Drivers of Durable Peace: The Role of Justice in Negotiating Civil War Termination

Abstract

Attaining durable peace after a civil war has become a major challenge, as many negotiated settlements relapse into violence. How can civil war negotiations be conducted and peace agreements formulated so as to contribute to lasting, durable peace? Previous research has focused on the durability of peace agreements, measured as the absence of violence. This study develops an index to measure durable peace for a period of 8 years after the agreement had been reached, and evaluates the new measure using an existing data set. We ask whether impacts on durable peace are Support for this study was provided by a Swedish Research Council Grant [C0114201; Registration Number 421-2012-1142] for a research Project titled "From peace negotiations to durable peace: The multiple roles of justice." Special thanks go to Sayra van den Berg for her diligent assistance with the coding and to the many colleagues who provided helpful advice on earlier drafts including those who heard our presentations at the International Studies Association (New Orleans, March 2015) and at the International Association for Conflict Management (Clearwater, Florida, June 2015). Electronic supplementary material

Justice Matters: Peace Negotiations, Stable Agreements, and Durable Peace

“…Thus, adhering to PJ principles during the process of negotiating should contribute to peace following the agreement. Indeed, strong correlations between PJ and DP were found in the sixteen cases analyzed by Wagner and Druckman (2017). The relationship was strongest on the reconciliation component of the DP index (r ¼ .66).…”

“…In their field studies of mediation, Pruitt et al (1993) reported that PJ judgments were a stronger predictor of improved relations with the other party (SA) than goal achievement or satisfaction with the agreement. Adherence to PJ principles also increased perceptions of the legitimacy of agreements in felony cases (Casper, Tyler, and Fisher 1988) and with the cessation of violence in civil wars (Albin and Druckman 2012;Wagner and Druckman 2017).…”

“…Research by Druckman and Albin (2011) on peace agreements showed that DJ was related to SA. Wagner and Druckman's (2017) study extended the focus from SA to DP. They obtained moderate relationships between DJ and DP, weaker than the correlations between PJ and DP.…”

The Colombian Signed Peace Agreement: A Text Mining Analysis of its Comprehension Difficulty

“…The R script that we have developed as supplementary material for this paper was conceived as an example that can be followed by other scientists interested in exploring the documents of Colombia, Guatemala and El Salvador where the need to understand the social mechanisms leading to permanent violence has been commonly highlighted (McDougall, 2009;Preti, 2002;Bourgois, 2001). Given the fact that peace agreements often include sensitive issues for reestablishing justice and governance (Wagner & Druckman, 2016), text mining techniques in general and readability evaluations in particular, are useful for assessing the difficulty of these texts and clarify the order of peace implementation that prove to be a key ingredient for reducing destabilizing effects of post-accord elections (Joshi et al, 2015).…”

Innovations in Doing Conflict Research: The Legacy of Daniel Druckman

“…The durable peace index that we constructed for our research consists of four components: reconciliation, security institutions, governance, and economic stability or growth. We tested the durable peace index and found that the durability found in the earlier studies mediates the relationship between the equality provisions in the peace agreements and the longer-term, durable peace (Wagner & Druckman, 2017).…”