State Capacity, Regime Type, and Sustaining the Peace after Civil War

ABSTRACT

About half of the nations that experience civil war eventually relapse into renewed conflict within a few years after the original war ends. This observation has motivated a stream of research into the factors that affect the risk of peace failure in the aftermath of civil war. While the outcome of the previous civil war—for example, military victory versus peace agreement—structures the post-war environment in ways that affect the risk of peace failure, the capacity of the post-war state to enact and implement policies that affect the incentives for and capacity of groups to undertake armed violence as a means of advancing their interests should also affect the risks of peace failure. Using Geddes’ categories of nondemocratic regime types, we will present a theory of how different regime types have varying capacities to repress and/or implement accommodative policies that affect the risk of peace failure. We test propositions derived from this theory with a series of event history models. Our findings suggest that while peace agreements significantly increase the duration of post-civil war peace, peace agreements involving some types of nondemocratic regimes actually increase the risk of post-civil war peace failure.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil wars
• peace agreements
• peace duration
• peace failure
• regime type

Acknowledgments

The online appendix can be found on the author’s website, https://michaelgreig.wordpress.com/research/

Notes

¹ See, for instance, Collier et al. (2003); DeRouen and Bercovitch (2008); DeRouen, Ferguson, Norton, Lea, Park and Streat-Bartlett (2010); Fortna (2004); Hartzell and Hoddie (2003, 2007); Hegre and Nygård (2015); Joshi and Mason (2011); Licklider (1995); Mason, Gurses, Brandt, and Quinn (2011); Mattes and Savun (2009); Quinn, Mason, and Gurses (2007); Toft (2010); Walter (2015).

² Fjelde used regime type data from Hadenius and Teorrell (2007).

³ Portions of this section draw from Gurses and Mason (2010).

⁴ A conflict is counted as ended if there is a spell of at least 2 years between the end date of one war and the start date of the next war. This approach is consistent with the existing literature. Buhaug, Gates, and Lujala (2009) combine ACD episodes if separated by 2 years or less. Similarly, Wood and Kathman (2013) use a 36-month gap before a conflict is treated as a new conflict.

⁵ “Low activity” is what UCDP Conflict Termination Dataset codes as “other outcome.” This condition occurs when fighting continues but drops below the 25-death threshold. As a result, UCDP codes the conflict as having terminated. There is no peace agreement; the government that was in power when the conflict started is still in power. Therefore, it seems reasonable to code it in the same category as government victory.

⁶ For robustness, we also estimated our models using per capita GDP instead of infant mortality. The results of these analyses were nearly identical to the results with infant mortality. These results are reported in the online appendix.

⁷ We analyze a post-Cold War sample separately because the literature has noted important differences, particularly in terms of the frequency of peace agreements after the end of the Cold War (see Kreutz 2010, for example).

⁸ Coding El Salvador as a military regime at the time of the peace agreement is puzzling in and of itself. Polity codes El Salvador as a democracy (6) as of 1984, when the new constitution went into effect and national elections produced a democratically elected legislature and president. Given this, one could argue that there is only one case of a military regime presiding over a peace agreement during the post-Cold War era.