Our collective challenge is to address the immediate priorities for peace consolidation, in such a way that it also promotes a holistic approach to the requirements for sustainable peace. We must invest generously in critical national capacities to ensure that peace is sustainable. Viable states require local institutions capable of delivering basic services and providing security, justice and political stability.
– U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, June 23, 20081
Peace consolidation is a process that must focus on the immediate goal of ending war while also taking steps to institutionalize positive dimensions of peace. In particular, the creation and consoli- dation of a quality peace necessitates a focus on processes and institutions of inclusivity and political opportunity. While there are many tools at peacemakers’ disposal to achieve the consolidation of qual- ity peace, I posit that those strategies that are most successful are those that focus on context. In other words, peacemakers, to be truly successful, must focus on the causes of conflict and needs of the conflict actors within the situation at hand. With a specific focus on peace agreements, I argue that agreements are best-equipped to achieve the goals of security, inclusivity, and opportunity when they take context into account. To this end, the quantitative analysis in Chapter 4 confirms that context-specific peace agreements lead to improvements in the quality of post-conflict peace. This chapter seeks to further ex- amine the underlying causal processes to strengthen both the academic and policy-implications related to context-specific peacebuilding.
In examining the toolset available to peacemakers, works by Mukherjee (2006) and Tull and Mehler
1Statement made in his remarks at the closing meeting of the Second Session of the Peacebuilding Commission
(2005) assert that even the most successful conflict resolution tools, such as power sharing, are not ap- propriate for every context. The ubiquitous use of power sharing, political liberalization, and economic liberalization – as I have discussed in the previous chapter – may render peace fragile and prone to collapse. Call and Cousens (2008) capture the heart of this argument when they write: “External actors need to understand the history, politics, and cultures of the countries in which they are attempting to ‘build peace,’ whether societies are emerging from statelessness, institutionalized authoritarian regimes, or highly informal predatory states” (14). The authors go on to assert that “Without understanding something about how state-society relations have evolved, how war may have changed things, or who has power and how power works, any generic peacebuilding strategy is likely to be a poor fit” (Call and Cousens, 2008, 14). Peace fails to take hold far too often; by designing settlements that fit the needs and grievances of specific cases, I argue that actors will be better able to help countries remove themselves from the conflict trap.
Why, specifically, does context matter, and how does an attention to context help countries out of the conflict trap? Why are peace agreements that are crafted to fit the conflict context more likely to contribute to a higher quality peace? Throughout the preceding chapters, I have argued that peace agreements both constrain and incentivize behavior. With respect to context-specific peace agreements and their effects on political opportunity following conflict, I argue that the agreements work through these same two causal mechanisms: constraints and (dis)incentives. First, peace agreements create a new system of political, economic, and social institutions; in short, they create a completely new or revised state apparatus that limits actors’ behaviors and prevents extreme deviations from working within the new political system. Context-specific agreements, in particular, create an extensive web of institutions that are intentionally chosen to match the needs of the conflict at hand. In Burundi, for example, the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement set up an extensive network of new political, economic, and security institutions that limited actors’ capacity to consolidate and abuse power.
Second, peace agreements have the capacity to disincentivize repression by rewarding those who work within the new political system. Specifically, I argue that context-specific peace agreements alter the incentives of actors by creating a system that takes into account the very grievances and incompati- bilities that led to violent conflict in the first place. Rather than using repression and exclusion as tools to further amass power, actors who have signed context-specific peace agreements will, on average, be
more likely to choose strategies that work within the new political system. Mason et al. (2011), for example, highlight how repression and exclusion are not politically “smart” in that they can lead to future rebellion.2 Assuming actors’ grievances were sufficiently addressed in a peace agreement, there is little incentive to repress and destabilize the new status quo.3 On the other hand, one might consider that conflicts that are resolved using one-size-fits-all solutions may leave actors with both uncertainty and a belief that they could gain more through violence, exclusion, and repression. There is some evi- dence from the case of Liberia that President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf wanted to ensure that the opposition perceived the system to be fair and just, so as to avoid a return to war. Political inclusion was, in the Liberian case, more strategically beneficial than exclusion or repression.
The causal processes that I have identified find parallels in other works on civil war resolution.4 For example, recent work by Barbara Walter (2015) identifies the quality of governance as a key determinant for a peace that is durable. While her research is distinct from my own in that it focuses on (1) the durability of a negative peace and (2) quality governance as an independent variable rather than the outcome of interest, she highlights a number of key effects of institutions. She identifies, in particular, how institutions create multiple avenues for political interactions; violence no longer needs to be the pathway through which bargaining occurs. In my own work, I similarly argue that context-specific peace agreements lay forth institutions that shift the focus of political interactions from violence to non-violence, from exclusion to a greater degree of inclusion.
This chapter provides a deeper consideration of the causal processes discussed above. To this end, I have chosen to present three case illustrations: Liberia, Burundi, and Cˆote d’Ivoire. The cases are not intended to prove or disprove the theory; instead, they are intended to complement the quantitative analysis in Chapter 4 and illustrate the plausibility of the causal story. In the following section, I will briefly discuss the process of case selection. Then, I will present the three cases. In each case, I focus on the extent to which the peace agreements within these countries were designed with context in mind. In the cases of both Liberia and Burundi, the key peace agreements fully addressed the grievances of the
2
Gurses and Rost (2013) also find that political and economic exclusion of ethnic groups increases the chances of conflict recurrence.
3
Mason et al. (2011) highlight an area to further investigate: that military power sharing, in particular, will reduce repression levels.
4
disputants; in other words, they were context-specific. On the other hand, the Ivorian case illustrates the negative consequences of pushing a peace agreement that does not pay sufficient attention to context. While the cases of Burundi and Liberia have taken strides toward a higher quality peace, violence has remained a tool of political interaction in Cˆote d’Ivoire.