Collaborative Research: The Multistage Path to Peace in Civil Conflicts

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Civil conflicts are critically important to the international community due to the fact that the consequences of those conflicts often spill across state borders, such as through refugee flows and weapons movements. Yet we understand relatively little about the process of negotiating peace in civil wars. The goal of this project is to better understand the process of negotiating peace agreements to end civil conflicts. To that end, it analyzes the multiple stages of the peace process: initiation (negotiation offers), pre-bargaining (agreeing to negotiate), negotiations (reaching an agreement), and implementation (ending the conflict). Understanding each stage is important because there are often multiple starts and stops throughout the peace process. With so many killed and displaced by civil conflicts around the world, understanding the particularities of this multi-stage process, and how the actions of international actors can facilitate (or may actually hamper) the process, is of critical importance for international peace and security. This project studies the complexities of the peace process, can enable international actors to be more effective in their efforts to end civil conflicts. While there are several studies on the outcomes of civil conflicts, as well as characteristics of the peace agreements that sometimes end them, there is a dearth of knowledge about the process itself: when and why warring parties will choose to move forward through its multiple stages and when and why they might withdraw from the process. To fill this gap, the principle investigators are drawing on primary and secondary documentation to create a comprehensive dataset on peace negotiations in civil conflicts from 1945-2016. Primary sources include UN and other international organization documents and signed peace agreements. Secondary sources include historical accounts of civil conflicts around the world. The dataset codes each stage of the negotiation process (negotiation, agreement, and implementation). If a breakdown occurred at any stage, the dataset includes detailed information on which of the parties (government or rebel group) refused to move forward in the peace process (refused to negotiate, walked away from negotiations, or failed to implement the agreement). Third-party actions such as mediation or military, economic, or diplomatic intervention will also be collected. This new dataset will allow the principle investigators to conduct a detailed, quantitative investigation of the peace process as it played out across a wide variety of civil conflicts, and the conditions under which successes or breakdowns occurred at the various stages. The principal investigators will also address the non-random selection of belligerents into later stages of the peace process through a variety of statistical methods. The findings illuminate how governments and rebel groups can navigate the peace process in civil conflicts successfully and what role third party actors play in facilitating that process.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.