Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements

by Stephen John Stedman (Editor)

Most experts agree that international involvement is necessary to help end civil wars, but few have looked at how, when, and where the United Nations and outside governments should do so. Here a team of scholars examines the varied experiences of the last 20 years to offer practical advice. They find that the local conditions surrounding settlements vary widely. In relatively benign environments, such as Guatemala and Namibia, traditional peacekeeping approaches involving confidence building and dialogue are possible. In more demanding environments, such as Bosnia and Sierra Leone, outside states need to compel and deter local factions to ensure they comply with the peace agreement. But the most important source of failures is the presence of "spoilers" -- factions that continue to resist peace -- and unhelpful neighboring states that oppose a settlement.

Genres: Nonfiction

775 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2002

Reviews

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book addresses and attempts to answer the question why some peace agreements to end civil wars actually end them—or at least are an important part of the process to end the war—while others fail miserably and may do more harm than good in getting the warring sides to lay down their arms. It is an unwieldy behemoth of a text, over 700 pages varying from essays closely arguing arcane points of peacekeeping practice to a few that are more off the cuff truisms along the lines of peace is better than war. I read through at least parts of each of the 25 articles that make up “Ending Civil Wars” and read more deeply into several that addressed issues or events that I know something about.

It is easy to find fault with peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts by the United Nations, non-governmental organizations and charitable operations—they don’t do particularly much well but that may be because of the inherent difficulty in trying to negotiate peace agreements between armed (often still armed) groups who have been figuring out the best ways to kill each other and who haven’t yet decided if peace would be to their advantage. But the efforts must be made—mass slaughter of civilians is an unalterable part of civil war and anything that can be done to bring it to an end should be encouraged. “Ending Civil Wars” lays out some of the successes and failures of these efforts and lessons that might be learned from them. There seems to be a good bit of academic score-settling in some of the articles. The editors must have considered them either a feature or a bug that wasn’t worth eradicating.

It is a complex process with lots of moving parts and plenty of participants who would be just as happy if the war continued. Among them are the men who have become powerful far beyond any influence they could have had in pre-war days. The instance I am most familiar with and one that is discussed in the chapter on “Disarmament and Demobilization” is Northern Ireland which wasn’t a civil war as such—the IRA and its allies never had state power during the Troubles—but which serves as a perfect example. The authors write that "Regarding Northern Ireland but as an indication of similar civil war situations: any reintegration of former combatants into society will have to provide them with a role of equivalent status they had during the conflict...”. Provisional IRA cadre and commanders achieved heights of respect and even respectability that they couldn’t have dreamed of as Catholic workers in West Belfast.

One difficulty in all civil wars how do deal with the still organized if disarmed units of the rebel army. There have been attempts to bring entire battalion sized units into the and under the discipline of the armed forces of the surviving state as well as attempts to integrate individual former rebel soldiers into loyal units. Neither have been universally successful—there are more cases of failure than otherwise. A salutary example is in Zaire/DRC where forces rebelling against the central government in the eastern Congo were supplied and financed by Uganda and Rwanda—actually financed by the diamonds, timber, tantalite and gold looted or expropriated by the rebel soldiers, sent to the sponsoring countries and then returned as arms and equipment. Clearly rebels run from a foreign country, even if defeated in the field, wouldn’t be welcome in the armed forces they were fighting. This is one reason why there have been no successfully negotiated settlements of civil conflict that involve easily portable and marketable natural resources like gems and minerals.

It may seem impossible to negotiate peace under almost any civil war conditions but it is still important that the effort is made—even partial success can save thousands of lives of civilians who might otherwise be caught the carnage of mass atrocity.