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ABSTRACT
(Re)gaining citizens’ trust is a challenge for post-war governments. Political trust is crucial for understanding both the risk of civil war in the first place and the state-society relationships that emerge afterwards. Peace agreements are tools to stop the fighting, address war’s injustices, and provide a blueprint for the state’s future – and they do so to varying degrees. Yet we have little systematic knowledge of how people react to such agreements and with what consequences. We argue that in post-war societies, people’s perceptions of the strategies aimed at ending the violence and (re)building the state have an enduring impact on people’s view of the state. In this study, we examine the association between post-conflict political trust and people’s approval of peace agreements analyzing a set of nationally representative, comparative surveys from Guatemala, Nepal, and Northern Ireland, three cases where long civil wars were ended by peace agreements. We find that individuals’ approval of the agreement and the perception that it has been implemented are positively associated with political trust, and that accounting for views of the peace agreement substantially improve on conventional explanations for political trust.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data Availability
The data and replication files for this article will be made available at https://www.prio.org/Data/Replication-Data/ and on the authors’ webpages.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Kreutz, “How and When Armed Conflicts End,” 246.
2 Walter, Committing to Peace; DeRouen, Lea, and Wallensteen, “The Duration of Civil War Peace Agreements,” 367–87.
3 International Crisis Group, Nepal’s Divisive New Constitution.
4 Cf. Nilsson and González Marín, “Violent Peace,” 238–62.
5 See e.g. Askvik and Dhakal, “Citizens’ Trust,” 417–37; De Juan and Pierskalla, “Civil War Violence,” 67–88; Wong, “How Can Political Trust be Built?,” 772–85; Fisk and Cherney, “Pathways to Institutional Legitimacy,” 263–81.
6 See also a new project by Sabine Carey at the University of Mannheim: http://www.sabinecarey.com/news/2019/1/10/initial-insights-on-perceptions-of-peace.
7 Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life, and “A Re-Assessment,” 435–57.
8 Norris, ed., Critical Citizens. 2-–30.
9 Easton, “A Re-Assessment,” 444.
10 Levi and Stoker, “Political Trust,” 476.
11 See e.g. Brinkerhoff, “Rebuilding Governance,” 3–14, Schlichte, In the Shadow of Violence; Lake, “Building Legitimate States after Civil Wars,” 29–52; De Juan and Pierskalla, “Civil War Violence,” 67-–88; Fisk and Cherney, “Pathways to Institutional Legitimacy,” 263–81.
12 Cf. Marten, Warlords; 2012, Staniland, “States,” 243–64; Cheng, “Private and Public Interests,” 63–79.
13 Haggard and Tiede, “The Rule of Law,” 405–17.
14 There is also a growing body of work on related phenomena. See e.g. Blattman, “From Violence to Voting,” 231–47 (political participation); Balcells, “The Consequences of Victimization,” 311–47; Lupu and Peisakhin,“The Legacy of Political Violence,” 836–51 (political identities); Bellows and Miguel. “War and Local Collective Action,” 1144–57; Bauer, Blattman, Chytilová, Henrich, Miguel, and Mitts, “Can War Foster Cooperation?,” 249–74 (cooperation); Gilligan and Samii, “Civil War and Social Cohesion,” 604–19 (social cohesion); and Tellez, “Worlds Apart”, 1053–76, and “Peace Agreement Design,” 827–44 on attitudes to peace.
15 Mishler and Rose, “What are the Origins?” 34.
16 Schoon and Cheng, “Determinants of Political Trust,” 619–20.
17 See also Newton and Zmerli, “Three Forms of Trust,” 169–74.
18 Checkel, “Socialization and Violence,” 592–605.
19 See e.g. Hewstone and Greenland, “Inter-Group Conflict,” 136–44; Bar-Tal, “From Intractable Conflict,” 351–65; Kelman, “Reconciliation,”15–32.
20 See e.g. Grosjean, “Conflict and Social and Political Preferences,” 424–51; De Juan and Pierskalla, “Civil War Violence,” 67–88; Hong and Kang, “Trauma and Stigma,” 264–86. In our data, about 40 percent report some type of victimization. Among the victims who identified the perpetrator(s), about 45 percent mentioned one or more actors operating on behalf of the government.
21 Nussio and Oppenheim, “Anti-Social Capital,” 1001–2.
22 Mishler and Rose, “What are the Origins?” 31.
23 Grosjean, “Conflict and Social and Political Preferences,” 424–51, Fisk and Cherney, “Pathways to Institutional Legitimacy,” 263–81.
24 E.g. Bakke et al.,, “Dynamics of State-Building,” 159–73; Wong, “How Can Political Trust be Built?” 772–85.
25 See the democratization literature, in which the transition to democracy is seen as complete when ‘democracy is the only game in town’ as phrased by Linz, “Toward Consolidated Democracies.” 14.
26 Wong, “How Can Political Trust be Built?” 772–85.
27 Nilsson, “Anchoring the Peace,” 243–66.
28 Tellez, “Worlds Apart,” 1053–76, “Peace Agreement Design,” 827–44.
29 Aguilar-Støen, Taylor, and Castellanos, “Agriculture, Land Tenure and International Migration”, 124.
30 Askvik and Dhakal, “Citizens’ Trust,” 418.
31 Miller, “Political Issues,” 951–72
32 Tavits, “Principle vs. Pragmatism,” 153.
33 Human Rights Watch. “Nepal: Decade After Peace.”
34 Van de Walle and Bouckaert, “Public Service Performance,” 891–913.
35 Kreutz, “How and When Armed Conflicts End,” 246.
36 Seawright and Gerring, “Case Selection Techniques,” 306.
37 Op. cit, 298.
38 Brown, “Nepal,” 275–196.
39 Adhikari, The Bullet and the Ballot Box, 115–17.
40 CEH, Guatemala Memoria del Silencio, 48–51.
41 Op.cit., 51–2.
42 McKittrick, Kelters, Feeney, and Thornton, Lost Lives.
43 Do and Iyer “Geography, Poverty and Conflict,” 737.
44 CEH, Guatemala Memoria del Silencio.
45 Caumartin and Sánchez-Ancochea, “Explaining a Contradictory Record”, 158–85.
46 World Bank, “Poverty headcount ratio”.
47 United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, “Intentional Homicide Rate”.
48 International Crisis Group, Nepal’s Peace Agreement.
49 E.g. Perry, “The Devolution of Policing in Northern Ireland.”
50 In particular, Humphreys and Weinstein, What the Fighters Say; Simkus, Albert. “The South East European Survey Project,” 3–14; O’Loughlin, Kolossov, and Toal, “Inside the post-Soviet de facto States,” 423–56.
51 The factor analysis supports a one-dimensional solution in all three samples. The scalability of the items is poorer in Nepal than in Guatemala and Northern Ireland (Guatemala: KMO = 0.78, Cronbach’s α = 0.68; Nepal: KMO = 0.58, Cronbach’s α = 0.55; Northern Ireland: KMO = 0.76, Cronbach’s α = 0.73). However, to improve comparativeness, we use the same procedure in all three cases.
52 Personal communication with members of different NGOs in Kathmandu, September 2015. See also Sajjad, “Heavy Hands,” 25–45.
53 Note that in Guatemala and Nepal, respondents who said that they did not know about the peace agreement (about 36 percent in each case) were routed away from follow-up questions about implementation. These are accounted for by a separate dummy variable ‘Not aware of the peace agreement’.
54 In Northern Ireland, respondents were asked about people from other parts of the UK and people from the Republic of Ireland.
55 In particular, war-time experiences could be associated with both political trust and approval of the peace agreement, leading to a spurious relationship between the two variables of interest.
56 The reference category includes victims of other perpetrators or no victimization. Alternative approaches yield essentially the same results, see Appendix C, Table A.
57 In all three sub-samples, about eight percent report that they participated actively in the armed conflict. In Guatemala and Northern Ireland, most of them on the government side. In Nepal, most people responded that they participated on the insurgent side. Again, alternative coding strategies produced largely similar empirical results, see Appendix C, Table A.
58 Schoon and Cheng, “Determinants of Political Trust,” 619–31.
59 The education questions included case-specific categories. Unsurprisingly, the level of education is much higher in Northern Ireland than in Guatemala and particularly Nepal. To be comparable across cases, the education measure is therefore quite rough. The variable is treated as a continuous variable, but dummy coding gives largely similar results.
60 In Northern Ireland, the statement was modified to reflect a high-income context: ‘We can buy everything we need/We have enough money to buy food and clothes, but purchasing a home or a car is a problem for us/We have enough money for the most essential, but we can’t afford to go on a holiday/We don’t have enough money even for the most essential.’
61 The findings are robust to alternative model specifications, e.g. measuring educational attainment through a set of dummy variables (see Appendix C, Table A).
62 Alternative specifications, e.g. including dummy variables to measure all actors in the conflict, yield very similar results, see Appendix C, Table A. Of the different types of wartime experiences (victimization, participation, and both), government victimization is most consistently associated with low political trust.
63 Blattman, “From Violence to Voting,” 231–47.
64 This is tested in Model I in Table A, in which Model 1 is run on the same sample as Model 2. It gives the same R2 as Model 1.
65 See Appendix C, Tables B–D, Models I––III.
66 Note that only 17 percent of the Guatemalan subsample believes that the peace agreement has been implemented. It seems likely that among many of these respondents, widespread concerns about corruption, violent crime, and poverty override the positive effect of the implementation.
67 In Guatemala, we included a dummy variable for indigenous identity. Due to substantial underreporting, this group is quite small, so the sample is not separated by identity group. In Nepal and Northern Ireland, we accounted for social identity groups in two different ways, by including dummy variables and by splitting the samples into subsamples by (main) castes and community background, respectively. See Appendix C for details.
68 Stathis N. Kalyvas, “The Ontology,” 476.
69 But see e.g. Dyrstad. “After Ethnic Civil War,” 817–31; Bakke, et al., “Convincing State-Builders?,” 591–607; O’Loughlin, Kolossov, and Toal, “Inside the post-Soviet de facto States,” 423–56.
70 United Nations, Peacebuilding, 2014, 7.
71 International Crisis Group, Nepal’s Divisive New Constitution.
72 United Nations, Peacebuilding, 2014, 7.
73 United Nations, Peacebuilding, 2012, 11.
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Notes on contributors
Karin Dyrstad
Karin Dyrstad is Associate Professor in Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include popular support for political institutions and peace-building mechanisms, as well as the consequences of political violence on people's attitudes. Her work has been published in journals such as Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Democratization, International Journal of Transitional Justice, Plos ONE, and International Interactions.
Kristin M. Bakke
Kristin M. Bakke is Professor in Political Science and International Relations at University College London, and Associate Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Focusing on political violence, her research explores how states respond to opposition within their borders, the dynamics of violence in self-determination struggles, post-war state-building and wartime legacies, and geopolitical orientations. Her book Decentralization and Intrastate Struggles: Chechnya, Punjab, and Québec was published with Cambridge University Press, and her work has also been published in journals such as British Journal of Political Science, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Perspectives on Politics, Political Geography, and World Politics.
Helga M. Binningsbø
Helga Malmin Binningsbø is a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Her research focuses on during- and post-conflict justice, peace agreements and peacebuilding policies, as well as public opinion in post-conflict societies. Her research has been published in Conflict Management and Peace Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and other journals.