonmilitary security support, support for politics and governance, for socioeconomic development, and for societal conflict transformation) and analyze which types or combinations are particularly effective and in which context. Applying configurational analysis (qualitative comparative analysis) to all thirty-six post-civil war peace episodes between 1990 and 2014, we find that (1) peacekeeping is only one important component of effective post-conflict support, (2) the largest share of peaceful cases can be explained by support for politics and governance, (3) only combined international efforts across all types of support can address difficult contexts, and (4) countries neglected by the international community are highly prone to experiencing conflict recurrence. Three case studies shed light on underlying causal mechanisms.
International Studies Perspectives, 2020
This article analyzes the success factors for external engagement aimed at fostering peace in conflict-affected states. It focuses on a set of three factors that have been under-researched so far: the strategic pri-oritization between stability and democracy, the degree of coordination, and the mode of interaction. We compare international engagement in six countries-Burundi, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Senegal, and Timor-Leste. These countries all struggled with violent conflict and experienced a democratic transition in the period 2000-2014. We use an innovative approach to assess the impact of external engagement by analyzing twenty critical junctures in the domestic political processes of these countries mainly linked to elections, constitution-writing processes, and peace agreements , as well as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. Based on over 300 interviews, we find that prioritizing stability over democratization is problematic, good international coordination has positive effects, and preferring cooperative forms of interaction over coercion is mostly but not always useful. In discussing these general features of international support, this article contributes to the broader discussion of factors that explain the impact external actors can have on transformative political processes after conflict.
Bringing Peace to Conflict Zones through Humanitarian Assistance
This thesis will look at ways in which humanitarian aid can bring peace to post-conflict zones looking at the debate on peacebuilding and statebuilding, issues with humanitarian aid and the role of the United Nations. Peacebuilding and statebuilding are necessary for post-conflict states to maintain long-term peace and stability. Humanitarian assistance will only be effective if it contributes toward the long-term goal of peacebuilding through statebuilding. UN-led humanitarian assistance in post-conflict zones should be administered in the context of a peacebuilding through statebuilding framework because immediate responses to a crisis play a critical role in determining the success of long-term peace. This thesis will argue that international responses to post-conflict situations are more likely to lead to long-term peace and stability if peacebuilding is central to their approach. Through partnership, planning and coordination, setting peacebuilding as the objective for providing humanitarian aid should result in the greater likelihood of long-term social, economic and political stability. The UN will demonstrate how the short and long-term priorities can be reconciled.
An analysis of post-conflict stabilization
Department for International Development of the United Kingdom , 2015
This project is concerned with explaining why peace endures in countries that have experienced a civil war. A statistical analysis (Cox Proportional Hazard models) was employed to identify factors that contribute significantly to the duration of peace. Six qualitative case studies of post-conflict peace stabilization were also produced and examined alongside the regression results. The main findings are: • The duration of peace is difficult to explain. Many variables are insignificant in the regressions. • The outcome of the conflict is significant: military victories, especially by Governments, last longer than other outcomes. • Settlements are more likely to break down than military victories. • UN peacekeeping operation (UNPKO) variables (dummy, treatment, total number of uniformed personnel, troops, type of mission) are not significant. • Settlements that are buttressed by UNPKOs are less likely to break down. • The case studies provide important additional insights and identify a number of factors that were important for the consolidation of peace. Many of these variables are difficult if not impossible to measure using statistical methods either because the data are not available/reliable or because the variables elude measurement. This is a report for the Department for International Development of the United Kingdom. (co-authors Richard Caplan, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, and Anke Hoeffler, Department of Economics, University of Oxford). (https://www.gov.uk/dfid-research-outputs/an-analysis-of-post-conflict-stabilization).
International Peacekeeping, 2019
Existing research suggests that democratization can run counter to peace in post-conflict contexts. This article analyses the effect of two competing strategies that external actors use to address the conflict of objective between democracy and peace: prioritization and gradualism. The prioritization approach advises sequencing, which means postponing support for democratization and concentrating first on peace in terms of the absence of violent conflict. The gradualist approach promotes peace and democracy simultaneously. This article offers a systematic analysis of these two prominent donor strategies. To this end, it focuses on two critical junctures in two similar post-conflict settings (Burundi and Nepal). Drawing upon extensive field research, the analysis shows that a gradualist approach is not more risk-prone than a prioritization strategy. To the contrary, the analysis suggests that even in most fragile contexts, gradualism can help to foster peace. Prioritization, in turn, may also contribute to the instability it aimed to prevent. Two factors condition the effect of the selected strategy on peace: which dimensions of democracy are affected and to what degree, and whether the institutional context reinforces or counteracts this trend.
Importance of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) in Post Conflict Peacebuilding
2015
Disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) is a critical element of post conflict peace building (PCPB). The peace agreement leading-up from ceasefire agreement after the end of conflict situations is not sufficient enough to prevent the relapse into conflict, and thus the need to ensure a long-lasting peace by addressing not only the direct causes of violence but also the structural and cultural causes through reforms. This paper examines the importance of DDR in reforming the security and political sector, and also the reforms in the social and economic sector. In furtherance, this draws an analysis of those reforms within the African –Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Burundi, Liberia, Cote D’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Sudan and South Sudan –experience of DDR.
Post conflict recovery and peace building
2010
Civil wars are the most common type of large scale violent conflict. They are long, brutal and continue to harm societies long after the shooting stops. Post-conflict countries face extraordinary challenges with respect to development and security. In this paper we examine how countries can recover economically from these devastating conflicts and how international interventions can help to build lasting peace. We revisit the aid and growth debate and confirm that aid does not increase growth in general. However, we find that countries experience increased growth after the end of the war and that aid helps to make the most of this peace dividend. However, aid is only growth enhancing when the violence has stopped, in violent post-war societies aid has no growth enhancing effect. We also find that good governance is robustly correlated with growth, however we cannot confirm that aid increases growth conditional on good policies. We examine various aspects of aid and governance by disaggregating the aid and governance variables. Our analysis does not provide a clear picture of which types of aid and policy should be prioritized. We find little evidence for a growth enhancing effect of UN missions and suggest that case studies may provide better insight into the relationship between security guarantees and economic stabilization.