Who Wins, Who Loses, Who Negotiates Peace in Civil Wars: Does Regime Type Matter?

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the outcome of a civil war is related to conflict duration: military victory by either the government or the rebels occurs early if it occurs at all, and the longer a civil war lasts, the more likely it is to end in a negotiated settlement. The models of civil war duration and outcome that have produced these findings are built on characteristics of the civil war and less on attributes of the state itself, other than where the state lies on the Polity autocracy-democracy scale. We propose that how civil wars end varies not only between democracies and authoritarian regimes but among the different authoritarian regime types identified by Geddes, Wright, and Franz. The distinguishing attributes of these regime types—democracy, one-party, personalist, military, monarchical—should lead to different likelihood in defeating a rebel movement, being defeated by a rebel movement, and negotiating a peace agreement with a rebel movement. Results from a series of competing-risk models using the Uppsala–Peace Research Institute Oslo Armed Conflict Dataset demonstrate support for our claim that how civil wars end is partly a function of the characteristics of the regime.

Forecasting peace agreement content: How conflict events predict the substance of peace settlements

“…We also include regime type (Phayal et al, 2019) using V-Dem data (Coppedge et al, 2022;Pemstein et al, 2022), the number of insurgent groups (Nilsson, 2010), as well as battle related deaths and onesided killings from the UCDP BRD dataset (Shawn et al, 2022), war duration and activity (Harbom et al, 2008) in our model.…”

“…For example, the duration of civil wars is affected by the natural resources present in the conflict regions (Buhaug, 2009;Lujala, 2010;Ohmura, 2018). Regime type (Phayal et al, 2019), the number of insurgent organisations (Nilsson, 2010) and state capacity (DeRouen et al, 2010) influence the conflict outcome. Moreover, international involvement affects the probability of negotiations and peace agreements in intrastate conflicts (McKibben and Skoll, 2020;Karlén, 2020;Maekawa, 2019).…”

Varieties of post-civil war violence

“…A state‐centric approach is reflected in many prominent datasets on civil conflict (Kreutz, 2010; Pettersson et al, 2019; Sarkees and Wayman, 2010). Quantitative work that analyzes these datasets typically examines the influence of state characteristics, such as level of development, regime type, geography, and ethnic competition, on the risk of civil war onset, outcome, or resumption (Fearon and Laitin, 2003; Mason and Greig, 2016; Phayal et al, 2019; Quinn et al, 2007).…”

Theorizing the Influence of Wartime Legacies on Political Stability after Rebel Victories

“…Personalist regimes, for example, are associated with weak state institutions, and may therefore leave different legacies from one-party regimes, which often do "have the institutional capacity to formulate and implement accommodative policies when challenges arise". 44 Victorious rebels that inherit functioning political and economic institutions and infrastructure will find the task of postwar governance more straightforward, as these will not need to be rebuilt from scratch. In summary, the lower the costs and the higher the payoffs from victory, the greater the capacity for victorious rebels to effectively deliver public services and facilitate reconciliation in the postwar period.…”

“…When governments win civil wars, the "political status quo ante is preserved", while peace agreements provide some "framework of a new post-conflict order". 5 In contrast, rebel victories mark an abrupt break with past configurations of political order, and their results are unpredictable in part because the new regime enters power in the absence of any agreed framework or settlement which may shape the course of postwar developments. Studying the aftermath of rebel victories may therefore yield important insights into how political order is constructed in post-conflict environments.…”