Historically, civil wars
were fought to the ªnish, with the complete military defeat of the losing side.1
But in the 1990s, as this article demonstrates, civil wars were more likely to
end in negotiated settlements rather than victory by one side. Why? We argue
that civil wars began to end in this historically distinct manner because of a
fundamental change in the international norms of conºict resolution—namely,
the rise of a norm of negotiated settlement. This norm arose in the context of a
new international political environment dominated by U.S. unipolarity and
liberal democracy; the ideas and principles of the liberal order undermined the
acceptability of military victory.
In the post–September 11 environment characterized by the war on terrorism,
however, the norm of negotiated settlement has been challenged by
countervailing notions of appropriateness—namely, stabilization over democratization
and non-negotiation with terrorist groups. As a result, civil wars are
ending less frequently, and less often in negotiation. The dominant international
political environment shapes norms of conºict resolution, which,
in turn, inºuence how civil wars end.
Lise Morjé Howard is Associate Professor and Alexandra Stark is a Ph.D. candidate, both in the Department
of Government at Georgetown University.
For helpful comments and suggestions, the authors thank Michael Barnett, Chester Crocker,
Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, Christian Davenport, Anjali Kaushlesh Dayal, Tanisha Fazal,
V. Page Fortna, Desha Girod, Caroline Hartzell, Ron Hassner, Stathis Kalyvas, Luke Keele, Joachim
Kreutz, Kathleen McNamara, Stephen Moncrief, Daniel Nexon, Ragnhild Nordås, Patrick Regan,
Thomas Risse, Elizabeth Saunders, Megan Stewart, James Vreeland, Elizabeth Wood, and the
anonymous reviewers. They are also grateful for feedback from participants at the International
Studies Association conferences in 2014 and 2016; the D.C. International Relations Workshop 2017;
the International Security Studies Section–International Security and Arms Control conference
2017; and the Order, Conºict, and Violence program at Yale University. Finally, they would like to
thank Alessandro Ceretti for research assistance and the Department of Government at
Georgetown University for a summer grant to complete this project.
1. Roy Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945–1993,” American
Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 3 (September 1995), pp. 681–690, doi:10.2307/2082982; and
Barbara F. Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement,” International Organization, Vol. 51,
No. 3 (Summer 1997), pp. 335–364, doi:10.1162/002081897550384.
International Security, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Winter 2017/18), pp. 127–171, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00305
© 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
How Civil Wars End
How Civil Wars End Lise Morjé Howard
and
Alexandra StarkThe International System, Norms, and the
Role of External Actors
127
What else might explain systematic changes in civil war termination over
time? The existing literature does not provide many answers. The civil wars
literature looks to three essential types of causes. First, domestic-structural factors
such as poverty, ethnic fractionalization, indivisibility, and rough terrain
render wars easier or more difªcult to start or stop.2
Second, bargaining dynamics,
such as mutually hurting stalemates, the balance of power, and the
number and geographic location of actors, may affect parties’ willingness to
compromise.3
Finally, outside interventions may produce negotiated settlements
if they provide effective mediation or credible guarantees, or if they underwrite
agreements with the threat of mutual harm/beneªt, whereas military
interventions may prolong conºict.4
Although these factors account for many outcomes, domestic-structural
variables cannot explain patterns of civil war termination that change systematically
over time. Seeking to comprehend shifting time-sensitive patterns with
structural variables amounts to trying to explain change with constants. Bargaining
models may clarify shifts in the outcomes of particular civil war scenarios,
as ªghting reveals preferences and information about capabilities. But
International Security 42:3 128
2. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political
Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1 (February 2003), pp. 75–90, doi:10.1017/S0003055403000534; Monica
Duffy Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, and the Indivisibility of Territory
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); Ron E. Hassner, War on Sacred Grounds (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009); Lars-Erik Cederman et al., “Transborder Ethnic Kin and
Civil War,” International Organization, Vol. 67, No. 2 (April 2013), pp. 389–410, doi:10.1017/
S0020818313000064; and Idean Salehyan, Rebels without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in World
Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009).
3. I. William Zartman, Ripe for Resolution: Conºict and Intervention in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989); Barry R. Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conºict,” Survival, Vol. 35,
No. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 27–47, doi:10.1080/00396339308442672; Walter, “The Critical Barrier to
Civil War Settlement”; David E. Cunningham, “Veto Players and Civil War Duration,” American
Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, No. 4 (October 2006), pp. 875–892, doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907
.2006.00221.x; Peter Krause, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal Distribution of Power
Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness,” International Security,
Vol. 38, No. 3 (Winter 2013/14), pp. 72–116, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00148; and Sarah Zukerman Daly,
Organized Violence after Civil War: The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2016).
4. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela R. Aall, Taming Intractable Conºicts: Mediation
in the Hardest Cases (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace [USIP] Press, 2004);
Barbara F. Walter, Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2002); Monica Duffy Toft, Securing the Peace: The Durable Settlement of
Civil Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Patrick M. Regan, “Third-Party
Interventions and the Duration of Intrastate Conºicts,” Journal of Conºict Resolution, Vol. 46, No. 1
(February 2002), pp. 55–73, doi:10.1177/0022002702046001004.
again, such models do not help scholars account for why civil war termination
varies in a systematic way over particular periods of time. Finally, while we argue
that external factors play a decisive role in ending civil wars, we supplement
the existing literature by seeking to answer the prior question of why we
observe changes in types of external interventions, including mediation attempts,
by time period.
We argue here, in Waltzian fashion, that such a phenomenon cannot be explained
“through the study of its parts.”5
In contrast to trends in the study of
civil wars toward the state level and microfoundations,6
we contend that, for
our outcomes of interest, we must look to the international level of analysis
for explanations. We argue that the international political environment—
characterized by both material and ideational factors such as polarity, perceptions
of ªrst-order threats, and great power goals—gives rise to clusters of
ideas of appropriate behavior, known as norms.7
These norms, in turn, shape
different types of outcomes, including how civil wars end. In the bipolar
world, where the central international contest was viewed as zero-sum,
ªghting to the ªnish was the most acceptable way to end a civil war. This normative
frame resulted in the material (and social) fact that the majority of civil
wars ended in military victory; relatively few civil wars ended in “low activity”
(where the number of annual battle deaths falls below a certain threshold)
or in negotiated settlements.
With the collapse of the Soviet economy, the demise of the Soviet Union, and
the rise of unipolarity, however, the United States and its allies faced an extraordinary
new opportunity to help their proxies win outright in numerous
civil wars across the globe. The United States had sought one-sided victory for
decades; thus one would expect this norm to continue. Americans, however,
along with their allies, chose not to seek complete defeat, favoring instead negotiated
solutions (or simply allowing wars to ªzzle out in low activity), even
in cases where settlement meant including opponents of the United States in
How Civil Wars End 129
5. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Pa.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), p. 19.
6. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006); and Charles King, “The Micropolitics of Social Violence,” World Politics, Vol. 56, No. 3 (April
2004), pp. 431–455, doi:10.1353/wp.2004.0016.
7. Peter J. Katzenstein, “Introduction: Alternative Perspectives on National Security,” in
Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 5.
the new government. The choice to try to end civil wars differently was enabled
by the end of bipolarity, but nothing from the material fact of unipolarity
necessitated this choice. Rather, it was the overarching international political
environment, characterized by both the absence of major threats and the quest
for democratization,8
that led to the appropriateness of civil war termination
through mediation and negotiation.9
In other words, policymakers in the
United States and their great power allies came to believe that civil wars ought
to end in a certain way, and they took actions, including attempts to broker
mediations, to achieve the goal of ending civil wars through negotiated settlements.
Norms were not an epiphenomenal, but rather a necessary and causal
factor, in this process.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, although the United States
remains the international unipole in a strict material sense, scholars and
policymakers have debated the consequences of unipolarity and how to interpret
the new strategic threat environment.10
In this period of uncertainty about
the ranking of threats and U.S. responses, the norm of negotiated settlement
persists; it has been challenged, however, by countervailing pressure for nonnegotiation
with terrorists, concerns about the potential for terrorist organizations
taking root in states experiencing internal instability, and a renewed
acceptability of total military victory. In civil wars, the goal of stabilization has
displaced the quest for democratization. The main effects thus far on civil wars
have been a decrease in all types of terminations and fewer negotiated settlements
in civil wars that include actors labeled as “terrorist groups.” Notions of
how civil wars ought to end vary by time period, as do the ways in which they
actually end.
International Security 42:3 130
8. Michael Barnett, “Building a Republican Peace: Stabilizing States after War,” International Security,
Vol. 30, No. 4 (Spring 2006), pp. 87–112, doi:10.1162/isec.2006.30.4.87; and Charles A. Kupchan
and Peter L. Trubowitz, “Dead Center: The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the United
States,” International Security, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Fall 2007), pp. 7–44, doi:10.1162/isec.2007.32.2.7.
9. Mediation occurs when a third party facilitates resolution between conºicting parties. Negotiation
often implies direct talks between parties without a mediator, although mediators facilitate
many negotiated settlements.
10. Kupchan and Trubowitz, “Dead Center”; Martha Finnemore, “Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the
Social Structure of Unipolarity: Why Being a Unipole Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be,” World Politics,
Vol. 61, No. 1 (January 2009), pp. 58–85, doi:10.1017/S0043887109000082; Stephen G. Brooks,
G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment,”
International Security, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Winter 2012/13), pp. 7–51, at p. 7, doi:10.1162/
ISEC_a_00107; and Nuno P. Monteiro, “Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity Is Not Peaceful,” International
Security, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Winter 2011/12), pp. 9–40, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00064.
We employ a three-pronged empirical strategy to develop our argument.
First, we demonstrate our dependent variable that civil wars ended differently
in each of the three time periods. Second, we ªnd that mediation efforts—a key
observable implication of our theory—are predicted by time period, even
holding other factors constant. Third, we trace the processes that ended the
civil wars in El Salvador and Bosnia—one in each of the ªrst two time
periods—to demonstrate our causal claims. We deduce expected causal process
observations and employ counterfactual reasoning to show logical consistency.
Third, we use content analysis (a blend of quantitative and qualitative
approaches), supplemented by discourse analysis, to demonstrate changes in
how important actors use four key words—democracy, negotiation, terrorism,
and stabilization—especially in the third time period. These words reºect
changes in key norms.
We offer several empirical, theoretical, and policy contributions for current
debates in the ªeld of international relations and the study of civil wars. First,
we demonstrate our argument by employing a novel, three-part methodological
approach. Each method works to bolster the strategy of the other.11
Second,
our use of quantitative and qualitative methods reºects an attempt to build on
an emerging theoretical trend of bridging constructivist and rationalist approaches
in international relations.12
We seek to demonstrate how actors respond
to the incentive structures of the international political environment,
which has both material and ideational roots; both material facts and shared
expectations create outcomes. We note, also, that scholars have not yet offered
constructivist explanations to address the empirical debates about civil
war termination.
Third, this article seeks to specify the historical international environments
within which bundles of norms arise, come into competition, and spell the demise
of others. In focusing on the causal weight of the international level, we
provide a new view of how the levels of analysis in norm creation relate to one
How Civil Wars End 131
11. Evan S. Lieberman, “Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative Research,”
American Political Science Review, Vol. 99, No. 3 (August 2005), pp. 435–452, doi:10.1017/
S0003055405051762.
12. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, “Bridging the Gap: Toward a RealistConstructivist
Dialogue,” International Studies Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (June 2004), pp. 337–352,
doi:10.1111/j.1521-9488.2004.419_1.x.
another. Unlike traditional analyses of norms, such as the rise of human rights,
the death of apartheid, or the abolition of slavery, we offer an explanation of
how normative change may occur without individual norm entrepreneurs or
civil-society mobilization.13
Civil war is the most prevalent type of violent conºict in the international
system and has been for decades.14
Civil wars not only kill many people; they
also give rise to related miseries such as refugees, violent extremism, sexual violence,
child soldiering, and illicit trafªcking. It is therefore important for
scholars and policymakers alike to understand why and how civil wars end.
Much of the policy-oriented scholarly literature has advocated one type of
ending: partition, power sharing, negotiated settlement, or one-sided victory.15
Our analysis points in a more pragmatic direction. Wars end differently in different
time periods, but given that they are susceptible to normative trends, it
is possible to change those norms in favor of greater pragmatism: the pursuit
of negotiation above all other options is not always prudent, but neither is the
unfettered pursuit of military victory or non-negotiation with terrorists. Each
civil war is different, and each case ought to be considered on its own merits.
Our article demonstrates explicitly the implicit assumption that external actors
have the power to inºuence civil war outcomes. Naming and deªning the
International Security 42:3 132
13. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International
Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); Audie Klotz, Norms in International Relations:
The Struggle against Apartheid (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995); Richard Price and
Nina Tannenwald, “Norms and Deterrence: The Nuclear and Chemical Weapons Taboo,” in
Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security, pp. 114–152; James Lee Ray, “The Abolition of Slavery
and the End of International War,” International Organization, Vol. 43, No. 3 (July 1989), pp. 405–
439, doi:10.1017/S0020818300032987; and Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink,
eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
14. Erik Melander, Therése Pettersson, and Lotta Themnér, “Organized Violence, 1989–2015,”
Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 53, No. 5 (2016), pp. 727–742, doi:10.1177/0022343316663032; and Nils
Petter Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conºict 1946–2001: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research,
Vol. 9, No. 5 (2002), pp. 615–637, doi:10.1177/0022343302039005007.
15. Chaim Kaufmann, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars,” International Security,
Vol. 20, No. 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 136–175, doi:10.1162/isec.20.4.136; Nicholas Sambanis and
Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl, “What’s in a Line? Is Partition a Solution to Civil War?” International Security,
Vol. 34, No. 2 (Fall 2009), pp. 82–118, doi:10.1162/isec.2009.34.2.82; Caroline Hartzell, Matthew
Hoddie, and Donald Rothchild, “Stabilizing Peace after Civil War: An Investigation of Some Key
Variables,” International Organization, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 183–208, doi:10.1162/
002081801551450; and Toft, Securing the Peace.
pressures of the international political environment may enable policymakers
to exercise greater freedom of choice.
In the ªrst section, we explain our outcomes of interest. We then review the
literature, pointing to its essential gaps. Third, we introduce our theory of
the international political environment and the ways in which it produces
changes in both norms of conºict resolution and material outcomes in civil
wars. We then develop our theory using quantitative, qualitative, and content
analysis. In conclusion, we offer several policy implications following from
our analysis.
The Rise and Decline of Negotiated Settlements
In her seminal work on civil war termination, Barbara Walter demonstrates
that, historically, the majority of civil wars ended in the defeat—political defeat,
expulsion, or extermination—of the losing side.16
This pattern did not
hold after the end of the Cold War, however. We use data on civil war termination
from the Uppsala Conºict Data Program (UCDP) Conºict Termination
Dataset (v. 2-2015, 1946–2013) to trace patterns in civil war termination beyond
the immediate Cold War period, from 1946 until 2013.17
Our analysis yields
several important ªndings. First, we conªrm that during the Cold War most
civil wars ended in victory by one side. In contrast, with the end of the Cold
War, many more civil wars ended in negotiated settlements. In addition, the
total number of civil war terminations rose between 1990 and 2001, including
the many wars that simply died out in low activity. Since the September 11
attacks, fewer civil wars have ended per year (see ªgure A2 in the online ap-
pendix).18
We still see many negotiated settlements, but the proportion of wars
ending in compromise as opposed to military victory has shrunk.19
How Civil Wars End 133
16. Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement”; and Walter, Committing to Peace.
17. Joakim Kreutz, “How and When Armed Conºicts End: Introducing the UCDP Conºict Termination
Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 47, No. 2 (2010), pp. 243–250, doi:10.1177/
0022343309353108. This pattern also exists in different civil war datasets. See V. Page Fortna,
“Where Have All the Victories Gone? Peacekeeping and War Outcomes,” Columbia University,
August 2009, https://polisci.columbia.edu/sites/default/ªles/content/pdfs/Publications/
Fortna/Working%20Papers/victories%20Sept%202009.pdf.
18. The online appendix is available at doi:10.7910/DVN/JFYSGU.
19. The UCDP Conºict Termination Dataset v.2-2015 codes civil war termination in six categories:
peace agreement; cease-ªre; victory for the government side; victory for the rebel side; low activity”
(fewer than twenty-ªve battle-deaths per year); and actor ceases to exist. Here, we have
Figure 1 illustrates these trends.20
The ªgure shows patterns in victories
versus negotiated settlements over time. In time period 1 (1946–89), victory
was the most common civil war ending (about 55 percent). In contrast, in time
period 2 (1990–2001), only 18 percent of civil wars ended in victory; the most
common civil war ending became settlement (38 percent). In the third time period
(2002–13), the trend appears to reverse: we see the proportion of victories
increasing (to 22 percent), while the share of negotiated settlements decreases
(to 32 percent). In most years, most civil wars do not end, but during the secInternational
Security 42:3 134
recoded both peace agreement and cease-ªre as “settlement” (n.b., UCDP codes a conºict as having
ended when a conºict year is followed by at least one year of inactivity). We collapse both victory
categories into one, “victory.” “Actor ceases to exist” indicates that “conºict activity continues
but at least one of the parties ceases to exist or become[s] another conºict actor”; we therefore drop
this category from our analysis. See Joakim Kreutz, UCDP Conºict Termination Dataset
Codebook, v.2-2015, February 19, 2016, p. 4.
20. See also ªgures 1 and 2.
Figure 1. Type of Civil War Termination as a Percentage of Total, by Time Period
percentageoftotalterminations
100
80
60
40
20
0
1946–89 1990–2001 2002–13
settlement
low activity
victory
ond time period, civil wars were ending more frequently than in the other two
time periods (see ªgures A1 and A2 and table A1 in the online appendix).
We ªnd an additional trend in time period 3: civil wars that involved nonstate
actors that have been designated by the U.S. State Department as Foreign
Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) are less likely to end in settlement or low activity,
and conversely more likely to end in victory or not to have ended
by 2013.21
Table 1 includes observations of all civil wars that ended in time period
3 as well as all civil wars that were ongoing as of 2013. Of all civil wars
that ended in settlement or low activity, only about 11 percent included an
FTO, whereas of all civil wars that either ended in victory or were ongoing as
of 2013, about 41 percent involved an FTO. In other words, after September 11,
we see fewer negotiated settlements when a war involves terrorists.
Existing Explanations for Civil War Trends
The current literature investigates a variety of phenomena such as civil war
onset, duration, recurrence, and termination. To explain these outcomes, scholars
have turned to three basic types of explanations: domestic-structural variHow
Civil Wars End 135
21. Although there are a number of different ways to code “terrorist organizations,” the U.S. Department
of State’s FTO list is the most appropriate for our purposes, because it reºects and directly
informs policymakers’ views. According to the State Department, FTOs “are foreign
organizations that are designated by the Secretary of State in accordance with section 219 of the
Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).” For the full list, see Bureau of Counterterrorism, U.S. Department
of State, “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State,
n.d.), https://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/other/des/123085.htm. To code FTOs, we cross-referenced
all organizations listed as Side B (i.e., nonstate actor side) with the State Department’s list of FTOs.
Table 1. Terrorist Organizations and Civil War Termination, 2002–13
Designated Terrorist
Organization?
Victory or Ongoing
as of 2013
Settlement or
Low Activity Total
No ( 27
(58.70%)
( 54
(87.10%)
( 81
(75.00%)
Yes ( 19
(41.30%)
( 8
(12.90%)
( 27
(25.00%)
Total ( 46
(100.00%)
( 62
(100.00%)
(108
(100.00%)
Pearson chi^2 ϭ 11.3604, p ϭ 0.001.
ables, bargaining dynamics, and international interventions. Although these
factors explain many trends in civil wars, none can account for why patterns in
civil war termination would change in a systematic way across time.
The ªrst category of explanations, domestic-structural factors, explores the
underlying conditions of a state or its territory. In a pivotal article, James
Fearon and David Laitin argue that poverty, state capacity, rough terrain, and
political instability set the conditions that make insurgency, and therefore the
outbreak of civil war, more likely.22
Although Fearon and Laitin do not explicitly
address war termination, other scholars have used their variables, as well
as additional domestic-structural factors such as indivisibility of holy sites,
ethnic fractionalization, and co-ethnics in neighboring states, to explain civil
war outcomes.23
Despite their importance, such elements do not change (at
least not signiªcantly) over time. These variables, therefore, cannot account for
changing patterns in civil war termination in different time periods.
The second category, bargaining dynamics, zeroes in on the processes and
difªculties of committing to peace. This line of argument follows from William
Zartman’s groundbreaking work on “mutually hurting stalemates” and the
conditions for a conºict to become “ripe for resolution.”24
One of Zartman’s
predictions is that civil wars will remain very difªcult to conclude in negotiated
settlements. In response to Zartman, in an article that foreshadowed the
rise in negotiated settlements in civil wars after the end of the Cold War, Roy
Licklider demonstrates that civil wars can end in settlements, and that the
post–Cold War drive toward negotiation would have a signiªcant impact
on settlements.25
Ripe-for-resolution arguments spurred other ways of theorizing about bargaining
dynamics. James Fearon’s bargaining theory of war between states
sparked a signiªcant new branch in civil war study, best exempliªed in
Barbara Walter’s work.26
Walter homes in on the problems of credible commitments:
if a group agrees to demobilize and cede territory, it may leave itself
International Security 42:3 136
22. Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War.”
23. Kaufmann, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars”; Toft, Securing the Peace;
Hassner, War on Sacred Grounds; and Julian Wucherpfennig et al., “Ethnicity, the State, and the Duration
of Civil War,” World Politics, Vol. 64, No. 1 (January 2012), pp. 79–115, doi:10.1017/
S004388711100030X.
24. Zartman, Ripe for Resolution.
25. Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945–1993.”
26. James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization, Vol. 49, No. 3
(Summer 1995), pp. 379–414, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706903.
open to attack by the other side. Third-party security guarantees alleviate
this dilemma.
Bargaining theories focus primarily on domestic-level variables, but
Walter’s theory of credible commitments and Zartman’s mutually hurting
stalemates open a window to the role of third parties in inºuencing bargaining
dynamics. Many subsequent studies point to the potentially beneªcial effects
of third-party intervention, negotiated settlement, peacebuilding, and peacekeeping
in civil wars.27
In contrast, military intervention may extend civil
wars.28
Military intervention also does not correlate with democratization,29
and externally driven military integration attempts often fail to achieve their
goals.30
With important policy and theoretical implications for this article,
Monica Duffy Toft has shown that negotiated settlements may save fewer lives
than decisive military victories.31
Other scholars have found that mediation is
positively correlated with lasting post-settlement peace.32
Although the literature on the role of third parties is vast and rich, no
scholar has tackled the question of why third parties changed intervention
strategies or why they began to mediate more often after the end of the
How Civil Wars End 137
27. Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, “International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and
Quantitative Analysis,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 94, No. 4 (December 2000), pp. 779–
801, doi:10.2307/2586208; Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conºict (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004); Lise Morjé Howard, UN Peacekeeping in Civil Wars (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Virginia Page Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work? Shaping Belligerents’
Choices after Civil War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008).
28. Patrick M. Regan, Civil Wars and Foreign Powers: Outside Intervention in Intrastate Conºict (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 59, 71.
29. Alexander B. Downes and Jonathan Monten, “Forced to Be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed Regime
Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” International Security, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Spring 2013),
pp. 90–131, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00117.
30. Ronald R. Krebs and Roy Licklider, “United They Fall: Why the International Community
Should Not Promote Military Integration after Civil War,” International Security, Vol. 40, No. 3
(Winter 2015/16), pp. 93–138, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00228.
31. Toft, Securing the Peace.
32. Patrick M. Regan and Aysegul Aydin, “Diplomacy and Other Forms of Intervention in Civil
War,” Journal of Conºict Resolution, Vol. 50. No. 5 (October 2006), pp. 736–756, doi:10.1177/
0022002706291579; Andrew Kydd, “Which Side Are You On? Bias, Credibility, and Mediation,”
American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 47, No. 4 (October 2003), pp. 597–611, doi:1111/1540-
5907.00042; Jacob Bercovitch and Karl Derouen, “Mediation in Internationalized Ethnic Conºicts:
Assessing the Determinants of a Successful Process,” Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter
2004), pp. 147–170, doi:10.1177/0095327X0403000202; Molly M. Melin and Isak Svensson, “Incentives
for Talking: Accepting Mediation in International and Civil Wars,” International Interactions,
Vol. 35, No. 3 (July 2009), pp. 249–271, doi:10.1080/03050620903084521; and Bernd Beber, “International
Mediation, Selection Effects, and the Question of Bias,” Conºict Management and Peace Science,
Vol. 29, No. 4 (2012), pp. 397–424, doi:10.1177/0738894212449091.
Cold War. Only Stathis Kalyvas and Laia Balcells explore the effects of the end
of the Cold War on civil war severity, duration, and outcomes. They locate the
changes in the domestic-level variable of the technologies of warfare after
the end of the Cold War.33
They do not, however, examine post–September 11
changes or explicate why or how mediation and negotiated settlements would
ensue from systemic change.
Civil Wars and the International Political Environment
To explain why civil wars end differently in different time periods, we look to
causes at the level of the international system, or what Kenneth Waltz calls the
“third image.” Waltz contends: “The actions of states, or, more accurately,
the actions of men acting for states, make up the substance of international relations.
But the international political environment has much to do with
the ways in which states behave.”34
In seeking to account for the rise and decline
of negotiated settlements, we argue that the international political environment
largely determines the norms that, in turn, shape the outcomes of
civil wars. Table 2 summarizes our argument.
Since the end of the Cold War and bipolarity, the United States has possessed
the largest military capacity in the world, “one order of magnitude
more powerful than any other military.”35
This military preponderance dominates
the international system in ways both material and ideal. Whereas Waltz
omitted the role of ideational factors such as “traditions, habits, objectives, desires,
and forms of government,” and many neorealists continue to discount
the role of ideas, we contend that there is more to unipolarity than simply the
material facts.36
We argue that the type of unipolarity and the nature of threats
also have systemic effects.
Constructivists privilege the causal role of ideational factors over material
International Security 42:3 138
33. Stathis N. Kalyvas and Laia Balcells, “International System and Technologies of Rebellion:
How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conºict,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 104,
No. 3 (August 2010), pp. 415–429, doi:10.1017/S0003055410000286; and Laia Balcells and Stathis N.
Kalyvas, “Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars,” Journal of
Conºict Resolution, Vol. 58, No. 8 (2014), pp. 1390–1418, doi:10.1177/0022002714547903.
34. Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2001), pp. 122–123.
35. Nuno P. Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014),
p. 3.
36. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 99.
power. Alexander Wendt famously characterized anarchy in social terms,
where the dominant states view each other as “enemy, rival, or friend,” but he
does not theorize about a system where one state—a liberal, democratic
state—dominates.37
Like many constructivists, neorealists have also been surprised
by the rise and enduring nature of U.S. unipolarity. Moreover, both
neorealists and constructivists theorizing about the system say almost nothing
about civil wars, even though this has been the dominant form of warfare
for decades.
We contend that material U.S. unipolarity is inseparable from the ideological
nature of that unipolarity, and that both material and ideational factors
must be taken into account when analyzing systemic effects on civil wars. Although
we cannot, in the space of this article, fully develop this theoretical
position, we describe the general characteristics of each of the three time periods
under review, and how they inºuenced the more speciªc norms of civil
war termination.
During the Cold War, states deemed it acceptable for civil wars to end in
complete military victory. In the context of superpower ideological war, members
of each side sought to convince others to accept their ideas of appropriate
How Civil Wars End 139
37. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), chap. 6; and Alexander Wendt, “Constructing International Politics,” International Security,
Vol. 20, No. 1 (Summer 1995), pp. 71–81.
Table 2. Time Periods, the International Political Environment, Norms, and Outcomes
Time Period 1
(1946–89):
Cold War
Time Period 2
(1990–2001):
Post–Cold War
Democratization
Time Period 3
(2002–13):
War on Terror
International
political
environment
characteristics
zero-sum ideological
polarization
political and
economic
liberalization
rise of authoritarianism,
Islamic fundamentalism, and
stabilization
Norms of civil
war termination
complete victory mediation and
negotiation
non-negotiation with
terrorists
Predominant
civil war
termination type
victory by one side settlement/low
activity
settlement/low activity (for
conºicts without terrorists);
increasing victory
governance, using both economic and military means. Violent internal conºicts
across the developing world became fertile sites for proxy wars. Both U.S.
and Soviet decisionmakers believed the victory of the side that adhered more
closely to their own ideological position to be of crucial strategic importance.
Each side thought the basic tenets of democratic capitalism and communism to
be fundamentally incompatible with each other. Given the goal of global political
domination on the part of both superpowers, neither the United States nor
the Soviet Union was willing to allow vulnerable countries to fall to the other
side. Negotiated settlement was therefore deemed an unacceptable outcome in
civil wars.
The second period is bookended by the fall of the Berlin Wall on
November 11, 1989, and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Most wars
in history ended with the defeat of the weaker side. The Cold War, however,
concluded in negotiated settlement, with the United States emerging as the
unipole.38
In the late 1980s, the deadlock in the United Nations Security
Council and General Assembly subsided, and states created, resurrected, or
expanded organizations such the Organization for Security and Co-operation
in Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank, and the
International Monetary Fund. In the international normative context of the triumph
of democracy, the United States and international organizations pressured
non-democratic regimes to democratize.39
At the request of the George
H.W. Bush administration, the UN Security Council met in 1992 at the level of
the Heads of State for the ªrst time in history, during which the world’s great
powers decided to seek to end civil wars in negotiated settlement.40
For states emerging from civil wars, international mediators convinced
belligerents to moderate their stances, engage in dialogue, and negotiate political
solutions to violent conºict.41
Mediators repeatedly sought to reach negotiInternational
Security 42:3 140
38. Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Ideas Do Not Float Freely: Transnational Coalitions, Domestic Structures,
and the End of the Cold War,” International Organization, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Spring 1994),
pp. 185–214, doi:10.1017/S0020818300028162.
39. Jon C. Pevehouse, “Democracy from the Outside-In? International Organizations and Democratization,”
International Organization, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Summer 2002), pp. 515–549, doi:10.1162/
002081802760199872.
40. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, “An Agenda for Peace,” A/47/277 (New York: United Nations [UN],
June 1992).
41. Timothy D. Sisk, Power Sharing and International Mediation in Ethnic Conºicts (New York: Carnegie
Corporation, 1996); and Karl DeRouen Jr. and Jacob Bercovitch, “Trends in Civil War Media-
ated settlements. Even in wars that ended in one-sided victory or did not
end—for example, in Angola, Rwanda, and Somalia—mediators made signiªcant
attempts to broker negotiated settlements. These mediation efforts
would not have been possible before the end of the Cold War or without
the unipole’s choice to pursue this method of conºict resolution.
In the third time period, the international political environment and the
goals of the great powers are less certain. The United States remains the most
powerful country as measured by material means alone, but its choices are
constrained by the rise of anti-liberal ideas and practices, such as Islamic fundamentalism
and authoritarianism. China, the European Union, Russia, and
the United States are rivals in some arenas but partners in others. One goal
on which all great powers have come to agree is that of “stabilization.” For
most Western powers, as well as the members of the Security Council, since
September 11, the emergence of the threat of Islamic terrorism and the need to
stabilize states that could produce extremists, refugees, and other potential security
threats has risen to top priority.
In this time period, the great powers have framed adherents to the ideology
of Islamic fundamentalism as their adversary, and vice versa. The rise of increasingly
powerful nonstate actors such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
(ISIS), al-Qaida, al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram, which are loosely united by
their ideological orientation in opposition to the West and others (including
Russia and China), characterizes the new threat environment. According
to this framing, members of ISIS and similar groups view as anathema the liberal,
pluralistic norm of negotiated settlement. Democratic outcomes are precisely
what such groups seek to avoid, if not destroy. This ideological type
of terrorism enables the spread of non-democratic norms of conºict resolution,
because even pluralistic decisionmakers will tend to respond with a
similar normative framework: total defeat of the other side is desirable. The
United States and dozens of other states have professed that they will not negotiate
with terrorists, especially those adhering to the ideology of violent
Islamic fundamentalism.
In concert with the norm of non-negotiation, achieving stabilization arose as
an approach to ending civil wars after increasing recognition of the barriers to
How Civil Wars End 141
tion,” in J. Joseph Hewitt, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Peace and Conºict 2012
(New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 59–70.
democratization and nation-building in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Stabilization sets the bar for success much lower than the approaches of the
immediate post–Cold War period. Arising in the same time frame as counterinsurgency
(COIN) doctrine, which emphasizes enabling the government to
win the support of civilian populations, stabilization operations also aim to secure
civilian populations while assisting one side in its military efforts. Both
COIN and stabilization efforts also aim to ensure that terrorist and other organizations
perceived as security threats cannot take root. As a result, we predict
that over time, negotiated settlements will continue to decrease in proportion
to victory and low activity.
norms of civil war termination
The argument about norms that we advance here—that shifts in the international
political environment change how policymakers believe civil wars
ought to end—is unique in several respects. First, although constructivist
scholars have explored norms of sovereignty and the use of force,42
the
beneªts of republican peace,43
and the transnational dynamics of civil wars,44
none has examined norms governing the outcomes of the most prevalent form
of warfare: civil wars. This is an unexpected gap in the literature. Civil wars
render states highly susceptible to external forces. By deªnition, states experiencing
civil war do not hold a monopoly over the legitimate use of force
within their borders,45
and are thus deeply vulnerable to external inºuences.
We therefore would expect external forces—both material and ideational—
to have greater effects on civil wars than when such forces target states that are
intact and hierarchically organized internally.
International Security 42:3 142
42. Mlada Bukovansky, Legitimacy and Power Politics: The American and French Revolutions in International
Political Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); Martha Finnemore, The
Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
2004); Renée de Nevers, “Imposing International Norms: Great Powers and Norm Enforcement,”
International Studies Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring 2007), pp. 53–80, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2486.2007
.00645.x; Ian Hurd, After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the United Nations Security Council
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and
British Military Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).
43. Barnett, “Building a Republican Peace.”
44. Jeffrey T. Checkel, ed., Transnational Dynamics of Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013).
45. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 1 (1918; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978),
p. 56.
Second, endogeneity problems and the difªculty of tracing causal processes
make norms challenging to measure empirically. The traditional mode in the
scholarly study of normative change explicates processes of “strategic social
construction,” whereby individual “norm entrepreneurs” or social activists
convince powerful decisionmakers to change state actions, usually in a progressive
direction.46
Much of the recent literature on norms responds to this
causal chain, analyzing a great variety of norm change trajectories, including
backsliding, reformulation, dissolution, and failure to change behavior.47
Our work, however, elucidates two different types of causal chains. In the
transition from the ªrst to the second time period, we see the United States as
the democratic unipole (and not individual civil society activists) functioning
as norm entrepreneur. But even more striking, in the third time period, we
see the norm of stabilization arising not out of the ideational efforts of a
single state or individuals, but rather from broad, material circumstances.48
By the mid-2000s, the U.S.-led experiments in democratization by force in
Afghanistan and Iraq were not bearing much fruit. The Color Revolutions and
the Arab Spring also did not lead to snowballing democratization. The failures
of democratization, the rise of authoritarian rule, and the already-existing increase
of low activity as a form of civil war termination, spurred the spread
of a new norm of “stabilization.” Stabilization replaced democratization and
nation-building as the new goal in civil war termination not only for the
United States, but for the other great powers as well. In other words, the norm
of stabilization appears to have arisen largely from a material, rather than an
ideational, source.
Below we provide several types of evidence for our arguments about the inHow
Civil Wars End 143
46. Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention; Klotz, Norms in International Relations; Keck and
Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders; Price and Tannenwald, “Norms and Deterrence”; and Thomas
Risse, “‘Let’s Argue!’ Communicative Action in World Politics,” International Organization, Vol. 54,
No. 1 (Winter 2000), pp. 1–39, doi:10.1162/002081800551109.
47. Jennifer L. Bailey, “Arrested Development: The Fight to End Commercial Whaling as a Case of
Failed Norm Change,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2008), pp. 289–318,
doi:10.1177/1354066108089244; Katharina P. Coleman, “Locating Norm Diplomacy: Venue Change
in International Norm Negotiations,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 19, No. 1
(2013), pp. 163–186, doi:10.1177/1354066111411209; and Colin H. Kahl, “In the Crossªre or the
Crosshairs? Norms, Civilian Casualties, and U.S. Conduct in Iraq,” International Security, Vol. 32,
No. 1 (Summer 2007), pp. 7–46, doi:10.1162/isec.2007.32.1.7.
48. We cannot, in the space of this article, offer a complete theoretical account of these different
types of norm change.
ternational political environment and norms in the three time periods. We
present statistical tests demonstrating a signiªcant relationship between time
period and the likelihood of civil war mediation attempts. Second, we use
cases studies from periods 1 and 2 to show that mediation was a crucial variable
in producing negotiated settlement and that norms, rather than simply
strategic cost assessments, played an important role in U.S. decisionmaking.
Finally, for the third time period, we employ content analysis, supplemented
by discourse analysis, to depict the fall of democratization and negotiation and
the rise of stabilization.
causal processes: time period and civil war mediation
Our theory asserts that changes in the international political environment inºuence
conºict resolution norms, which, in turn, affect how civil wars end. As
a ªrst cut at providing empirical evidence for our theory, we conduct a statistical
analysis demonstrating that the three time periods predict when civil wars
are more or less likely to experience a mediation attempt. Attempts by third
parties to mediate civil wars are an observable implication of our theory: if
great powers believe that civil wars ought to end in settlements rather than
victory by one side, they should be more likely to engage in mediation and to
support such efforts. There is already a signiªcant body of research demonstrating
that mediation makes civil wars more likely to end in durable settle-
ments.49
We therefore focus our statistical analysis on our theory’s novel
contribution. We hypothesize that civil wars will be more likely to experience a
mediation attempt in time period 2 as compared to time periods 1 and 3.
Figure 2 and table 3 demonstrate a correlation between time period and
whether a civil war is likely to experience a mediation attempt in a given year.
We use the Bercovitch Data Centre for Conºict, Mediation and PeaceBuilding’s
Civil Wars Mediation dataset’s coding of mediation attempts by
other states, international organizations, and nonstate actors.50
The dataset
codes all instances of civil war mediation from 1946 to 2013.
Figure 2 demonstrates that third-party mediation increased sharply around
International Security 42:3 144
49. Regan and Aydin, “Diplomacy and Other Forms of Intervention in Civil War”; Kydd, “Which
Side Are You On?”; Bercovitch and Derouen, “Mediation in Internationalized Ethnic Conºicts”;
Melin and Svensson, “Incentives for Talking”; Regan, Civil Wars and Foreign Powers; and DeRouen
and Bercovitch, “Trends in Civil War Mediation.”
50. DeRouen and Bercovitch, “Trends in Civil Wars Mediation”; and Karl DeRouen Jr., Jacob
1988/89, plateaued in the early 1990s (with a brief dip and recovery in 1996
after the tragedies in Rwanda and Bosnia), and then declined after 2001.51
Table
3 shows that mediation attempts are correlated with our three time periods.
Each observation is a civil war-year, and mediation is a dichotomous
variable coded as 1 if a civil war experienced at least one mediation attempt in
that year and 0 if it did not. In time period 1, just 9 percent of all civil war-years
involved a third-party mediation attempt. In contrast, in time period 2, almost
25 percent of civil war-years experienced a mediation effort. In time period 3,
about 13 percent of civil war-years included an attempted mediation—more
than in time period 1, but fewer than in time period 2.52
Finally, a logit model demonstrates that this correlation is statistically sigHow
Civil Wars End 145
Bercovitch, and Paulina Pospieszna, “Introducing the Civil Wars Mediation Dataset,” Journal of
Peace Research, Vol. 48, No. 5 (2011), pp. 663–672, doi:10.1177/0022343311406157.
51. See ªgure A2 in the online appendix; notably, the number of ongoing civil wars was fairly
steady in time period 3 even as the number of civil wars that experienced mediation attempts declined
over the same time period.
52. The p-value of a Pearson chi-squared test comparing only time periods 1 and 2 is less than
0.001 (chi-squared ϭ 66.7341); the p-value of a Pearson chi-squared test comparing only time periods
2 and 3 is less than 0.001 (chi-squared ϭ 16.8799).
Figure 2. Number of Civil Wars with Mediation on an Annual Basis
1940 1960 1980 2000 2020
year
0
5
10
15
totalnumber
niªcant even when controlling for other relevant variables and using a variety
of model speciªcations.53
Our analysis provides conªrmation of a strong correlation
between time period and mediation. We now turn to the second and
third pieces of our three-pronged empirical approach: case studies and content
analysis.
Case Studies of War Termination in El Salvador and Bosnia
In the previous section, we treated mediation as a dependent variable, showing
that mediation attempts vary signiªcantly by time period. In this section,
we treat mediation as a causal variable, but we also go beyond this factor to
weigh other explanations for why, after 1989, civil wars were more likely
to end in negotiated settlements.
Causal explanations are difªcult to capture quantitatively. A case study approach
is more useful for explicating causality, because otherwise, “it is unclear
whether a pattern of covariation is truly causal in nature, or what the
causal interaction might be. . . . The investigation of a single case may [also] allow
one to test the causal implications of a theory.”54
Here, we seek evidence of
causal processes that we would expect to observe if the United States and its
allies were acting only in response to costs as opposed to norms of appropriInternational
Security 42:3 146
53. See table A3 in the online appendix.
54. John Gerring, Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), p. 45.
Table 3. Time Period and Mediation Attempts
Mediation
Attempt?
Period 1
(1946–89)
Period 2
(1990–2001)
Period 3
(2002–13) Total
No (898
(91.35%)
(376
(75.81%)
(346
(86.72%)
1,620
(86.26%)
Yes ( 85
(8.65%)
(120
(24.19%)
( 53
(13.28%)
258
(13.74%)
Total (983
(100.00%)
(496
(100.00%)
(399
(100.00%)
1,878
(100.00%)
Pearson chi^2 ϭ 67.3228, p Ͻ 0.001.
ateness.55
If they were responding to costs, we would expect to see concerted
efforts to reduce them. If they were responding to norms, we would expect to
see explicit normative language in documented reºections of the decisions
made by key external policymakers about what they thought they ought to do:
pursue a one-sided victory or a negotiated settlement, often as part of an effort
to democratize.
We chose the cases of the war termination processes in El Salvador and
Bosnia-Herzegovina because they are representative of other cases in their
time periods, and they provide variation on such factors as time period, type
of conºict (ideological vs. ethnic), and the existence of a mutually hurting
stalemate as opposed to imminent military victory for the United States’ preferred
side. Despite this variation, after the shift in the international political
environment at end of the Cold War, U.S. presidents and their advisers chose
not only to back mediation efforts but also to invest signiªcant material resources
in negotiated settlements because they considered it the responsible or
right thing to do.
Also in both El Salvador and Bosnia, after 1989, international pressure from
other external actors—U.S. allies, Russia, and the United Nations—favored negotiation
as opposed to one-sided victory. The signiªcant ªnancial and diplomatic
backing by external parties for mediation enabled the mediators to
employ a “single text” strategy, whereby the mediation team would draft
the details of the peace proposals and present their propositions to each side
for review.56
The international consensus around the appropriateness of a
negotiated settlement and this centralized mediation method secured the negotiated
solutions.
For each case, we process trace through the difªcult-to-quantify and changing
calculations of costs, threats, and norms that drove external decisions not
only to seek but also to materially support negotiated settlements after 1989.
We present an array of primary source evidence—from speeches, biographical
accounts, and declassiªed documents—to show that norms associated with
democratization and negotiated solutions were driving decisionmaking. We
How Civil Wars End 147
55. “Qualitative research uses causal process observations to . . . slowly but surely rule out alternative
explanations until they come to one that stands up to scrutiny.” See Henry E. Brady and David
Collier, eds., Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards (Lanham, Md.: Rowman
and Littleªeld 2004), p. 260.
56. When disputing parties direct the drafting process, they often derail the negotiations.
also detail other case-speciªc factors that moved the parties toward agreement,
and we demonstrate the causal role of third-party mediation. Lastly, we pose
the following counterfactual question: Would the outcome have been different
in a different international political environment?57
el salvador
El Salvador was home to the twentieth century’s longest high-intensity civil
war in Latin America. Extending over twelve years, it took the lives of approximately
75,000 people (out of some 4.5 million) and created more than 1 million
refugees and internally displaced persons.58
The war was fought over the
militarization of the political sphere and inequality, particularly in land distribution.
After a military coup in October 1979, violence ignited in March 1980
when Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, known for speaking against poverty
and injustice, was assassinated while offering mass. In the months after his
tumultuous funeral service, disparate opposition parties began to unify, culminating
in the formation of the leftist party Farabundo Martí National
Liberation Front (FMLN) in December of 1980.
Supported ªnancially and militarily by Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Soviet
Union, the FMLN sought to destabilize and delegitimize the Salvadoran government
through attacks on government ofªcials as well as on El Salvador’s
physical infrastructure. The government and various paramilitary organizations
dissuaded people in the countryside from supporting the FMLN,
often through brutal, public assassinations and broad-sweeping military cam-
paigns.59
While the Christian Democratic Party nominally ruled the country
for most of the 1980s, the El Salvadoran armed forces, along with death squads
associated with the rightist political party Alianza Republicana Nacionalista
(ARENA) waged brutal warfare. Beginning with the administration of
International Security 42:3 148
57. On these methods, see Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development
in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).
58. Estimates vary. See Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 14; Mario Lungo Uclés, El Salvador in the
Eighties: Counterinsurgency and Revolution, trans. Amelia F. Shogan (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1996), p. 194; and UN, The UN and El Salvador, 1990–1995 (New York: UN, 1995) p. 7
para. 14.
59. Jacqueline L. Hazelton, “The ‘Hearts and Minds’ Fallacy: Violence, Coercion, and Success in
Counterinsurgency Warfare,” International Security, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Summer 2017), p. 102,
doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00283.
President Jimmy Carter, these groups were supported ªnancially, and sometimes
were trained, by the United States.
During most of the 1980s, the United States pursued the goal of a decisive
military defeat of the FMLN, rather than negotiation. President Ronald Reagan
and his advisers saw the conºict as zero-sum: “Central America is a region of
great importance to the United States. . . . [I]t’s at our doorstep. And it has become
the stage for a bold attempt by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Nicaragua to
install communism by force throughout the hemisphere.”60
Reagan further explained,
“We have an entire plan for bolstering the government forces. This is
one we must win.”61
The war was deeply unpopular with the American public,
but President Reagan sought to appeal to Americans’ sense of morality:
“Based simply on the difference between right and wrong, it was clear that we
should help the people of the region ªght the bloodthirsty guerillas bent on
robbing them of freedom.”62
The ofªcial U.S. view of the conºict as zero-sum was mirrored by that of the
internal parties. As the far-right colonel Sigrrido Ochoa said in 1987, “We are
in a war and somebody has to win. . . . I never heard of a war that was a
draw.”63
On the opposite side, the FMLN asserted that it had the support of
the population, as well as the Soviet Union and other external actors, to continue
to seek victory over the government. Like the rightist parties, the FMLN
would not negotiate because, as explained in a recently declassiªed Central
Intelligence Agency analytic paper, “[t]he top FMLN Commander Joaquín
Villalobos rejects the concept of negotiations as a means to a solution. . . .
According to Villalobos, the desire of democracies to negotiate is a vulnerability
to be exploited.”64
Neither the domestic belligerents nor their external supHow
Civil Wars End 149
60. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on United States Policy in Central America,” May 9,
1984, Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum,
Simi Valley, California, https://reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1984/
50984h.htm.
61. Ronald Reagan, An American Life: The Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990),
pp. 447–478, at p. 477. See also recently declassiªed White House National Security Decision Directive
92, “U.S. Policy Initiatives to Improve Prospects for Victory in El Salvador,” February 24,
1983, National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, District of
Columbia.
62. Reagan, An American Life, p. 479.
63. Terry Lynn Karl, “El Salvador’s Negotiated Revolution,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Spring
1992), pp. 147–164, at p. 149.
64. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Directorate of Intelligence, Ofªce of Latin American Analy-
porters believed that the other would negotiate in good faith, even though by
1987 the war had reached a battleªeld stalemate.65
In 1989, however, the internal and external forces supporting one-sided victory
began to shift. In El Salvador, ARENA’s Alfredo Cristiani, a Georgetown
University–educated businessman, won the presidential election in a landslide.
Cristiani sought to move ARENA away from its paramilitary roots,
while business elites pushed for an end to economic disruption through nego-
tiations.66
Splits within the military began to develop “between a hard-line
faction committed to total war and a more moderate or pragmatic faction willing
to discuss a negotiated settlement.”67
Similar shifts were occurring on the
other side. In November 1989, the FMLN launched an offensive on the capital
of San Salvador, demonstrating that it could make serious inroads and that it
would not be defeated militarily. The FMLN’s advance, however, was not accompanied
by the widespread uprising of political support that its leadership
had expected. Negotiation became a possible path forward.
Several days after the FMLN offensive, a rightist rapid-reaction battle
group entered the campus of the Jesuit-run Central American University
and murdered six Jesuit priests, their cook, and her daughter. This act
caused widespread outrage, including in the U.S. Congress, where House
member Joe Moakley and others called for a severe reduction in American aid
to El Salvador.68
On the international stage, on November 11, 1989, the Berlin Wall came
down, and many observers declared the Cold War over. The emergence of
International Security 42:3 150
sis, “The FMLN in El Salvador: Insurgent Negotiations Strategy and Human Rights Abuses,” November
22, 1988, National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, District
of Columbia.
65. Walter C. Ladwig III, “Inºuencing Clients in Counterinsurgency: U.S. Involvement in El Salvador’s
Civil War, 1979–92,” International Security, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Summer 2016), pp. 99–146, at p. 133,
doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00251; and Aila M. Matanock, “Bullets for Ballots: Electoral Participation Provisions
and Enduring Peace after Civil Conºict,” International Security, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Spring 2017),
p. 126, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00275.
66. Elisabeth Jean Wood, Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and
El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
67. Susan D. Burgerman, “Building the Peace by Mandating Reform: United Nations—Mediated
Human Rights Agreements in El Salvador and Guatemala,” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 27,
No. 3 (May 2000), p. 67, doi:10.1177/0094582X0002700304.
68. Karl, “El Salvador’s Negotiated Revolution,” p. 151; and Russell Crandall, The El Salvador Option:
The United States in El Salvador, 1977–1992 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016),
p. 451.
glasnost and perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union pulled
the proverbial ideological rug out from under many armed resistance groups,
including the FMLN. Future Secretary of Defense Robert Gates explained colorfully,
“You sort of had the feeling, in contrast to during the mid ’80s, that by
1989 the Soviets’ heart really wasn’t—that they really didn’t give a sh*t
about Latin America.”69
In 1989, the Soviets cut off military aid to Cuba and
Nicaragua (the main arms suppliers to the FMLN).70
As communism imploded, the U.S. Congress continued to press the George
H.W. Bush administration to cut off aid to El Salvador if the Cristiani government
did not bring the murderers of the Jesuits to justice. Assistant Secretary
of State for Latin American Affairs Bernard Aronson, the point person in the
administration for El Salvador, described the U.S. government’s reaction to
the Jesuit killings as follows: “It was such a terrible atrocity, the killing of
priests and the housekeeper and innocent people, coming after years and
years of efforts to improve the human rights performance of the [Salvadoran]
military. It really sent a signal to some members of the Congress—made them
re-evaluate their willingness to support the military. . . . For the ªrst time, they
[the Salvadoran armed forces] had to contemplate the possibility that the U.S.
would cut off military aid. So, I think it gave them a much greater incentive to
negotiate more seriously than they had before.”71
Congress subsequently cut off aid to El Salvador, and the armed forces began
a concerted effort to investigate the killings; several months later, aid resumed.
The Bush administration was committed to democratizing and human
rights reforms in the Salvadoran government and military. According to
Aronson, “We pressed very hard for the purging of the worst abuses from
the ofªcer corps well before the negotiations got serious. We worked very hard
. . . to make it clear that we wanted to see the negotiations go forward. We
How Civil Wars End 151
69. Quoted in Jeffrey A. Engel, “When George Bush Believed the Cold War Ended and Why That
Mattered,” in Michael Nelson and Barbara A. Perry, eds., 41: Inside the Presidency of George H.W.
Bush (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014), pp. 100–121, at p. 114.
70. Mark LeVine, “Peacemaking in El Salvador,” in Michael W. Doyle, Ian Johnstone, and Robert
C. Orr, eds., Keeping the Peace: Multidimensional UN Operations in Cambodia and El Salvador (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 227–254, at p. 231.
71. Bernard Aronson, assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, interview with Jean
Krasno, Yale–United Nations Oral History Project, October 10, 1997, interview transcript, United
Nations Oral History Collection, DAG Digital Repository, Dag Hammarskjöld Library, New York,
New York, pp. 17–18, http://repository.un.org/handle/11176/89707?showϭfull.
monitored the right wing. . . . We consulted and worked very closely with
the four friends. We were involved in a hundred different ways behind the
scenes of the negotiating process. . . . We started our own process of talking
to the FMLN. We provided an enormous amount of the funding for the
peace process.”72
To achieve the goal of a negotiated settlement, President Bush promised to
increase El Salvador’s $131 million economic aid package by $50 million.73
The 1990 U.S. ªnancial package to El Salvador would eventually amount to
$228.9 million for economic aid and $86 million for the Military Assistance
Program.74
Thus, even though the Soviet Union had cut off military aid and
therefore ceased to pose a threat to U.S. strategic interests in the region, the
United States continued, and even increased, its costly support for El Salvador.
In February 1990, President Bush’s new secretary of state, James Baker,
testiªed before Congress: “We believe this is the year to end the war through
a negotiated settlement which guarantees safe political space for all
Salvadorans.”75
Although Baker remained uncomfortable with the prospect of
talking directly with the FMLN, as one expert explained, “By ªnally dropping
the notion of the FMLN’s military defeat, Baker’s words marked a decisive reversal
of U.S. policy. The stage was set for political settlement.”76
The Bush administration
pushed for negotiations and democratization by working to
include the FMLN in the political process while insisting that its preferred side
(the Cristiani government) make signiªcant concessions. The United States
was waging a costly effort to negotiate an end to the war.
the role of norms in el salvador. The Soviet and regional threats were
gone. Aid to El Salvador was expensive. El Salvador was democratizing, as
evidenced in Cristiani’s election. If the United States were responding solely
according to strategic assessments and costs, it would simply have ceased aid
to the Salvadoran government. But rather than abandoning the conºict (as the
International Security 42:3 152
72. Ibid., p. 27.
73. Ladwig, “Inºuencing Clients in Counterinsurgency,” p. 136.
74. “El Salvador: Accountability for U.S. Military and Economic Aid” (Washington, D.C.: United
States General Accounting Ofªce [GAO], September 1990). In 1992, the United States pledged a
further $250 million to aid the National Reconstruction Plan. See “El Salvador: Role of
Nongovernment Programs in Postwar Reconstruction” (Washington, D.C.: GAO, November
1992), p. 2.
75. Quoted in Karl, “El Salvador’s Negotiated Revolution,” p. 154.
76. Ibid., p. 155.
Soviet Union had), or pushing for its preferred side to win decisively (as it
had for the previous decade), the Bush administration decided to pursue genuine
negotiations. The agreements eventually required both the Cristiani government
and the FMLN to concede to deep political and military reforms,
including halving the size of the Salvadoran military (to 31,000 troops), inducing
the FMLN to disarm and become a political party, redistributing land, and
purging the worst human rights violators from the leadership of the armed
forces—processes that the United States backed with hundreds of millions of
dollars. Why?
The above decisions must be understood in the broader international political
environment of the time, which the United States sought to shape. After the
end of the Cold War, the United States found itself the unipole, committed not
simply to furthering its own power but also to spreading democratic ideals. In
his 1991 State of the Union address, often dubbed his “New World Order”
speech, President Bush discussed the 1990–91 Gulf War that extracted Saddam
Hussein’s military from Kuwait and the larger ideas behind the new U.S. foreign
policy. He declared, “What is at stake is more than one small country; it is
a big idea: a new world order. . . . The triumph of democratic ideas in Eastern
Europe and Latin America and the continuing struggle for freedom elsewhere
all around the world all conªrm the wisdom of our nation’s founders. . . . And
we all realize . . . our responsibility to be the catalyst for peace.”77
In El Salvador speciªcally, upon the ªrst conversation between President
Bush and President Cristiani, the White House Spokesperson reported, “The
United States is committed to the defense of democracy and human rights in
El Salvador. . . . The time has come to end the violence and secure an honorable
peace that will protect the rights and security of all Salvadorans, regardless of
their political views, to participate in a safe and fair political process.”78
The
United States was both creating, and acting in line with, a new expectation that
How Civil Wars End 153
77. George H.W. Bush, “Address before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,”
January 29, 1991, John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, eds., American Presidency Project, http://
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pidϭ19253.
78. Marlin Fitzwater, “Statement by Press Secretary Fitzwater on President Bush’s Telephone Conversation
with President-Elect Alfredo Cristiani of El Salvador,” March 22, 1989, Public Papers,
George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, College Station, Texas, https://bush41library
.tamu.edu/archives/public-papers/218.
civil wars should end in negotiation rather than military victory. That did not
mean, however, that the civil war in El Salvador would simply stop.
mediator’s role in el salvador. Arduous negotiations ensued from
January 1990 to January 1992, while both sides jockeyed for better military
position. In mid-1991, FMLN troops advanced again on San Salvador, demonstrating
that the war was not going to end on its own or simply ªzzle
out. There was a stop-and-start nature to the negotiation process: the
FMLN and the Salvadoran government signed, and often reneged on,
seven different peace plans before concluding the ªnal Chapultepec accord
on January 16, 1992.
The lead mediator, appointed by the UN Security Council and approved by
the warring parties, was the Peruvian diplomat Álvaro de Soto. He also had
the support of an informal group of “friends” in Colombia, Mexico, Spain, and
Venezuela.79
Reºecting on the negotiations, de Soto explains that “the ‘friends’
mechanism had the purpose of preempting rival initiatives that might confuse
the negotiations.”80
The “friends” generally deferred to de Soto, while assisting
him in exerting pressure on the warring sides to strike deals with each
other and to uphold commitments. De Soto adopted the technique of a “single
negotiating text,” by drafting the peace proposal language himself, presenting
the draft to both sides, and then revising in light of suggestions. He and his
team continuously suggested avenues of compromise, with provisions on disarmament,
as well as military, judicial and constitutional reforms. Such direct
mediation was an “unprecedented diplomatic intervention in internal con-
ºict.”81
It is improbable that the war would have ended as it did without such
an effective mediator, whose work was enabled by the support of the permanent
ªve members of the UN Security Council, and especially the United
States and the Soviet Union/Russia.
How Civil Wars End 154
79. Teresa Whitªeld, Friends Indeed: The United Nations, Groups of Friends, and the Resolution of
Conºict (Washington, D.C.: USIP Press, 2007).
80. Álvaro de Soto, “Ending Violent Conºict in El Salvador,” in Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler
Hampson, and Pamela Aall, eds., Herding Cats: Multiparty Mediation in a Complex World (Washington,
D.C.: USIP Press, 1999), p. 366. De Soto is referring here mainly to an effort by the Venezuelan
government to “hijack” the negotiations, just as the UN had been making progress. See ibid.,
pp. 368–369.
81. Burgerman, “Building the Peace by Mandating Reform,” p. 65. See also William Stanley and
David Holiday, “Peace Mission Strategy and Domestic Actors: UN Mediation, Veriªcation,
and Institution-Building in El Salvador,” International Peacekeeping, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer 1997),
pp. 22–49, doi:10.1080/13533319708413665.
El Salvador is emblematic of many wars of its time (e.g., Cambodia,
Guatemala, and Mozambique), where ideas of how the conºict ought to end
shifted with the end of the Cold War. The FMLN was the sworn enemy of the
United States. Over the course of the 1980s, the United States spent $3.5 billion
to try to defeat the group.82
After the end of Soviet support, the rise of unipolarity
could easily have spelled the demise of the FMLN. Instead, the international
political environment, shaped by a democratic unipole, shifted to
favor negotiations. This normative change brought about moves toward
compromise in El Salvador, but not all actors were on board: “The parties in
El Salvador could not have ended the war by themselves or made the concessions
they made, by themselves. They needed that international framework
and pressure and support apparatus to make it work.”83
It took effective international
mediation (and UN peacekeeping), which required the investment of
considerable ªnancial resources and political capital, to conclude the war in a
democratizing, negotiated settlement.
bosnia-herzegovina
Whereas the end of the Cold War provided momentum to end ideologically
based civil conºicts such as the one in El Salvador, it had the opposite effect
on others. Ethnofederal regimes in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and
Yugoslavia began to fracture. Although the process was mainly peaceful in the
ªrst two, Yugoslavia’s break-up was violent: ªve of the six new republics succumbed
to war.
Bosnia-Herzegovina was home to the worst of the ªghting. Out of a prewar
population of 4.5 million, some 100,000 were killed and more than 2 million
forced to ºee their homes.84
The war was fought, roughly speaking, between
Bosnian Serbs (who are generally of Christian Orthodox faith), Bosnian Croats
(often Catholic), and Bosniaks (who are mainly Muslim). The Bosnian Serbs
were led by the nationalist leader Radovan Karadzib and military commander
Ratko Mladib, and sustained by neighboring Serbia and its president,
Slobodan Miloševib. Mate Boban led the Bosnian Croats, who were buttressed
How Civil Wars End 155
82. “El Salvador: Accounting for U.S. Military and Economic Aid” (Washington, D.C.: GAO,
1990), p. 2.
83. Aronson, interview with Krasno, p. 38.
84. “Bosnia War Dead Figure Announced,” BBC News, June 21, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/
hi/europe/6228152.stm.
by the regime of President Franjo Tudjman in neighboring Croatia. President
Alia Izetbegovib represented the Bosniaks. He did not have a neighboring former
Yugoslav republic from which to garner immediate external assistance.
International support for the different sides varied over the course of the
war, but in general, the United States favored the most aggrieved group,
the (Muslim) Bosniaks. Germany supported Croatia, as it had under Adolf
Hitler during World War II. Russia, recalling historical and cultural ties, supported
Serbia.
The causes of the war are multiple and complex.85
Early on, the “ancient hatreds”
thesis was one of the most popular explanations. It held that the ethnic
groups in the former Yugoslavia hated each other for generations and that no
external action could alter such a deep conºict.86
Numerous scholars have discredited
this view, pointing instead to the role of instrumental domestic elites
in their use of ethnicity to hold onto power; the rise and erosion of a Yugoslav
national culture; political economic institutions that gained separate force
within each of the republics; relative deprivation fueling animosity between
wealthy and poor republics; the strategic use of emotion; and international actors
that fueled the independence efforts of different sides of the war.87
Each of
these—largely domestic—factors contributed to the outbreak of the war, but
it was outside actors that secured the peace. External action, however, was
not immediate.
Beginning in 1992, U.S. and European leaders viewed the conºict as an internal
one that could not be resolved by external efforts other than diplomatic.
U.S. decisionmakers generally felt that Bosnia-Herzegovina was a European
problem and that Europeans should therefore lead the way in negotiations to
International Security 42:3 156
85. David Campbell, “MetaBosnia: Narratives of the Bosnian War,” Review of International Studies,
Vol. 24, No. 2 (1998), pp. 261–281, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20097522.
86. Dusko Doder, “Yugoslavia: New War, Old Hatreds,” Foreign Policy, Summer 1993, http://
foreignpolicy.com/1993/06/19/yugoslavia-new-war-old-hatreds/; and Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan
Ghosts: A Journey through History (London: Macmillan, 1994).
87. V.P. Gagnon Jr., “Ethnic Nationalism and International Conºict: The Case of Serbia,” International
Security, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Winter 1994/95), pp. 130–166, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2539081;
Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution
after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1995); Roger D. Petersen, Understanding
Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Brian C. Rathbun, Partisan Interventions: European Party
Politics and Peace Enforcement in the Balkans (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004).
end the war. Europeans tended to agree, while also insisting that the impetus
for resolution arise internally.
U.S. policymakers generally concurred. The George H.W. Bush administration’s
secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, declared, “I have said this
38,000 times . . . until the Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats decide to stop killing
each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it.”88
When
Bill Clinton became president, he initially echoed the previous administration’s
view.
Despite evidence of war crimes being committed by the Yugoslav national
army and its Bosnian Serb allies, European and U.S. leaders did not want to
employ force to end the conºict. The conºict did not directly threaten their
countries, but it was embarrassing, and some ofªcials in the ªrst Clinton administration
argued that failure to address it was undermining U.S. “leadership
both at home and abroad.”89
They preferred to provide humanitarian aid,
employ sanctions against Serbia, and deploy UN peacekeepers to freeze the
ªghting and encourage all sides to negotiate a way out of the conºict.90
They
would not consider coercive military options. Negotiation was the preferred
means and outcome: “We could [not] use signiªcant force to punish the
Bosnian Serbs because UN peacekeepers might be taken hostage and the humanitarian
mission derailed.”91
European leaders also argued, contrary to
many U.S. foreign policy makers, that an arms embargo on all parties would
keep the violence contained.92
Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright handily summed up the ªrst several years of external efforts: “Our
goal was a negotiated solution, but we never applied the credible threat of
force necessary to achieve it. Instead we employed a combination of halfmeasures
and bluster that didn’t work.”93
From 1992 to 1994, external actors presented numerous peace plans—ªve in
How Civil Wars End 157
88. Quoted in Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 23.
89. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as quoted in Derek Chollet, The Road to the Dayton
Accords: A Study of American Statecraft (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 39.
90. Jon Western, “Sources of Humanitarian Intervention: Beliefs, Information, and Advocacy in
the U.S. Decisions on Somalia and Bosnia,” International Security, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Spring 2002),
pp. 112–142, doi:10.1162/016228802753696799.
91. Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary: A Memoir (New York: Hyperion, 2003), p. 233.
92. Many U.S. foreign policymakers were against the arms embargo because it disproportionately
affected the Bosniaks, which they saw as unfair. Senator Bob Dole was a leader in this effort.
93. Ibid., p. 229.
all—but after each crumbled, the external actors decided to shift course to
achieve their desired outcome. A body similar to the aforementioned “group
of friends” in El Salvador, called the “Contact Group” came together and
drafted the penultimate plan. The Contact Group included representatives
from Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States (and later Italy), and
introduced the concept of a Muslim-Croat Federation that would govern separately
from a Bosnian Serb entity, in a united country where the Serbs would
hold 49 percent of the territory and the Federation 51 percent. This concept,
agreed exclusively among the external parties, would form the basis of the
ªnal Dayton agreement. At the time the Contact Group formulated this
plan, the Serbs occupied some 70 percent of the territory. It was therefore
unclear how the plan would materialize, but subsequent events made
it a reality.
In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces attacked the town of Srebrenica—
a UN-designated “safe area.” The forces waged a genocidal massacre that
killed approximately 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, mainly men and boys, and ethnically
cleansed some 40,000 people.94
The horror of Srebrenica spurred the
United States and its partners in NATO to greater action. President Clinton
designated his formidable assistant secretary of state for European affairs,
Richard Holbrooke, to serve as the top U.S. mediator in the Balkans.
Holbrooke explained that given Serb advances, “as diplomats we could not expect
the Serbs to be conciliatory at the negotiating table as long as they had
experienced nothing but success on the battleªeld.”95
With U.S. persuasion,
Russia agreed to support NATO aerial bombing and to participate in a followon
UN peacekeeping mission.
In mid-September 1995, the NATO aerial operation “Deliberate Force,”
coupled with major ground campaigns by both Croatian and Muslim-Croat
Federation forces, brought the Bosnian Serb armed forces to the edge of military
defeat. Federation forces in Bosnia had retaken more than 50 percent of
the territory, and the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Banja Luka looked likely to
International Security 42:3 158
94. Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, “War-Related Deaths in the 1992–1995 Armed Conºicts in Bosnia
and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results,” European Journal of Population,
Vol. 21, Nos. 2–3 (June 2005), pp. 187–215, doi:10.1007/s10680-005-6852-5.
95. Holbrook, To End a War, p. 73.
fall next, which would essentially vanquish the Serbs.96
But rather than allowing
a complete military defeat for the Bosnian Serbs, the United States and its
European partners called off the Federation’s advance and pressed for a negotiated
solution.
the role of norms in bosnia-herzegovina. The Serbs were the aggressors
in this war, and the United States preferred the Federation—especially the
Bosniaks. Russia was weak and would not defend the Serbs militarily.
The Serbs did not pose a serious physical threat to the United States or
to Europe—most militaries in Europe could have defeated them, if desired.
Europeans were happy to have the United States take the lead in ending
the conºict. In Banja Luka, defeat of the Serbs by the Muslim-Croat
Federation was imminent. Why did the United States halt the Federation’s
advance and instead pursue a negotiated solution? Holbrooke explains his
decision in his memoir: “A true practitioner of Realpolitik would have encouraged
the attack [on Banja Luka] regardless of its humanitarian concerns.
In fact, humanitarian concerns decided the case for me. I did not think the
United States should contribute to the creation of new refugees and more human
suffering.”97
Others in the Clinton administration supported this view. National Security
Adviser Anthony Lake and then-UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright pushed
for a negotiated solution as the ªrst choice, with the option to use military
force to pursue a victory only in the event of failed negotiations. Albright
reasoned, “If a negotiated settlement were not forthcoming, we should urge
withdrawal of the UN mission and train and equip the Bosnian military behind
the shield of NATO air-power.”98
President Clinton concurred: “I agree
with Tony and Madeleine. We should bust our ass to get a settlement within
the next few months. We must commit to a uniªed Bosnia. And if we can’t
get that at the bargaining table, we have to help the Bosnians on the bat-
tleªeld.”99
The Europeans and, importantly, the Russians also wanted to press
How Civil Wars End 159
96. Christiane Amanpour, “Sacirbey and Silajdic Positively Giddy,” CNN.com, September 17, 1995,
http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/Bosnia/updates/sep95/9-17/pm/index.html; and John Pomfret,
“Bosnia, Croatia Agree to Halt Offensive” Washington Post, September 20, 1995.
97. Holbrooke, To End a War, p. 166.
98. Albright, Madam Secretary, p. 240.
99. Quoted in ibid., p. 241.
a negotiated solution. Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev asserted, “All
we want to do is to end this bloody goddamned war, and to end it in a way
that’s a visibly cooperative achievement.”100
The U.S. team, with the support of other external actors, was operating according
to normative impulses. The team chose to employ military means to
achieve not a military victory but a negotiated settlement. The costs of pursuing
this goal would run into the billions, and American public opinion was not
generally supportive of U.S. intervention in Bosnia.101
Nevertheless, the administration
was willing to provide signiªcant ªnancial support for this normative
agenda. In a major speech on Bosnia-Herzegovina, President Clinton
explained why he made the choice to push for a negotiated solution while securing
the peace by providing more than 20,000 U.S. troops (of 60,000 total)
under NATO command: “Today, because of our dedication, America’s ideals—
liberty, democracy and peace—are more and more the aspirations of people
everywhere in the world. It is the power of our ideas, even more than our size,
our wealth and our military might, that makes America a uniquely trusted nation.
. . . Nowhere has the argument for our leadership been more clearly
justiªed than in the struggle to stop or prevent war and civil violence. . . . [W]e
have stood up for peace and freedom because it’s in our interest to do so, and
because it is the right thing to do.”102
Clinton and his team chose this course of
action not because of domestic pressure, threats, or a desire to reduce costs, but
because in the post-1989 international political environment they thought that
it was normatively appropriate.
mediator’s role in bosnia-herzegovina. In the fall of 1995, although the
battleªeld was primed to achieve a negotiated solution, the warring parties
were not generally supportive of such an outcome. According to Ivo Daalder,
International Security 42:3 160
100. Quoted in Holbrooke, To End a War, p. 85.
101. According to a GAO report, U.S. military expenditures for 22,000 American troops deployed
through NATO in 1996 amounted to about $3 billion. See “Bosnia: Costs Are Exceeding DOD’s Estimates”
(Washington, D.C.: GAO, July 25, 1996), p. 2. Since then, the United States has spent a total
of about $17 billion in military, humanitarian, and development assistance to Bosnia. See David
Rohde, “Bosnia’s Lesson: When American Intervention Works (Partly),” Atlantic, April 27,
2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/bosnias-lesson-when-americanintervention-works-partly/256471/.
On U.S. public opinion, see Western, “Sources of Humanitarian
Intervention,” p. 146.
102. William J. Clinton, “Balkan Accord: Clinton’s Words on Mission to Bosnia—’The Right Thing
to Do,’” New York Times, November 28, 1995.
who coordinated U.S. policy on Bosnia from 1995 to 1997, “It would take two
more months of arduous and creative negotiations to arrive at a successful
conclusion.”103
Holbrooke was in charge of the Dayton negotiations. Like
de Soto in El Salvador, he insisted on employing a “single-text” mediation,
where his team would draft the proposals for consideration. He also insisted
on three important, centralizing preconditions, which he argues made successful
negotiations possible. First, “A central dilemma confronting the United
States had been with whom to negotiate on the Serb side.”104
Thus
Holbrooke’s opening move was to convince Miloševib to persuade the Bosnian
Serb leadership—namely, Karadzib and Mladib, who had been indicted on war
crimes—to allow Miloševib to negotiate on their behalf.105
His second step was
to limit the negotiations to the three central presidents involved—Izetbegovib,
Miloševib, and Tudjman, each of whom promised “not to talk to the press or to
other outsiders.”106
And ªnally, although many nations were interested in being
involved in the peace process—which would have added derailing veto
players—Holbrooke managed largely to exclude them. He consulted with
European and Russian leaders only to ask for their support in applying pressure
on Izetbegovib, Miloševib, and Tudjman at various points. After twenty
days of negotiations on a sequestered air force base in Dayton, Ohio, the mediator
and negotiators emerged with a workable, if not perfect, peace agreement.
While in the post-1989 international political environment external actors
generally supported a negotiated outcome, it took military intervention, and
effective mediation, to produce one.
counterfactuals
Given what scholars know about the El Salvador and Bosnia cases, it is possible
to conduct some counterfactual thought experiments, imagining how the
wars might have ended in different time periods.107
Before the end of the
How Civil Wars End 161
103. Ivo H. Daalder, Getting to Dayton: The Making of America’s Bosnia Policy (Washington, D.C.:
Brookings Institution Press, 2000), p. 134.
104. Ibid., p. 127.
105. Holbrooke, To End a War, p. 29.
106. Ibid., p. 200.
107. Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics:
Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1996).
Cold War, is it conceivable that the war in El Salvador could have ended in a
negotiated settlement through internal momentum alone? Such an outcome
would have been highly unlikely, given the zero-sum positions of both internal
and external actors. If the Salvadoran war had endured until after 2001, it remains
likely that external actors would have continued to press for a negotiated
settlement because the conºict did not involve Islamic terrorists.
In Bosnia, if the war had occurred during the Cold War, it is inconceivable
that the United States and the Soviet Union would have joined together to support
NATO bombing and a UN peacekeeping mission to end the war in compromise.
If it were fought today, the same might be true. Moreover, given the
current popular anti-Muslim sentiment, it is unlikely that Americans—across
both sides of the aisle—would have expressed such sympathy for the Muslimmajority
Bosniak population.
case summaries
The El Salvador and Bosnia-Herzegovina cases demonstrate our main causal
claims. The war in El Salvador is representative of those that spanned the ªrst
and second time periods: during the Cold War, there was no perceived avenue
for negotiated settlement because in the zero-sum international political environment,
such an outcome was inconceivable and unacceptable. After the end
of the Cold War, in the new international political environment characterized
by the absence of existential threats and an emphasis on democratization
and liberalization, the United States, along with many other outside actors,
chose not to pursue outright defeat of opponents but rather pressed to end
wars in negotiated settlement. Despite calls from Congress to cut costs, the
George H.W. Bush administration increased aid to El Salvador to enable democratic
reforms and a negotiated settlement, in its effort to act in line with, and
shape, a democratic new world order. The pursuit of negotiation did not apply
only to ideological conºicts.
Also during period 2, but in the context of an ethnic conºict, U.S. policymakers
faced a choice: allow their preferred side (the Muslim-Croat
Federation) to win on the battleªeld or insist that the Federation stop short of
military victory and instead undergo U.S.-led mediation to produce a negotiated
solution. Rather than withdrawing from the decisionmaking process, or
allowing the impending one-sided victory, the United States chose to spend
International Security 42:3 162
billions of dollars and risk potential U.S. military casualties to ensure a negotiated
settlement.
In both cases, centralized, U.S.-supported mediation was the precipitating
causal factor that enabled the wars to end in negotiations rather than victory
for one side. External ideas of appropriate conºict resolution, and their pursuit
in policy, proved decisive for the eventual outcomes. External inºuence on
civil war outcomes continued into period 3, but we demonstrate this phenomenon
using a different methodological approach.
period 3: from democracy to stabilization
For period 3, we could have explicated a study of Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan
to demonstrate how external ideas and actions have led to the duration
of these conºicts, or we could have traced the post–September 11 negotiated
settlements in Timor-Leste, Liberia, or Sierra Leone—conºicts that did not include
an Islamic terrorist group. These processes are already obvious to many
observers, however, and space is limited. Instead, we examine the words and
actions of powerful policymakers to detect the work of norms through content
analysis.108
The UN Security Council is the highest international authority that makes
decisions about the legitimacy of the use of force.109
Most mediation efforts,
and eventual negotiated settlements, enjoy the blessing of the permanent ªve
members of the Council—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and
the United States. It is important, therefore, to try to get a picture of normative
trends in the Council, which reºect the thinking of the great-power permanent
members.
A key measure of norms is the extent to which to great powers use words
associated with those norms, followed by actions. The Security Council produces
an annual report to the UN General Assembly that surveys the issues
discussed in the Council and its subsidiary bodies. These reports therefore
How Civil Wars End 163
108. On this and alternative strategies, see Gary Goertz and Paul F. Diehl, “Toward a Theory of International
Norms: Some Conceptual and Measurement Issues,” Journal of Conºict Resolution,
Vol. 36, No. 4 (December 1992), pp. 634–664, doi:10.1177/0022002792036004002.
109. Erik Voeten, “The Political Origins of the UN Security Council’s Ability to Legitimize the Use
of Force,” International Organization, Vol. 59, No. 3 (July 2005), pp. 527–557, doi:10.1017/
S0020818305050198; and Hurd, After Anarchy.
reºect the collective concerns and activities of the world’s great powers.110
We approach the task of capturing norm shifts in the Council by analyzing the
content of these reports. Scholars have used content analysis across disciplines
as a method that “allows researchers to analyze perceptual constructs that are
difªcult to study via traditional quantitative methods. At the same time, it allows
researchers to gather large samples that may be difªcult to employ in
purely qualitative studies.”111
Content analysis thus helps them to cross quantitative
and qualitative divides.
We employ a type of content analysis, “text analysis,” or “text mining,”
which is a computer-aided form of analyzing large numbers of documents for
depicting changes in key word use over time.112
We produce a word count of
the total number of certain word stems in each Security Council annual report.
This provides an overall count of how many times each word is used in each
annual report, which gives us a general measure of the relative importance of
the underlying policy concepts that the words represent to the members
of the Council, across time. Once we can pinpoint when in history certain
word use was rising or declining, we can then dig into the circumstances of
the change.
Here, a second technique, “discourse analysis,” is helpful.113
This type of
word analysis concerns the “exploration of how participants actively construct
categories.”114
While the words that powerful actors use reºect social reality,
given these actors’ power, their words function as well to create reality.115
In
International Security 42:3 164
110. The reports are available at http://www.un.org/en/sc/documents/reports/.
111. Vincent J. Duriau, Rhonda K. Reger, and Michael D. Pfarrer, “A Content Analysis of the Content
Analysis Literature in Organization Studies: Research Themes, Data Sources, and Methodological
Reªnements,” Organization Research Methods, Vol. 10, No. 1 (January 2007), pp. 5–34,
doi:10.1177/1094428106289252.
112. Kimberly A. Neuendorf, The Content Analysis Guidebook (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2004),
p. 34.
113. Yoshiko M. Herrera and Bear F. Braumoeller, “Symposium: Discourse and Content
Analysis—Introduction to the Symposium,” Qualitative Methods, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 2004), p. 16.
114. Cynthia Hardy, Bill Harley, and Nelson Phillips, “Symposium: Discourse and Content
Analysis—Discourse Analysis and Content Analysis: Two Solitudes,” Qualitative Methods, Vol. 2,
No. 1 (Jan. 2004), pp. 19–22, at p. 21. See also Mlada Bukovansky, “The Hollowness of Anti-Corruption
Discourse,” Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 13, No. 2 (May 2006), pp. 181–209,
doi:10.1080/09692290600625413.
115. Neta C. Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian
Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing
the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2006), chap. 2; and Ronald R. Krebs, Narrative and the Making of U.S. National Security
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
such situations, discourse analysis is helpful for sorting through causal processes.
When analyzing discourses, it is important to identify the context in
which the word or concept was ªrst employed, by whom, and then the process
of institutionalization. Our aim is to describe the signiªcance, and work toward
a causal explanation about the effects, of some of the words most associated
with our norms of interest.
We count the number of instances of the word stems democ* and negotiat*,
which reºect the norms of democratization and negotiated settlements that
were ascendant during period 2, and the word stems terror* and the word
“stabilization,” reºecting the rise of norms of ªghting terrorism, and the new
concept of “stabilization,” that ascended in period 3. We show our results in
ªgures 3 and 4, using locally weighted scatterplot smoothing (LOWESS).116
Figure 3 demonstrates the transition from the norm of ending civil wars
through mediation and political settlements, to stabilizing conºicts without
necessarily ending them. The ªgure tracks the number of times that the stem
democ* (democratize, democratization, democracy, etc.) and the word “stabilization”
are used in each Security Council annual report. It shows that the use
of the stem democ* increases gradually from 1960 to 1980 and more sharply in
the second time period, from about 1990 to a peak in around 2001, and then
declines throughout the third time period. In 2001, around the same time that
the stem democ* begins to decline, use of the word “stabilization” begins
to increase.
Likewise, ªgure 4 shows the transition from the norm of negotiation to a focus
on ªghting terrorism. The stem negotiat* (negotiations, negotiating, negotiator,
etc.) began to increase substantially in the mid-to-late 1980s, around
the time that we locate the transition from time period 1 to time period 2 (in
1989/90). Unsurprisingly, the count of the word stem terror* (e.g., terror, terrorism,
terrorist) began to rise sharply in the late 1990s/early 2000s
These ªgures demonstrate that the Security Council often discussed democracy
and negotiation as the Cold War ended, but that these considerations
diminished signiªcantly after the attacks of September 11. Thereafter, the
Council’s talk and actions concerning terrorism and stabilization increased
How Civil Wars End 165
116. LOWESS is a non-parametric regression curve that uses locally weighted regression to create
a smoothed curve, aiding visualization of trends over time. See William S. Cleveland, “Robust
Locally Weighted Regression and Smoothing Scatterplots,” Journal of the American Statistical
Association, Vol. 74, No. 368 (1979), pp. 829–836.
dramatically. The word “stabilization” ªrst appeared on the agenda of the
Council in the mid-1990s. Many stabilization references were made in connection
with Rwanda in 1994, where negotiation and peacekeeping efforts failed
to transition the country to democratic governance. In the wake of genocide,
stabilization became the new goal. After September 11, the use of the term increased
dramatically. The ªrst peacekeeping operation to use the word “stabilization”
in the mission’s title occurred in Haiti in 2004, the same year that the
United States created the Ofªce of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and
Stabilization (explained further below), and eleven years after U.S. and UN
democratization efforts in Haiti had not borne much fruit.117
Since then, the
language of stability has become increasingly common in UN complex peacekeeping
operations, which is reºected in the Security Council’s annual reports:
of the four missions authorized since 2010, three (in the Central African
Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mali) are titled “stabilizaInternational
Security 42:3 166
117. The United States drafted the mandate for the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti.
Figure 3. Democ* and Stabilization
1940 1960 1980 2000 2020
year
democ* stabilization
150
100
50
0
wordcount
tion” operations. The fourth mission, in South Sudan, which was not initially
one of stabilization, has adopted the stabilization mandate of the others, even
though its title has not changed.118
The Security Council’s move from seeking to negotiate settlements in civil
wars as a way to democratize to merely “stabilizing” conºict mirrors changes
in U.S. policies. Shortly after September 11, President George W. Bush signaled
a renewed acceptability of military victory: “We will not rest until terrorist
groups of global reach have been found, have been stopped, and have been de-
feated.”119
Two year later, he used the scholarly language of norm creation
when he famously proclaimed that he sought to “win the war of ideas . . .
with our friends and allies, we aim to establish a new international norm reHow
Civil Wars End 167
Figure 4. Negotiat* and terror*
1940 1960 1980 2000 2020
year
100
60
80
40
20
0
wordcount
negotiat* terror*
118. John Karlsrud, UN Peace Operations in the 21st Century: The UN at War (Basingstoke, U.K.:
Palgrave, 2017).
119. President George W. Bush, November 6, 2001, quoted in “National Strategy for Combatting
Terrorism” (Washington, D.C.: CIA, 2003), p. 4, https://www.cia.gov/news-information/cia-the-
war-on-terrorism/Counter_Terrorism_Strategy.pdf.
garding terrorism requiring non-support, non-tolerance, and active opposition
to terrorists.”120
Since then, great powers have applied the new norm of anti-terrorism to
civil wars in which Islamic groups were directly involved as ªghting parties,
such as in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Iraq, Libya, Mali,
Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. In some of those conºicts, groups such as
al-Qaida and ISIS are not directly involved, but governments would like to
brand opponents with the terrorist label. Incumbent governments seek the
support of the United States and others in defeating rebel groups by discursively
situating opponents as “terrorists.” In civil wars from Syria beginning in
2011, to Turkey’s conºict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, Sudan’s war
with the Justice and Equality Movement, Ethiopia and the Ogaden National
Liberation Front, and Russia’s involvement in Chechnya and Ukraine, governments
have labeled insurgents “terrorists,” claiming that they are linked (explicitly
or implicitly) to a larger ideological movement of terror and therefore
deserve the attention of the United States and the UN as part of the “war on
terror.” This discursive framing explicitly precludes the option of a negotiated
settlement.121
In the mid-2000s, coupled with the rise of terrorism as a new, ªrst-order
international threat, the democratization efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan fal-
tered.122
The United States began to shift its discourse and actions from democratization
to stabilization. In 2004, the State Department established the Ofªce
of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization—an ofªcial coordinator
“to enhance our nation’s institutional capacity to respond to crises involving
failing, failed, and post-conºict states.”123
As President Bush described,
this ofªce would “help the world’s newest democracies make the transition to
peace and freedom and a market economy.”124
In other words, in 2004–05, we
have evidence that for the U.S. president, stabilization and democratization
International Security 42:3 168
120. Ibid., p. 25.
121. The norm of negotiated settlement has not disappeared entirely, however—civil wars that do
not involve Islamic terrorist organizations (such as in those in Burundi, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire,
and Liberia) still tend to end in negotiated settlement (or low activity).
122. Downes and Monten, “Forced to Be Free?”
123. “Ofªce of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department
of State), https://2001-2009.state.gov/s/crs/.
124. President G.W. Bush, International Republican Institute dinner, May 17, 2005, https://
georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/05/20050517-9.html.
were bound together. But as the 2000s progressed, the goal of democracy receded,
and stabilization ascended. For example, in the 2008 Congressional
Supplemental Appropriations Act reauthorizing the Ofªce of the Coordinator
for Reconstruction and Stabilization, the word “democracy” was replaced by
the vaguer term “conºict transformation” as a way to offset instability:
“Whole-of-Government Reconstruction and Stabilization planning is undertaken
in support of achieving ‘conºict transformation’ in the speciªed country
or region. The goal of conºict transformation is to reach the point where the
country or region is on a sustainable positive trajectory and where it is able to
address, on its own, the dynamics causing instability and conºict.”125
In the U.S. government, especially during the administration of President
Barack Obama, stabilization was to enable the United States’ exit from
Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.126
As reported in Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2016
piece in the Atlantic, President Obama expressed regret that the Arab Spring
had the opposite effect of democratizing the Middle East (other than in
Tunisia), and that the problems in the Middle East “could not be ªxed—not on
his watch, and not for a generation to come.” Tellingly, the president joked:
“All I need in the Middle East is a few smart autocrats.”127
The language of,
and material efforts for, democratization shifted to stabilization (and a tacit acceptance
of autocracy). In other words, in period 3, the normative shift to
stabilization reºected “real-world,” material changes, rather than the other
way around.
In short, in period 3, stabilization has challenged democracy as the overall
objective of external actors in civil wars. Moreover, negotiation is no longer the
prevailing expectation of how wars ought to end. Thus far, in the post–
September 11 period, civil wars are less likely to end in general. Although the
norm of negotiated settlement has not died, it does not apply to wars that include
groups designated as “terrorist” by the United States. For those, the
How Civil Wars End 169
125. Ofªce of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, “Frequently Asked Questions”
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, July 15, 2008), https://2001-2009.state.gov/s/
crs/66427.htm.
126. Robert J. Lieber, Retreat and Its Consequences: American Foreign Policy and the Problem of World
Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
127. Quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” Atlantic, April 2016, pp. 70–90, at pp. 81,
80.
wars continue; when they end, they tend to end in victory. We expect
these trends to continue.
Conclusion
During the Cold War, civil wars most often ended in military victory for one
side. After the Cold War, they ended mainly in negotiated settlement. Since the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, wars that do not involve terrorists still
generally end in negotiation or low activity, whereas those with terrorist
groups tend to end in one-sided victory; civil wars are also ending less often
in general. Most civil war terminations involve external intervention, but the
literature on civil wars has not offered a theory of why international actors
would intervene differently in different time periods.
For decades after World War II, the United States and its allies sought military
victory for one preferred side in civil wars. After the Cold War, however,
the material condition of unipolarity enabled the United States to seek to end
civil wars as it chose. The United States decided, along with its allies, to
end wars not in victory, but rather in negotiation, often using mediation as a
tool to achieve settlements. There is nothing from the fact of material unipolarity
that would necessitate such a choice, but the democratic character of
the unipole compelled a shift toward negotiation. After the Cold War, the overarching
international political environment was characterized by the United
States’ and its allies’ quest for democratization. In this new environment, a
norm of negotiated settlement arose, which in turn produced the material and
social outcomes of negotiated settlements.
After the September 11 attacks, the international political environment
changed again. The new threat of terrorism, along with the failures of democratization
in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, spurred disillusionment with
the quest for externally assisted democracy. As the 2000s progressed, many
countries experienced democratic backsliding, and many democratization
movements faltered. In place of the quest for democracy after war, stabilization
has become the overarching normative impulse and policy goal.
The norm trajectories we trace are different from most theoretical accounts
of normative change. Usually, “norm entrepreneurs” set out to change “bads”
such as apartheid, slavery, or the use of weapons of mass destruction. Activists
convince powerful people and states to change policies. Thus notions of apInternational
Security 42:3 170
propriateness create changes in outcomes. This standard causal chain ªts to a
certain extent with the processes of norm change after the Cold War, except
rather than individual norm entrepreneurs, it was the great powers, led by the
democratic unipole, that decided to change their methods for ending civil
wars. In contrast, the normative shifts in the post–September 11 time period do
not stem from the actions of one or a few powerful states, individuals, or social
movements. They are more reactive than proactive. From the material facts of
terrorist attacks, failures of democratization, and civil wars already ending in
low activity, we see normative trends in the United States and the UN Security
Council of the acceptance of the appropriateness of non-negotiation with terrorists,
and the quest not for democracy but stabilization.
Thus our argument is basically structural: actors are bound in large part by
the international political environment in which they operate. That does not
mean, however, that innovation and agency are impossible. Structures are
hard to change, but norms are easier. When it comes to policy recommendations,
much of the scholarly literature on war termination advocates a certain
type of ending to achieve lasting peace: partition, negotiated settlement, or
rebel victory. Our article makes explicit the implicit assumption in these arguments
that external actors have the power to inºuence how civil wars end. External
actors, however, are under the inºuence of the prevailing international
political environment. By highlighting the character and pressures of this environment
in different time periods, and the role of accompanying conºict resolution
norms, it may be easier for actors to come to novel policy decisions that
buck the prevailing trend. Sometimes, better outcomes may result when outsiders
do not push for a negotiated settlement, but rather allow one side to
win. Other times, it may be necessary to negotiate with terrorists in order
to conclude a devastating civil war, despite the pressures of the international
political environment. Regardless, having a better understanding of how and
why civil wars conclude could give policymakers some tools to help end such
wars and eliminate their attendant economic and humanitarian costs.
How Civil Wars End 171