Multilateral and diplomatic resolutions to intrastate conflicts are the preferred method of termination. However, mediated settlements tend toward failure and conflict recurrence. A significant factor in this failure is that government and groups are heterogeneous. While the demands, goals, preferences, and intentions of both sides are sometimes viewed as being held in common, they are potentially as diverse as the groups’ members. Understanding the relationship between resolution efforts and group heterogeneity is complicated but crucial to improving mediation success. The current article examines all intrastate conflicts for the period 1945–1999, in order to test two competing propositions found in the literature on group change and the occurrence of mediation. The primary question of interest is whether group change tends to result from or precede mediation attempts. In other words, is group change an impetus to engage in mediation or do mediation processes tend to result in altered group characteristics. The findings support only the proposition that when governments engage rebels in mediation, rebel group changes are significantly more likely to occur than without mediation. The implications of the findings are also discussed.

The current study is a replication and expansion of an earlier piece by Hartzell, Hoddie, and Rothchild (2001) exploring civil war settlement characteristics and stability. Their research focused on the importance of territorial autonomy provisions and the role of third party guarantors in predicting settlement success and stability. They employed a model that controlled for such conflict characteristics as international system structure, nature of the previous regime, conflict duration, conflict issue, and conflict intensity. Our study replicates Hartzell et al. using the Regan (2001) civil war dataset, employing a broader definition of conflict and a more stringent definition of when a conflict has ended. The results presented here differ from the previous study to have find that the importance of territorial autonomy provisions as a predictor of settlement stability is greatly diluted when one examines only those conflict settlements that have lasted for six months or longer without reciprocated violence. Third-party guarantors, however, remain a strong factor determining conflict settlement stability in the revised dataset. We also expand the previous work by including cases where the conflict ended through military victories, as well as by adding a dimension to the negotiated settlement variable that separates settlements that were coerced due to external military presence from those that were not coerced.

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