Ending civil wars: A case for rebel victory?

International Security

Volumn 34, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 7-36

  Toft, Monica Duffy ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 77954282248     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: 15314804     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/isec.2010.34.4.7     Document Type: Article

References (112)

1. See Edward N. Luttwak, "Give War a Chance," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 78, No. 4 (July/August 1999), pp. 36-44.
2. Hereafter, when I use the term "victory," I am referring to military victory, the defeat of a rival in war.
3. This claim is supported by a survey of articles published in seven leading international relations and comparative politics journals-American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, and World Politics-from 1990 through 2005.
4. For an analysis of implementing negotiated settlements following three civil wars whose main objective was control over the central government (i.e., not secession).
5. see Dorina Akosua Oduraa Bekoe, "After the Peace Agreement: Lessons for Implementation from Mozambique, Angola, and Liberia," Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2002.
6. Richard Falk, "Hard Choices and Tragic Dilemmas," Nation, December 20, 1993, p. 755.
7. "Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of Noninternational Armed Conflicts (Protocol II), 8 June 1977," International Committee of the Red Cross homepage, http://www.icrc.org/IHL.NSF/FULL/475?OpenDocument.
8. See G.I.A.D. Draper, "Wars of National Liberation and War Criminality," in Michael Howard, ed., Restraints on War: Studies in the Limitation of Armed Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 135-162.
9. Stephen Ryan, Ethnic Conflict and International Relations (Aldershot, U.K.: Gower, 1990).
10. See, for example, Peter Harris and Ben Reilly, eds., Democracy and Deep-Rooted Conflict: Options for Negotiators (Stockholm: International IDEA, 1998).
11. Luttwak, "Give War a Chance".
12. Robert Harrison Wagner, "The Causes of Peace," in Roy Licklider, ed., Stopping the Killing: How Civil Wars End (New York: New York University Press, 1993), pp. 235-268.
13. Luttwak, "Give War a Chance," p. 44.
14. Wagner, "The Causes of Peace.".
15. Roy Licklider, "The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in CivilWars, 1945-1993," American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 3 (September 1995), pp. 681-690.
16. T. David Mason, Joseph P. Weingarten Jr., and Patrick J. Fett, "Win, Lose, or Draw: Predicting the Outcome of Civil Wars," Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2 (June 1999), pp. 239-268.
17. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War," American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1 (February 2003), pp. 75-90.
18. Jeremy M. Weinstein, "Resources and the Information Problem in Rebel Recruitment," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 49, No. 4 (August 2005), pp. 598-624.
19. Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, and Måns Söderbom, "On the Duration of Civil War," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 3 (May 2004), pp. 253-273.
20. Karl R. de Rouen Jr. and David Sobek, "The Dynamics of Civil War Duration and Outcome," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 3 (May 2004), pp. 393-320.
21. For a review of the theoretical literature on civil war outcomes, see Monica Duffy Toft, Securing the Peace: The Durable Settlement of Civil Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), chaps. 1, 2.
22. For a review of some of the main statistical findings, see T. David Mason, "Sustaining the Peace after Civil War" (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, December 2007).
23. Matthew Hoddie and Caroline Hartzell, for example, conclude that out of sixteen peace agreements signed between 1980 and 1996, those that completely implemented provisions for military power sharing among former combatants held the greatest prospects for maintaining the peace.
24. See Hoddie and Hartzell, "Civil War Settlements and the Implementation of Military Power-Sharing Arrangements," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 40, No. 3 (May 2003), pp. 303-320.
25. In a later work, they further show that implementation of institutional reform in political, economic, and territorial power sharing is a crucial component of a lasting peace.
26. See Caroline A. Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie, Crafting Peace: Power-Sharing Institutions and the Negotiated Settlement of Civil Wars (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007).
27. The data set includes all cases of civil war through 2007. Analyses that include assessments by decades (e.g., 1940s, 1950s) consider civil wars that ended by December 31, 1999, while other analyses include all civil wars that ended by December 31, 2002.
28. For the complete data set, summaries of the cases, and codebook, see http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Toftcwdata.xlsx.
29. See Nicholas Sambanis, "Partition as a Solution to Ethnic War: An Empirical Critique of the Theoretical Literature," World Politics, Vol. 52, No. 4 (July 2000), pp. 437-483.
30. Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, "International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and Quantitative Analysis," American Political Science Review, Vol. 94, No. 4 (December 2000), pp. 779-801.
31. Fearon and Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War." For a critical review of negotiated settlements.
32. see Alexander B. Downes, "The Problem with Negotiated Settlements to Ethnic CivilWars," Security Studies, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer 2004), pp. 230-279.
33. Only civil wars that ended by 2002 are included in the logit analysis.
34. These six criteria are an amalgamation of criteria used by other scholars to define civil wars over the past two decades. For example, Licklider and Doyle and Sambanis use a death threshold of 1,000 total, as opposed to a yearly average. Furthermore, this data set includes wars that involved colonial struggles. Other data sets are inconsistent in this regard. For consistency, wars that are commonly thought of as colonial wars are included in this data set. There are a total of ten such wars included here. Additionally, other data sets use country years as their units of analysis (e.g., Doyle and Sambanis; and Fearon and Laitin) and differ on when to disaggregate or aggregate different wars. Doyle and Sambanis, for instance, consider Afghanistan to have suffered three separate wars. For a more comprehensive comparative analysis of this data set with others, see http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/MTcodebook2010.pdf.
35. Five years is a standard period to delineate the final, stable end of a war, because it typically allows for at least one election cycle.
36. See Licklider, "The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil War".
37. Barbara F. Walter, "The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement," International Organization, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Summer 1997), pp. 335-364.
38. Caroline A. Hartzell, "Explaining the Stability of Negotiated Settlements to Intrastate Wars," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 43, No. 1 (February 1999), pp. 3-22.
39. For a fuller treatment, see Monica Duffy Toft, "End of Victory? Civil War Termination in Historical Perspective," paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Honolulu, Hawaii, March 1-6, 2005.
40. See also Virginia Page Fortna, "Where Have All the Victories Gone? Peacekeeping and War Outcomes," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Toronto, Canada, September 3-6, 2009.
41. Licklider, "The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars.".
42. One might assume in such cases that the rebels are most likely to flee after surrendering, because traditionally (i.e., especially prior to 1977) rebels have never enjoyed the full protections of international humanitarian law. Victorious incumbent governments have tended to deal extremely harshly with surviving rebels, who most often face exile or imprisonment, at best, and torture or murder, at worst.
43. Doyle and Sambanis discuss a related, but contradictory, finding: settlements enhanced peacebuilding between the combatants. Their finding supports a different issue, which deals with the quality of peace rather than the absence or duration of peace.
44. See Doyle and Sambanis, "International Peacebuilding.".
45. See also J. Michael Quinn, T. David Mason, and Mehmet Gurses, "Sustaining the Peace: Determinants of Civil War Recurrence," International Interactions, Vol. 33, No. 2 (April 2007), pp. 167-193.
46. All of the models were tested using additional controls. In none did regime type, duration, or the incidence of third-party military intervention achieve significance; nor did any of the controls affect the coefficients and significance of other variables. When economic development was measured by the natural log of a country's per capita GDP in the year prior to a civil war, it did affect the significance of termination type: victory in model 1 moves to two-star significance, while both negotiated settlement and rebel victory drop below the one-star threshold. But in no model is the economic indicator significant itself, and its adverse effect on other variables probably stems from the fact that per capita GDP data are missing for more than half of the observations in the data set. On the relationship between GDP per capita and civil war onset.
47. see Fearon and Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War".
48. Marie L. Besançon, "Relative Resources: Inequality in Ethnic Wars, Revolutions, and Genocides," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 42, No. 4 (July 2005), pp. 393-415.
49. This variable was coded "1" if the civil war was rooted in ethnic or religious identity, as in former Yugoslavia with Bosnian Muslims fighting Orthodox Christian Serbs and Catholic Croats. If the war was not rooted in ethnic or religious identity, then it was coded "0.".
50. This variable was coded "1" if the fight was over control of territory, as in former Yugoslavia, and "0" if the fight did not center on the control of a piece of a state's territory, as in Tajikistan.
51. Licklider, "The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars," p. 684.
52. Barry R. Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," Survival, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 27-47.
53. Chaim Kaufmann, "Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars," International Security, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 136-175.
54. Chaim D. Kaufmann, "Intervention Ethnic and Ideological Civil Wars: Why One Can Be Done and the Other Can't," Security Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Autumn 1996), pp. 62-101.
55. In "Partition as a Solution to EthnicWar," Sambanis found that partition is more likely to follow ethnic wars.
56. See Monica Duffy Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, and the Indivisibility of Territory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
57. Ron E. Hassner, "To Halve and to Hold: Conflicts over Sacred Space and the Problem of Indivisibility," Security Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Summer 2003), pp. 1-33.
58. Ron E. Hassner, War on Sacred Grounds (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009).
59. Stacie E. Goddard, "Uncommon Ground: Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy," International Organization, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Winter 2006), pp. 35-68.
60. Stacie E. Goddard, Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
61. Barbara F. Walter, Reputation and Civil War: Why Separatist Conflicts Are So Violent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
62. I. William Zartman, ed., Elusive Peace: Negotiating an End to Civil Wars (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1995).
63. The logic of this argument can be found in Kaufmann, "Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars".
64. David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild, "Containing Fear: The Origins and Management of Ethnic Conflict," International Security, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 1996), pp. 41-75.
65. The main findings of the logit model were confirmed using a Cox proportional hazard model. A negotiated settlement increased the likelihood of war recurrence in each year by almost 400 percent, whereas military victories reduced the likelihood by roughly 75 percent (both findings were significant at the p _ 0.01 [two-tailed tests]). In addition, rebel victories reduced the likelihood of recurrence by more than 20 percentage points over government victories (_68 percent to _44 percent).
66. This model used the same controls as those used in the logit model presented here. See author's website for logfiles of a more comprehensive statistical analysis at http://belfercenter.ksg .harvard.edu/files/MTcodebook2010.pdf.
67. This analysis measured average effect of each termination type relative to a control group comprising all other cases. A pair-wise comparison of victories to negotiated settlements alone strengthens the results (the first difference becomes-0.28).
68. In the logscale, the difference between 4.8 and 8.4 translates into an increase of 124 casualties per month to 4,532 (a thirty-seven-fold increase).
69. In a separate analysis, Quinn, Mason, and Gurses found that ethnic revolutions and secessionist wars were not more likely to recur. The difference in findings (especially regarding ethnic revolutions, which seem to capture identity-based civil wars in this analysis, and are consistently shown to be significant in relation to recurrence) results from differences over which cases are included and their coding. Quinn, Mason, and Gurses use the Doyle and Sambanis data set, which excludes a number of wars of independence (e.g., identity based) and failed negotiated settlements. Given these discrepancies, I am more confident that this data analysis more accurately captures the dynamics. Quinn, Mason, and Gurses, "Sustaining the Peace.".
70. To conduct the duration tests, I added the values of duration for each country's civil wars together. If, for example, in the original data set there were two separate observations for Angola called "Angola IIa" (Angola Civil War) and "Angola IIb" (UNITA Warfare), the duration in months for each module was added to measure the total hardship a country endured as a result of both the initial war and its resumption. Where a recurred civil war is ongoing, it is truncated in 2006.
71. These counts come from a number of sources, including J. David Singer and Melvin Small's Correlates of War data set, ver. 3-0, http://www.correlatesofwar.org
72. And the Oslo International Peace Research Institute data set, Data on Armed Conflict, http://www.prio.no/CSCW/Datasets/Armed-Conflict/.
73. The data and supporting documentation used for tables 4 and 5 are available on the author's website at http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/MTcodebook2010.pdf.
74. This finding holds even when excluding the deadliest of these civil wars-Sudan-as a potential outlier. When Angola (another particularly deadly conflict) is excluded, the number of per capita battle deaths is similar to the global mean, but per capita deaths remain higher for recurred negotiated settlements. To exclude both Sudan and Angola simultaneously-thus removing the two deadliest of five total failed negotiated settlements-makes little sense.
75. Polity IV Project, Polity IV Dataset (College Park: Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, 2000), ver. p4v2000.
76. The results in table 6 indicate a shift toward less repression as the war approaches, although repression increases just slightly during the year the war breaks out. This decrease in authoritarianism might be indicative of these states' efforts at placating a discontented society. This "loosening up" argument goes only so far, however. As the war approaches, the level of authoritarianism does increase ever so slightly. Such a dynamic lends credence to the idea that "liberalization" of the system is precarious because it might put too much stress on that system, leading to more calls for even more liberalization. If these calls are not met, frustration sets in, repression increases, and violence ensues.
77. Similarly, Fearon and Laitin, as well as Håvard Hegre, Tanja Ellingsen, Scott Gates, and Nils Petter Gleditsch, show that anocracy makes conditions ripe for insurgents. Authoritarianism does not allow insurgents to emerge, whereas democratic states seem to allow grievances to be handled without resort to violence.
78. See Fearon and Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War".
79. Hegre, Ellingsen, Gates, and Gleditsch, "Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816-1992," American Political Science Review, Vol. 95, No. 1 (March 2001), pp. 33-48.
80. see Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000)
81. Because there are so few cases, interpreting the findings related to cease-fires/stalemates must be done with care.
82. Moreover, they do not address whether democratization affects civil war recurrence. I included this factor in an earlier model; it had no effect.
83. Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
84. Collier, Hoeffler, and Söderbom, "On the Duration of Civil War.".
85. Ritva Reinikka and Paul Collier, eds., Uganda's Recovery: The Role of Farms, Firms, and Government (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001).
86. For a fuller treatment of the Uganda case
87. see Toft, Securing the Peace.
88. Severine Rugumamu and Osman Gbla, "Studies in Reconstruction and Capacity Building in Post-Conflict Countries in Africa: Some Lessons of Experience from Mozambique, Rwanda, and Uganda" (Harare, Zimbabwe: African Capacity Building Foundation, December 2003).
89. Dan M. Mudoola, "Institution-building: The Case of NRM and the Military in Uganda, 1986-1989," in Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, eds., Changing Uganda: The Dilemmas of Structural Adjustment and Revolutionary Change (London: James Currey, 1991), pp. 230-246.
90. Thomas P. Ofcansky, Uganda: Tarnished Pearl of Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996).
91. Rugumamu and Gbla, "Studies in Reconstruction and Capacity Building in Post-Conflict Countries in Africa.".
92. Nelson Kasfir, "The Ugandan Elections of 1989: Power, Populism, and Democratization," in Hansen and Twaddle, Changing Uganda, pp. 247-278.
93. Ofcansky, Uganda.
94. John Kiyaga-Nsubuga, "Uganda: The Politics of 'Consolidation' under Museveni's Regime, 1996-2003," in Taisier M. Ali and Robert O. Matthews, eds., Durable Peace: Challenges for Peacebuilding in Africa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 86-112.
95. Reinikka and Collier, Uganda's Recovery.
96. Ultimately, readers must decide whether the Ugandan example is reflective of the larger universe of relevant cases or merely an outlier.
97. What little academic research exists on SSR addresses current policy practices.
98. See, for example, Nicole Ball, "Transforming Security Sectors: The IMF and World Bank Approaches," Conflict, Security, and Development, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April 2001), pp. 45-66.
99. Dylon Hendrickson, "A Review of the Security Sector Reform," Working Paper, No. 1 (London: King's College London, Centre for Defence Studies, 1999).
100. Chris Smith, "Security-Sector Reform: Development Breakthrough or Institutional Engineering?" Conflict, Security, and Development, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April 2001), pp. 5-20.
101. The fund's name is LOFTA (Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan) and is administered by the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping. Michael Schmunk, German diplomat, interview by author, Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 2005.
102. For background reading on the history of Colombia and its war, see David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
103. Bert Ruiz, The Colombian Civil War (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001).
104. Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
105. William Avilés, "Institutions, Military Policy, and Human Rights in Colombia," Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 28, No. 1 (January 2001), pp. 31-55.
106. Compare Barbara F. Walter, Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 2002).
107. Walter, "The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement.".
108. For an impressive effort at demonstrating just how strong international pressure is on developing countries to liberalize their politics and economics.
109. see Roland Paris, At War's End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
110. See Charles T. Call, "Assessing El Salvador's Transition from Civil War to Peace," in Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth M. Cousens, eds., Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2002), pp. 383-420.
111. Toft, Securing the Peace, chap. 5.
112. In fact, although the war was largely fought over land and class issues, most of the provisions of the agreement focused on transformation of the security sector.