What are the effects of particular institutional arrangements on sustainable peace? And do specific characteristics of peace processes affect institutional choices? Both questions have been of equal importance for the ‘Institutions for Sustainable Peace’ network ever since it started to work (in 2011).Footnote1 The debate on the role of institutions for the participation and inclusion of different sectors of society has been at the core of the study of democratisation processes. In peace and conflict studies, institutional engineering is discussed as an option to prevent conflicts either from escalating into armed encounters or from recurring after a war has been terminated.Footnote2 As the current international approach to peace-building relies on the promotion of democratisation and statebuilding, the question which designs of formal state institutions might help to mitigate conflicts in the future is relevant not only academically, but is of utmost importance also in policy circles. Policymakers across the globe stick to the idea that negotiated war settlements can lead to more inclusive, more democratic and less violent societies. International proposals to end the Syrian war have mostly opted for some form of power-sharing and inclusion of hitherto excluded or marginalised groups.
However, the balance sheet of such efforts remains mixed and the academic debate is inconclusive as to what works and what does not. Regarding the prevention of violent ethno-political conflict, a recent quantitative study by Andreas Wimmer finds no relationship between different features of institutional designs and ethnic conflict.Footnote3 In practice, examples of successful institutional engineering are rare while failures abound.Footnote4 Two main challenges arise when dealing with questions of the effect of institutional designs on the prospects of peace: first, scholars typically focus on one type of institution instead of engaging in integrative analyses of the interaction of the whole set of institutions, and there is little exchange between specialists on various institutions and their impact. Second, there has been little effort to identify how specific contexts such as the respective character of divisions or the traumatic experience of violence condition the prospect of successful institutional engineering. The Institutions for Sustainable Peace (ISP) network was thus established to enhance knowledge on the reasons for success or failure of institutional designs in highly divided societies. The main idea of the ISP network is to bring the debate forward by focussing on
Politically salient divisions, including not only ethnicity or religion, but also social disparities as these are closely related to other divisions and may trigger or enhance other divisions.
The interplay between these divisions and single institutions as well as the ‘concert’ of institutions.
To address research desiderata, increase the knowledge on effects and interactions of institutions, and discuss research findings on these topics, the members of the ISP network meet regularly at network conferences, workshops and through an exchange programme. All articles published within this Special Issue of Civil Wars have originated from such conferences, mostly the annual conventions of the International Studies Association in San Diego (2012) and San Francisco (2013), but have been reworked since then after undergoing a double-blind review process resulting in further changes.
Obviously, all authors of this special issue share the view that institutions have an impact on the prospects of peace after war. However, there are quite distinct positions on the exact causal mechanisms at work defended by the contributors and they also use different research methods, both quantitative and qualitative. Some contributions have a global and others a more regional focus on their specific themes. Most authors of this special issue acknowledge that institutional choice may not be the only determinant for peace, but that the context (e.g. war termination) and actor behaviour (international and domestic actors) play an important role in the implementation of peace as well.
The collection of contributions starts with a framing essay by Timothy Sisk, taking as a start of his reflection the most recent case where power-sharing is proposed for a solution of a deadly conflict: Syria. At the time of writing, it remained unclear what institutional solution could bring peace to this increasingly divided society. Not only diplomats, but also scholars seem to lack a clear roadmap. Why is this so? Sisk maintains that many knowledge gaps remain, e.g. on the ‘strategic imagination’ over various power-sharing options by the protagonists of war. Broad blueprint solutions are often insufficiently adapted, given the salience of ‘historical, cultural, geographic or other path-dependent factors’. Sisk summarises discussions within the ISP framework and relates the articles of this special issue, the main reason why this introduction can be rather short.
The issue continues with more specific perspectives on institutional choices in post-war societies. Some contributions focus on a broader set of institutions, while others are more particularly dealing with one major institution such as an electoral system, political parties and a territorial state structure.
Based on a medium-N comparative analysis, Andreas Mehler examines why some divided societies at the end of war opted for a radically inclusive constitutional reform and others did not – regardless of what mechanism of conflict mitigation (of the consociational or centripetalist type, see Sisk in this issue) is sought. Mehler finds in his cases of inclusive constitutional reform a massive international involvement in the peace process, mostly by UN organisations (see Reilly, infra). International actors had much less leverage in a control group of cases where constitutional amendments were designed to strengthen the executive. Only in about one quarter of all cases, constitutional change was intended to ‘engineer’ a peace order. This suggests that strong sitting governments avoid deep-cutting reforms enshrined in constitutions while those with limited bargaining power give in much more easily.
Paulina Pospieszna and Gerald Schneider statistically test the effect of some of the classical ingredients of consociationalism à la Lijphart on war recurrence. They find that proportional representation (PR) and federalism both cannot prevent a war from returning, but that the establishment of grand coalitions reduces this risk to some extent. One finding in line with Bogaards (see infra) is that the representation of former rebels in grand coalitions appears independent of the choice of PR as the electoral system for legislative elections. This may sound surprising as both elements should have the same, i.e. inclusionary effects. Moreover, they find that countries do not appear to freely choose PR and federalism, but that those choices are inscribed in history, i.e. that their prior use is determining whether both devices are chosen after war.
Matthijs Bogaards focuses on PR more particularly and engages in a thorough literature review of two strands of the literature (electoral systems in post-war societies; power-sharing). His findings demonstrate that the causal chain of many advocates of PR does not hold when the core factor of (ethnic) inclusion cannot be shown to be influenced by the choice of this electoral system as mostly predicted: ‘If PR does not result in more inclusive parliaments and if more inclusive parliaments do not promote democracy and peace, then the case for proportional representation is fundamentally weakened’. Bogaards finds it difficult to draw far-reaching lessons from studies of (political) power sharing when they do not look specifically at the electoral system. He sets out ideas on how to examine more precisely and how the type of electoral system affects two different dependent variables (democracy and peace) after civil war. As a result of a medium-N comparison of cases where the electoral system is fixed in peace agreements, Bogaards comes to an overall positive assessment of PR with regard to peace, but much less so with regard to democracy. Joining the results of Schneider and Pospieszna, only in three of his cases (Nepal, South Africa and Zimbabwe) a break with the tradition of pre-existing electoral systems could be observed.
A related topic is addressed by Benjamin Reilly, focussing on political parties. Blaming international interventions for favouring inclusion and minority representation over governability and accountability, he finds that strong parties and stable party systems are not promoted, but rather undermined. Empirically, Reilly finds more cases of proliferation of new identity-based parties than the emergence of only a few broad-based, aggregative parties in post-war societies, arguably the much better condition for both democracy and peace. And this seems to be in line with ideological preferences of international organisations (for descriptive representation) and with their propensity to avoid administrative difficulties, expressed by the promotion of PR in a single nation-wide district. Reilly enumerates grave errors in the design of post-war orders, e.g. in Iraq and Nepal. Moreover, he wonders why domestic elites in divided societies which did not experience widespread violence have devoted so much efforts to limit party proliferation, combat sectarianism and regulate parties in a number of ways, including requirements for candidates to garner support across different regions of a country.
Sabine Kurtenbach examines the relationship between properties of war termination, post-war policies that deal with major grievances, and security sector reform on the one hand and post-war violence on the other in a small-N comparison. Her three Central American cases (El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua) show marked differences in those regards. Only Nicaragua has managed to keep the casualties in post-war forms of violence – measured by homicide rates and victims of state repression – comparatively low. Kurtenbach shows that a military victory by insurgents will offer stronger leeway for changing institutions profoundly. Such institutional change can in turn address long-standing grievances (in particular political and economic exclusion) that were at the origin of civil wars, while security sector reform is also key in terms of avoiding violence by state organs. She shows in parallel how difficult such a reform process is when old elites are in a position to sabotage substantive change, mostly already as a result of the outcome of war. The content of peace agreements (eventually including promises to reform) only matters if it can be implemented.
The contribution by Christof Hartmann explains why vertical/territorial power-sharing in sub-Saharan Africa is rare, even though it is proposed by international actors as a way to end war and include marginalised groups. The lack of (ethno-)federal arrangements or regional autonomy is a consequence of the prevalent socio-ethnic context of most African states: ethnic groups are rarely in a majority position, are rarely in a ranked situation and do not ‘control’ well-defined territories. Many reasons advanced in the scholarly debate for the relative absence of separatist movements in Africa may also explain why there are so few federal experiments. While efforts to decentralise are much more numerous than federal experiments, Hartmann explains those rather not by their peace-enhancing capacity. The much more frequent decentralisation reforms are according to Hartmann frequently donor-driven and superficial explaining their limited effect on peace and war.
This last statement offers an unexpected thread for most of the articles in this collection: more often than not is the role of international actors addressed, although this was not intended by the editors. While external actors claim to promote peace and democracy with a variety of instruments, i.e. diplomatic initiatives, peace-keeping or development cooperation, their interventions may have unintended side effects. First of all, depending on their depth, interventions may alter the power relations on the ground. External pressure in favour of negotiations may alter de facto military victories and shape institutional reforms as the cases of Guatemala and Nicaragua demonstrate (Kurtenbach). Profound constitutional change also seems to be driven mostly by external involvement and less by the political initiative of former adversaries or strong local elites (Mehler). Bogaards and Reilly make a similar claim for the choice of electoral and party systems. While the motifs of external actors to promote a specific institutional design are hotly debated, the consequences and effects of these choices need much more systematic research. How do externally driven institutional designs affect societal divisions? What are their political costs regarding local ownership and functionality?
A further commonality of many contributions is an implicit or explicit occupation with the term power-sharing which still is defined and used differently. While Bogaards underscores that consociationalism does not equate power-sharing (the former being rather one sub-form of the latter), Pospieszna and Schneider examine exclusively consociational forms, but suggest a distinction between formal institutions and informal arrangements. Hartmann uses the broad distinction between vertical and horizontal power-sharing. Mehler acknowledges the range of power-sharing options but finds that empirically most institutional power-sharing combinations are of the consociational type – a finding confirmed (and deplored) by Reilly; both attribute this to a current mind-set in the international sphere. Sisk briefly describes the consociationalist versus centripetalist debate on power-sharing and opts for a broad definition that includes the ‘set of institutions and processes that prioritise inclusion, consensus decision-making, and the institutionalisation of norms of peaceful coexistence’.
While most contributions focus on the effects of institutions, a majority of them also analyse institutional choice as a dependent variable and clearly see constraining factors: not all potential institutional conflict management tools for deep-seated divisions can and will be selected at war's end. Shifting targets between the viability of institutional reforms in the short-term and their long-term sustainability and consolidation are discussed in most articles at least implicitly. Different factors are analysed such as the war outcome (Kurtenbach; Pospieszna/Schneider), identity formation during war (Sisk) or more broadly the balance of power between rebels and sitting government (Mehler), the institutional history of a given country (Reilly), and also some more objective constraints such as the size of a country (Hartmann), which may determine the choice of institutions. Nevertheless, we need to know much more about the long-term effects of these processes for the prospects of democratisation as well as for peace.Footnote5 While institutional reform may pave the way for war termination and a political opening, their effects on the incremental process of building peace beyond war termination is less evident. We believe that this collection can contribute important findings to the research agenda and stimulate a debate on such broader issues.
Acknowledgements
We thank first of all the Leibnitz Community for the funding of the ISP network project. Funding of the Thyssen Foundation enabled us to have a first kick-off workshop in Hamburg, and a pre-ISA catalytic workshop grant and different ISA panels in 2012 and 2013 allowed for the presentation and discussion of first drafts of the papers. We also thank all reviewers for their commitment and all authors for their responsiveness during this process.
Notes
1. The Institutions for Sustainable Peace network started with a kick-off conference in April 2011 in Hamburg, but formally saw the daylight only one year later. Among the members are some of the best-known peace research institutes globally plus eminent individual researchers, see http://www.giga-hamburg.de/isp for further information. On the first ISP network conference, see also Nadine Ansorg, Felix Haas and Julia Strasheim, ‘Institutions for Sustainable Peace: From Research Gaps to New Frontiers’, Global Governance 19 (2013) pp.19–26.
2. For a recent review, see Stefan Wolff, ‘Building Democratic States After Conflict: Institutional Design Revisited’, International Studies Review 12 (2010) pp.128–41. See also, Matthew Hoddie and Caroline Hartzell (eds) Strengthening Peace in Post-Civil War States. Transforming Spoilers into Stakeholders (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2010); Matthias Basedau, Managing Ethnic Conflict: The Menu of Institutional Engineering, GIGA-Working Paper Nr 171, June 2011; Joanne McEvoy and Brendan O'Leary (eds) Power-Sharing in Deeply Divided Places (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press 2013).
3. Andreas Wimmer, Waves of War. Nationalism, State Formation, and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012) pp.174–96.
4. For Africa see Ian S. Spears, ‘Africa's Informal Power-Sharing and the Prospects for Peace’, Civil Wars 15/1 (2013) pp.37–53.
5. On peacebuilding and democratisation see Christoph Zürcher, Carrie Manning, Kristie D. Evenson, Rachel Hayman, Sarah Riese and Nora Roehner, Costly Democracy. Peacebuilding and Democratization After War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2013).