implementing peace agreements in civil wars:...

IPA Policy Paper Series on Peace Implementation

May 2001, New York

International Peace Academy

Implementing Peace Agreementsin Civil Wars:

Lessons and Recommendationsfor Policymakers

Stephen John Stedman

CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AND COOPERATIONSTANFORD UNIVERSITYCISAC

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Stedman is Senior Research Scholar, Center for International Security and Cooperation, StanfordUniversity and with Elizabeth Cousens, IPA and Donald Rothchild, University of California at Davis,Co-Director of the CISAC-IPA Project on Implementation of Peace Agreements in Civil Wars.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CISAC and IPA wish to thank the Ford Foundation and the Edward E. Hills Fund for their generous supportof this project.

This report is also available on IPA’s website:<www.ipacademy.org>

Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Implementation: The Link Between Mediation and Peacebuilding. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Determinants of Successful Peacebuilding. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Strategies, Coordination, and Incentive Compatibility Issues. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Evaluation of Sub-Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15Demobilization and Reintegration of CombatantsDisarmamentElectionsHuman RightsRefugee Repatriation

Bridges to Peacebuilding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19Civilian SecurityLocal Capacity Building: Civil Society Organizations

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Appendix 1: List of Project Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Appendix 2: List of Project Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

IMPLEMENTING PEACE AGREEMENTS IN CIVIL WARS: LESSONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR POLICYMAKERS

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface

As a sub-field of conflict resolution, peace implementation has been more practiced than studied. Unlike eitherconflict mediation or long-term peacebuilding, very little analytical reflection has been devoted to the immediatechallenges of implementing peace agreements once they are concluded. Too often, those responsible for translatingthese accords into meaningful action have had to proceed quickly, without either an accurate map of the hazardsof the war-torn terrain in which they find themselves or a reliable plan for managing challenges when they doarise. At the most elementary level, what has been missing is clear knowledge of those factors that make the differ-ence between successful peace implementation and failure, between the assurance of peace and the resumption ofwar.

That such analysis is needed, and needed urgently, becomes clear in surveying the experience of the 1990s. InRwanda, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Somalia, and twice in Angola, the failure to get warring parties to live up totheir peace agreements not only restarted armed conflict, it also escalated the violence. The breakdown of the 1994Arusha Accords in Rwanda led to a genocide of some 800,000 people: approximately fifty times more deaths thanhad occurred in the 1990-1993 civil war. As all of these tragedies suggest, the period immediately after the signingof a peace agreement is arguably the time of greatest uncertainty and danger. It is also the time when most peaceagreements fail. Improving our knowledge of the specific challenges of peace implementation might help toimprove the odds of success.

Between late 1997 and early 2000, Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)and the International Peace Academy (IPA) engaged over two dozen scholars to undertake a systematic study ofthe determinants of successful peace implementation. The project examined every peace agreement between 1980and 1997 where international actors were prominently involved. The sixteen cases studied covered the full rangeof outcomes: from failure, to partial success, to success, thereby permitting a more rigorous investigation of whatmakes implementation work. To strengthen the policy relevance of the research, practitioners contributed to thedesign of the project and participated in the workshops, conferences, and policy fora in which preliminary findingswere presented and discussed. It is our hope that the results of this research will help improve the design andpractice of peace implementation.

With this goal in mind, I am pleased to introduce “Implementing Peace Agreements in Civil Wars: Lessons andRecommendations for Policymakers”, the first of our IPA Policy Paper Series on Peace Implementation. Written byproject co-director Stephen Stedman, it summarizes the broad design of the research and distills its major findings.In evaluating implementation strategies, the relative importance of implementation sub-goals, and the linkagesbetween negotiation, implementation and long-term peacebuilding, Stedman and his colleagues offer someimportant new insights as well as provide more solid corroboration for some conventional wisdom.

The full research of the project will be published in a forthcoming two-volume study, entitled Ending Civil Wars,co-edited by project directors Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth Cousens. On behalf of theproject directors and authors, I would like to express our deep appreciation to the Ford Foundation and the EdwardE. Hills Fund for their generous support of this project.

David M. MalonePresident

International Peace Academy


Preface 1

Executive Summary

• The greater the difficulty of the environment, thegreater the likelihood that peace implementationwill fail. The two most important environmentalsources of failure are the presence of spoilers—factions or leaders who oppose the peaceagreement and use violence to undermine it—andneighboring states that oppose the peaceagreement and assist the spoilers. Given theimportance of these findings, the United Nationsneeds to improve its capacities for strategicallyassessing the implementation environment, partic-ularly the motives, intentions, and capabilities ofpeace parties and spoilers.

• A third environmental determinant of implementa-tion is the presence of valuable spoils. Our studyfound that no peace agreement has been success-fully implemented where there are valuable, easilymarketable commodities such as gems or timber. Incountries where there are easily marketed valuablecommodities (spoils), implementers should have adeveloped strategy, the resources, and the commit-ment to counter those who profit from war.

• Cases of peace implementation also differ in termsof the willingness of international actors toprovide resources and risk troops. The mostimportant variable is whether assisting the affectedcountry is seen as vital to the national interests ofa major or regional power; only when such interestis present has peace implementation succeeded inthe most difficult environments, characterized bythe presence of spoilers and hostile neighbors.Without great or regional power interest, theUnited Nations can only succeed in the leastdifficult environments. When selecting what peaceagreements the UN should implement, great poweror regional power interest should be treated as ahard constraint.

• That major and regional power interest plays a keyrole in implementation success creates incompati-bilities between the strategies that are needed forsuccess and the incentives of the major powers tosupport those strategies. As the difficulty of the

implementation environment increases, there is aneed for greater scope and assertiveness of thetransitional authority that is supplied by interna-tional actors. Similarly, the more difficult theenvironment, the greater the need for coercivestrategies of implementation. But, the strategiesand resources available to internationalimplementers are also a function of great andregional power interest. Unless their securityinterests are engaged, the resources and commit-ment necessary for coercive strategies to succeedwill not be forthcoming. Without great or regionalpower interest, the United Nations should notimplement hard cases.

• A second incentive compatibility issue concernsmechanisms for providing strategic coherence andcoordination. The more difficult the implementa-tion environment, the greater the need for strategiccoordination. When international actors lack unity,spoilers can take advantage of international splitsto attack the peace process and threatenpeacemakers. Similarly, the more coercive thestrategy, the greater the civil-military tensions inimplementation, and the greater the need forstrategic coordination. But, again, strategiesavailable for international coordination, such asfriends groups, are also a function of great andregional power interest. The willingness of states tojoin friends groups is indicative of a priorjudgment that the specific case is in the state’sinterest. Such mechanisms for coordination willnot always be available: there are no “friends ofSomalia,” as there are no great or regional powerswho have security interests in a peaceful Somalia.

• The gap between what is needed in some missionsand what major or regional powers are willing toprovide leads to organizational pathologies withinthe United Nations. In some cases, the willingnessof the Security Council to authorize peace missionsstems from a perception that the case will be safeand easy; where threats are perceived, the reactionof the Security Council is to cut and run. Aware ofthis, UN officials are reluctant to share worrisomeconflict assessments and tend to “ask only for whatthe traffic will bear.” The need to present optimisticscenarios to the Security Council precludes realistic


2 Executive Summary


Executive Summary 3

contingency planning, since this signals that moredire scenarios are possible. On occasion, thistendency has led UN officials to ignore or playdown blatant and destabilizing violations of peaceagreements. Given that such intelligence is fallibleand that there will be missions where unantici-pated violent challenges may erupt duringimplementation, there is a need for the UnitedNations to improve its contingency planning forpeace operations.

• From an examination of the relative importance ofsub-goals (e.g. demobilization, disarmament,elections, human rights, and refugee repatriation)to overall implementation success, two majorfindings emerge:

1 ) For every sub-goal, expectations must becommensurate with resources and permissibles t r a t e g i e s. In the absence of commitment ofresources and troops, ambitious standards forsub-goals are symbolic statements of outside

virtue, not practical means of terminating wars.

2 ) When allocating investment to sub-goals,priority should be given to demobilization ofsoldiers and demilitarization of politics, that is,the transformation of warring armies intopolitical parties. Unless these are achieved, civilwars cannot be brought to an end, and theconsolidation of democracy and the protectionof human rights have little chance of success.

• Two low-cost opportunities that should be pursuedduring implementation are civilian security,through police and judicial reform, and localcapacity-building for human rights and reconcili-a t i o n . Although the study did not identify a singlecase where a failure to pursue these opportunitiesundermined implementation, it found that thepotential long-term benefits of security reformand local capacity-building for peacebuildingwarrant the relatively inexpensive investmentsthat such measures require.

Introduction

When antagonists in civil war sign a peace agreement,what can international actors do to prevent arecurrence of that war? This is a life or death questionfor millions of people. The two worst outbreaks ofmassive violence in the 1990s – Angola in 1993 andRwanda in 1994 – followed the failure of peaceagreements to end those wars. In both cases, the deathand destruction were staggering: an estimated 350,000dead in Angola and 800,000 dead in Rwanda. Warwent on for eight years in Liberia and took 150,000lives because multiple peace agreements failed to endthe civil war there. In 2000, two more countries foundthemselves back in war after the failure of peaceaccords – Angola and Sierra Leone.

In all of these cases, international actors mediated theagreements and were given prominent roles inimplementation. Why did they fail? What could theyhave done differently? Was implementation in thesecases doomed by unworkable peace agreements? Wasfailure a question of unfulfilled mandates or mandatesinappropriate to the task at hand? Or was failurecaused by the lack of an appropriate strategy and/orthe unwillingness to anticipate violent challenges andcraft an effective response? How did these cases differfrom successes such as Namibia, El Salvador, orMozambique? Were these successes the result of lesschallenging environments or did international actorsdo things differently?

Between late 1997 and early 2000, StanfordUniversity’s Center for International Cooperation(CISAC) and the International Peace Academy (IPA)conducted research to better understand the determi-nants of successful peace implementation. The CISAC-IPA project on peace implementation focused on threeprimary issues:

1) An evaluation of international actors and theirstrategies of peace implementation;

2) An evaluation of various sub-goals of peaceimplementation (e.g., demobilization, disarma-ment, refugee repatriation, human rights, reconcil-iation etc.) and their relationship to overallimplementation success;

3) A search for low-cost, possible high-payoffopportunities for linking short-term implementa-tion success to long-term peacebuilding.

The project studied every peace agreement concludedbetween 1980 and 1997 in which international actorswere assigned a prominent role in implementation(Table 1).

Table 1. Cases Studied

Case

1. Angola, 1992-932. Angola, 1994-983. Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1995-20004. Cambodia, 1991-935. El Salvador, 1993-956. Guatemala, 1992-987. Lebanon, 1991-20008. Liberia, 1990-999. Mozambique, 1992-9410. Namibia, 198911. Nicaragua, 1989-9112. Rwanda, 1993-9413. Sierra Leone, 199814. Sri Lanka, 1987-8815. Somalia, 1992-9316. Zimbabwe, 1980

To strengthen the policy relevance of the research,practitioners and policymakers participated in everystage of the project. Appendix 1 lists all of the practi-tioners who shared in their time and energy tocomment on memos and drafts.

The project found that cases of peace implementationdiffer dramatically in terms of the difficulty of theimplementation environment and of the willingness ofinternational actors to provide resources and risktroops, and also that these differences are predictablebefore a peace operation begins. These two findingsmark a dramatic advance in our understanding ofpeace implementation in three fundamental ways.First, the CISAC-IPA results put to rest glib generaliza-tions about peace operations based on one or few


4 Introduction

cases. To put it bluntly, the results suggest that there isno reason to assume that actions and strategies thatwork in a more benign conflict environment such asGuatemala or Namibia will work in a much moredemanding environment such as Bosnia or SierraLeone.

Second, the results imply that implementation strate-gies must be designed based on the level of difficultyof the case. In certain limited situations, strategiesthat derive from traditional peacekeeping (with itsunderlying emphasis on confidence building) can beeffective. In more challenging situations, however,when predation co-exists with fear, confidencebuilding will prove inadequate, and implementerswill need to compel and deter to insure compliancewith a peace agreement. Third, the results raise thefundamental issue of what economists refer to as“incentive compatibility” or what we commonlyknow as “political feasibility”: that strategies must bein the self-interest of critical actors to implement.Difficult implementation environments require moreresources, greater international involvement, andmore coercive strategies, but often such resources,involvement, and strategies are not forthcomingbecause no major or regional power sees the relation-ship between peace and war in a given country to bein its own vital strategic interest. The problem ofincentive compatibility usually is subsumed underarguments that a lack of political will is theproblem—that if only more will were found, thentougher cases would receive the needed attention andresources. But the emphasis on political willmisleads: it takes a relatively fixed variable – percep-tion of vital national interest of regional and majorpowers – and treats it as if it were easily manipu-lated. The CISAC - I PA study argues that this is avexing analytical error that overestimates thecommitment of international actors to making peacein war-torn countries of peripheral securityi m p o r t a n c e .

The project also scrutinized claims that are oftenmade about the importance of various implementa-tion sub-goals and their role in the overall successand failure of peace accords. Such claims grew inprominence in the 1990s, as various internationalnon-governmental organizations lobbied publics and

governments, insisting that their single issue ofconcern—whether it be disarmament, elections,human rights, or refugee repatriation—was crucial toimplementation success. Two major findings emergefrom an examination of the sub-goals and the overallsuccess of implementation. First, in terms of what canbe achieved in the fulfillment of any sub-goal, thedesires of implementers must be commensurate withallocated resources and permissible strategies. Forexample, one could argue that post-agreementelections should only be held under optimalconditions, or insist that every peace accord mustinclude provisions for full accountability andprosecution for past atrocities and war crimes, ordemand that all refugees be repatriated to theiroriginal homes. In the absence of commitment ofadequate resources and troops, however, ambitiousstandards for sub-goals are symbolic statements ofvirtue, not practical means of terminating wars.Second, in terms of the degree of investment in sub-goals, priority should be given to the demobilizationof soldiers and the demilitarization of politics, that is,the transformation of warring armies into politicalparties. Without achieving these two critical sub-goals, civil wars cannot be brought to an end, andimportant normative goals such as the creation andconsolidation of democracy and the protection ofhuman rights have little chance of success.

The project also identified two low-cost opportunitiesthat should be pursued during implementation: 1)civilian security through police and judicial reform;and 2) local capacity-building for human rights andreconciliation. Although the study did not discover asingle case of failed implementation that resulted froma failure to pursue these opportunities, we found thatthe potential long-term benefits of security reform anddeveloping local capacities for peacebuilding warrantthe relatively inexpensive investments that suchmeasures require.

Several policy recommendations follow from ourstudy. These recommendations cluster along threedimensions: 1) when international actors should getinvolved in attempting to implement peace; 2) thecapabilities that are needed for international actors tosucceed in peace implementation; and 3) priorities tobe undertaken during peace implementation.


Introduction 5

When To Get Involved

• When selecting which peace agreements the UNshould implement, major powers or regional powerinterest should be treated as a hard constraint.

• Without great or regional power interest, theUnited Nations should not implement hard cases.

• Before attempting to implement a peace agreementin a country where there are easily marketedvaluable commodities (spoils), potential spoilers,and hostile neighbors, the implementer shouldhave the strategy, resources, and commitment tomanage such challenges.

Needed Capabilities

• Given the importance of judgment about thedifficulty of implementation environment, there isa need at the United Nations for better strategicassessment concerning possible peace implementa-tion missions.

• Given the importance of the role that spoilers play

in implementation failure, there is a need forintelligence gathering and assessment concerningthe motives, intentions, and capabilities of partieswho sign peace agreements and parties who areomitted from peace agreements.

• Given that such intelligence is fallible and thatthere will be missions where unanticipated violentchallenges may erupt during implementation, thereis a need for the United Nations to improve itscontingency planning for peace operations.

Priorities

• Emphasis must be given to the demilitarization ofpolitics: demobilizing armies, disarming troops,returning soldiers to civilian life, and transformingarmed factions into political parties.

• To create a bridge from short-term implementationto long-term peacebuilding, implementers shouldpromote civilian security through police andjudicial reform and build local capacity for humanrights and reconciliation.


6 Introduction

Implementation: The Link BetweenMediation and Peacebuilding

For the most part analyses of conflict resolution andcivil war have paid scant attention to the short-termimplementation of peace agreements and have insteadfocused on the mediation of agreements and/or long-term peacebuilding. Because the negotiated settlementof civil wars was a relatively rare phenomenon in theCold War era, studies in the 1980s focused primarily onthe conditions and tools for getting parties in civil warsto sign agreements.1 Rather legalistically, scholarsassumed that a contract between state and insurgentleaders would remain binding in the post-agreementphase. There was also a tendency to conceive ofconflict resolution in a linear fashion, where successfulnegotiation signaled an irreversible reduction inconflict. Successful cases in the 1980s—Zimbabwe,Namibia, and Nicaragua—reinforced these assumptions.Before long, however, several civil wars—Angola,Rwanda, and Liberia—defied the linear view of conflictresolution and brought attention to the difficulties ofgetting parties to live up to their commitments topeace.2 Far from being a time of conflict reduction, theperiod immediately after the signing of a peaceagreement seemed fraught with risk, uncertainty, andvulnerability for the warring parties and civilianscaught in between.

We have rather thin knowledge of this dangerousperiod because, for the most part, scholars asked thewrong question of the cases. They asked: when antago-nists in a civil war sign a peace agreement, what caninternational actors do to insure that the society willnot experience war in the future? This is the wrong

question because it misses a prior question that ismuch more causally direct: when antagonists in civilwar sign a peace agreement, what can internationalactors do to prevent a recurrence of that war? Thedifference between preventing the return of a specificwar with roughly the same cast of characters andpreventing forever the outbreak of war is crucial. Theformer, albeit extremely difficult, lies in the realm ofpossibility, while the latter is unachievable in theshort-term. And it is usually in the short-term whencombatants return to war and when hundreds ofthousands die.

Peace implementation is the process of carrying out aspecific peace agreement. It focuses on the narrow,relatively short-term (three months in the case ofZimbabwe, five years plus in the case of Bosnia) effortsto get warring parties to comply with their writtencommitments to peace. Success is measured in relationto the conclusion of the war on a self-enforcing basis:when the outsiders leave, do the former warring partiesrefrain from returning to war? The relevant evaluationcriteria are much narrower than the basket of goodsassociated with peacebuilding (e.g. the amelioration ofroot causes of conflict, and the promotion of justice,positive peace, harmony, and reconciliation ofenemies), but are broader than the accomplishment ofspecific, mandated tasks.3

Measures of peace implementation are narrower thanindicators of peacebuilding because good things likereconciliation, justice, democracy, and the rule of lawcannot be attained in the short-run. Moreover,measuring the effect of short-term action by outcomes10-15 years in the future is problematic because thepassage of time is the enemy of inference. As two of


Implementation: The Link Between Mediation and Peacebuilding 7

1See, for example, I. William Zartman, Ripe for Resolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Richard Haass, Conflicts

Unending (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and Stephen John Stedman, Peacemaking in Civil War (Boulder, CO: LynneRienner, 1991).2Stephen John Stedman, “UN Intervention in Civil Wars: Imperatives of Choice and Strategy,” in Donald C.F. Daniel and Bradd C.

Hayes, eds., Beyond Traditional Peacekeeping (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 40-64; Fen Osler Hampson, Nurturing Peace:Why Peace Settlements Succeed or Fail (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1996); Stephen John Stedman, “Mediationand Negotiation in Internal Conflicts,” in Michael Brown, ed., International Dimensions of Internal Conflicts (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1996), pp. 341-376; and Barbara Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement,” International Organization, Vol. 51: No.3 (Summer 1997), pp. 335-64.3For a critical but sympathetic review of the peacebuilding literature, see Elizabeth Cousens, “Introduction,” in Elizabeth Cousens and

Chetan Kumar, with Karin Wermester, eds., Peacebuilding as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies (Boulder, CO: LynneRienner, 2000), pp. 1-20.

our authors argue, “The further away one gets in timefrom the conclusion of a peace mission, the more likelyit is that any number of other extraneous factors (e.g.business cycles, famines, unusually good or badw e a t h e r, the policies of a neighboring state, thebehavior of the first elected leaders) are what isactually responsible for what has taken place ratherthan the technology of the peace mission itself. As thepotential impact of such exogenous factors increases,the quality of our inferences about the contribution ofthe peace operation itself tends to diminish until thepoint where it breaks down completely.”4

Some performance indicators, especially thosesuggested by scholars of peacebuilding, run the furtherdanger of setting such high thresholds of success thatwe are left with a world of undifferentiated failure. Forexample, Roland Paris has argued that one shouldjudge the success of peace operations in the 1990s bythe standard of “creating conditions that will allowpeace to endure long after the peacekeepers have left.”For Paris, such conditions include economic growth,equitable development, and good governance. By thesestandards, Paris asserts that only one peace operationin the 1990s—Namibia—can be judged a success.5

Correspondingly, the list of failures then includes notonly unmitigated disasters such as Rwanda andAngola, but also operations where war has ended, suchas Mozambique, El Salvador, Bosnia, and Nicaragua.By failing to discriminate between catastrophic failuressuch as Rwanda and Angola, and flawed successessuch as El Salvador, Cambodia, and Mozambique, Parisholds evaluation hostage to an unreasonable standardof success and insures that it will yield very littleinformation that can be used to improve futuremissions. Good things like economic growth, equitabledevelopment, and good governance should be strivenfor, but they form a useless standard for evaluatingimplementation actions that take place in a shortperiod of time.

In our project we chose to operationalize missionsuccess with reference to two variables: 1) whether the

specific war that the peace agreement was designed toaddress is brought to an end while the implementersare present; and 2) whether the war is terminated on aself-enforcing basis, so that the implementers canwithdraw without fear of the war resuming. Weassessed each case of peace implementation by thesemeasures and then further subjected the cases to aninformal, counterfactual analysis about the specificcontribution of the implementers to the result. If thepeacekeepers could not bring the war to a close, as inRwanda, Angola, Somalia, or Sri Lanka, the missionwas coded as a failure. If the peacekeepers brought thewar to a close, but could not leave for fear of the warrestarting as in Bosnia, we coded the case as a partialsuccess. If the peacekeepers brought the war to a closeand departed without the war restarting in a two yearperiod, as in El Salvador, Mozambique, Guatemala, andNicaragua, we coded the case as a success.

We then went further to ask what most likely wouldhave occurred in the mission’s absence. It is the differ-ence between this estimated outcome and whatoccurred in the presence of the mission that representsthe basis for evaluating the mission’s impact. It makesno sense to credit outside implementers with achievingsomething that would have happened anyway or toblame them for being ineffective when the situationwould very likely have gotten far worse in theirabsence. Without the estimate of the counterfactual,the researcher is implicitly taking the moment of themission’s initiation as the status quo and benchmarkfor assessment and assuming that everything thathappened afterwards was caused by the implementers.

Careful evaluation of the sixteen peace operations inthe CISAC - I PA study led us to alter our initial estimatesof two cases. The case of Liberia, which would havebeen coded as a success based on the criterion of endingthe war on a self-sustaining basis, we downgraded to apartial success to take better account of evidence thatthe actions of the implementers actually delayed resolu-tion of the war. The case of Cambodia, which wouldhave been coded as a failure based on the criterion of


8 Implementation: The Link Between Mediation and Peacebuilding

4George Downs and Stephen John Stedman, “Evaluating the International Implementation of Peace Agreements in Civil Wars,” in

Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild and Elizabeth Cousens, eds., Ending Civil Wars: Volume II: Implementation of PeaceAgreements, forthcoming.5Roland Paris, “Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism,” International Security, Vol. 22: No. 2 (Fall 1997), pp. 54-89.

ending the war, we upgraded to a partial successbecause, although the country was still at war, thesecurity situation of the country was much improved bythe time the peace operation was terminated.

To address the gaps in our understanding of peaceimplementation, the CISAC-IPA project did not assumethat all civil wars were equally difficult to end throughnegotiation. Our instinct was that some implementa-tion environments were more difficult than others andthat successful implementation of peace would be, inpart, a function of easier environments. Second, weassumed that the greater amount of internationalcommitment involved, the greater the likelihood thatimplementation would succeed. But we also assumedthat all civil wars do not receive equal attention orresources. Here, we took a step back from the observa-tion that robust international involvement per sefavored success to ask which conflicts attract more

international involvement in peace implementation.6

Again, our instinct was that both the degree of interna-tional attention and the amount of resources devotedto peace implementation was a function of some otherimportant variable, and that knowledge of thatvariable would allow us to specify when internationalcommitment would be forthcoming. Third, we assumedthat there were interaction effects between context andwillingness: that more difficult cases would needgreater international commitment and that, in the moredifficult cases, international actors would have to dothings differently than in easier cases. In essence, wefelt that the strategies of international actors mattered– an insight that often gets lost in vague generaliza-tions about international attention or guarantees.Fourth, given that international actors are called uponto do so much in peace implementation, we wanted toknow which sub-goals contained in implementationmandates were more important to success.


Implementation: The Link Between Mediation and Peacebuilding 9

6Fen Hampson and Barbara Walter argue that international attention (Hampson) or international guarantees (Walter) are crucial for

negotiated termination of civil wars. See Hampson, Nurturing Peace, and Barbara Walter, “The Crucial Barrier.”


Determinants of SuccessfulImplementation

Although not specifically concerned with civil war,p e a c e keeping, or war termination, the general litera-ture on policy implementation provides crucialinsight into the conditions under which a peaceagreement might succeed or fail. A policy implemen-tation perspective requires that we pay attention tothe environment surrounding implementation andrecognize that some environments are moreconducive to implementation than others. Such aperspective also looks to the coalitions that supportimplementation and their willingness to investresources. As a first cut, therefore, our projectascertained what makes some peace implementationenvironments more difficult and challenging thanothers. Our second cut was to determine which casesget the most resources.

Based on findings from the scholarly literature onpeacemaking in civil war, we created a difficulty scorefor peace implementation based on the following eightvariables:7 the number of warring parties; the lack ofeither a peace agreement before intervention or acoerced peace agreement; the likelihood of spoilers; acollapsed state; the number of soldiers; the presence ofdisposable natural resources; the presence of hostileneighboring states or networks; and demands forsecession.

• The number of warring parties. The difficulty ofimplementation increases when there are more than twowarring parties.8 Strategies become less predictable,balances of power become more tenuous, and alliancesbecome more fluid. In Cambodia, for example, anyaction that the United Nations might have taken againstthe Khmer Rouge had to be weighed against the effectssuch action would have had on Funcinpec, which relied

on the Khmer Rouge to balance against the State ofC a m b o d i a .9 In cases where a proliferation of warringparties occurred, as in Somalia and Liberia, implementersconstantly found it difficult to craft solutions that wouldaddress the concerns of all the warring factions. Whereany factions found themselves excluded, the peaceagreement faced their violent opposition.

• The absence of a peace agreement signed by all majorwarring parties before intervention and with a minimumof coercion. The United Nations has usually required adetailed peace agreement among the warring parties as asign of their consent to a peace mission as a pre-condition for its involvement. In the 1980s and 1990s,h o w e v e r, the United Nations intervened in manyongoing wars and, in several instances, either it or aregional organization or a state intervened in the hope ofusing force to compel a peace agreement: the UN inSomalia, ECOMOG in Liberia and Sierra Leone, India inSri Lanka, NATO in Bosnia, and Syria in Lebanon.Intervention in the absence of a peace agreement like l ywill trigger violent opposition by parties who value thepre-intervention status quo. The absence of a peaceagreement implies a lack of problem-solving, trust, andconfidence-building among the warring factions, thusproducing a more difficult implementation environment.

• The likelihood of spoilers. The presence of spoilers inpeace agreements poses daunting challenges toi m p l e m e n t a t i o n .10 One critique of the spoiler concept,h o w e v e r, is that spoilers are only recognized after thefact. This criticism can be addressed by attempting togauge whether prospective implementers judged thatthey were likely to face violent challenges duringimplementation. A more sophisticated criticism of thespoiler concept is that potential spoilers are alwayspresent and whether an actor actually engages inspoiling behavior depends on the existence of a specialopportunity structure.11 There is, as we shall see, someevidence that this is at least partially the case.

• Collapsed State. The lack of state institutions andgoverning capacity places great demands on peace

10 Determinants of Successful Implementation

7This section draws from Downs and Stedman, “Evaluation of International Implementation.”

8Gerardo L. Munck and Chetan Kumar, “Civil Conflicts and the conditions for successful international intervention: a comparative study

of Cambodia and El Salvador,” Review of International Studies Vol. 21: No. 2 (1995), pp. 159-181 and Michael Doyle and NicholasSambanis, “International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and Quantitative Analysis,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 94: No. 4,(December 2000).9Sorpong Peou, “Implementing Cambodia’s Peace Agreement: Challenges, Strategy, and Outcome” in Stephen John Stedman, Donald

Rothchild and Elizabeth Cousens, eds. Ending Civil Wars, Volume I: From Mediation to Implementation, forthcoming, and StephenJohn Stedman, “Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes,” International Security, Vol. 22, No. 2, (Fall 1997), pp. 32-36.10

Stedman, “Spoiler Problems.”

implementers. In addition to bringing fighting to a close,the implementers must create and build up a modicum ofstate capacity in order for the peace to have a chance tosustain itself.

• Number of soldiers. At some level, numbers matter. Highnumbers of soldiers pose greater demands for verifica-tion and monitoring and, hence, a greater potential forsuccessful cheating. Moreover, greater numbers ofsoldiers require more personnel for monitoring and moreresources for demobilization. We scored cases wherethere were more than 50,000 soldiers as being difficult toi m p l e m e n t .

• Disposable natural resources. If warring parties haveaccess to disposable resources such as gems, minerals, ort i m b e r, implementation becomes more difficult. Suchresources not only provide armies with a means forcontinued fighting, they also become the reward againstwhich they weigh the benefits of peace.1 2 A key differ-ence between Mozambique and Angola is that, in thelatter country, UNITA’s access to diamonds emboldenedtheir spoiler behavior, whereas RENAMO’s lack of accessto such resources effectively limited the benefits ofreturning to war.1 3

• Hostile Neighboring States or Networks. Civil warsrarely take place in otherwise stable regions. As Pe t e rWallensteen and Margareta Sollenberg observe, manycivil wars today intersect with regional conflicts andinterstate competition.1 4 From this it would follow thatthe attitude of the surrounding states towards a peaceagreement in a neighbor’s civil war plays a key role insupporting or undermining the prospects of peace.Spoilers to a peace agreement, for example, are like l yto be much stronger and more vocal if they areconfident that they can count on neighboring states fors a n c t u a r y, guns, fuel, and capital.1 5 L i kewise, in regionswhere weak states have little control over borders,well-organized private or semi-official networks canallow neighboring states to take advantage of suchstate decrepitude to support spoilers in the war-tornc o u n t r y.

• Wars of Secession. There is a plausible argument thatnegotiated settlements are more difficult to attain andimplement where civil wars are fought over nationals o v e r e i g n t y.1 6 Such conflicts often revert to all-or-nothing struggles that make the job of would-beimplementers more difficult than in cases where warringparties share a common identity and at least agree on aunitary future for their country.

The more these indicators are present, the greater thedifficulty of bringing the conflict to an end. Theconflict environment, however, is only one aspect ofimplementation success or failure. Internationalwillingness is also crucial: low degrees of interest andcommitment either lead to no intervention or, alterna-tively, to an intervention with an extremely limitedstrategy set in the sense that implementers will beconstrained by the resources they can deploy and therange of sub-goals they can pursue. Constraints on thestrategy set need not be a problem when theimplementation environment is easy. But difficultenvironments and constrained strategies can be arecipe for disaster, as in the examples of Rwanda,Angola, Sierra Leone, where the Security Councilauthorized the UN to implement an agreement, but didnot provide adequate resources.

We scored our cases on three indicators of interest andcommitment, what we refer to as a “willingness score”:1) major or regional power interest; 2) commitment ofresources; 3) and acceptance of risk of casualties tosoldiers.

• Major or regional power interest. A key sign of a highcommitment to a mission is whether large, powerfulstates support intervention and publicly define theconflict as important to their own vital security interests.The more remote that a mission is from a powerful state’svital security interests, the more likely it is beingu n d e r t a ken for symbolic reasons that are unlikely to


Determinants of Successful Implementation 11

11Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler have made a similar argument in connection with the factors that inspire rebellion in the first place.

See Greed and Grievance, Policy Research Paper 2355, World Bank Development Group, May 2000.12

There is an emerging literature on the political economy of civil wars and its effect on prospects for war termination. See, for example,Mats Berdal and David M. Malone, eds., Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wa r s ( B o u l d e r, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000).13

Stedman, “Spoiler Problems,” pp. 47-48.14

Peter Wallensteen and Margareta Sollenberg, “Armed Conflicts, Conflict Termination and Peace Agreements, 1989-96,” Journal ofPeace Research, Vol. 34: No. 3 (Fall 1997), pp. 339-358.15

Stedman, “Spoiler Problems,” p. 51.16

Chaim Kaufman, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Civil Wars,” International Security, Vol. 20: No. 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 136-175.


12 Determinants of Successful Implementation

inspire the outlay of more than a very modest amount ofr e s o u r c e s .

• Resource commitment. Crucial for successful implemen-tation is the willingness of states to provide adequatefinancial resources for a mission. But such resources varyby case, and this is often known before a mission evenbegins. In Cambodia, for example, the Security Councilprovided extreme leeway to planners to judge whatresources were needed for a successful mission. InRwanda, on the other hand, the Security Council rejectedthe figures provided by its own field mission, and insteadimposed extreme limits on resources available.

• Acceptance of risk to soldiers. We scored this separatelyfrom financial resource commitment because policy-m a kers evaluate the risk to their own troops differentlythan a judgment about financial resources.

Table 2 lists the cases in our study, the principalimplementer, the conflict difficulty score, and theinternational willingness score. The higher thedifficulty score, the more difficult the implementationenvironment; the higher the willingness score, thegreater the willingness of international actors tocommit to the effort.

Our analysis found that only four of the variablesstudied are statistically significant for explainingimplementation success: 1) the existence of a spoiler;2) the presence of disposable resources; 3) the presenceof a neighboring state that is hostile to the peaceagreement; 4) and the presence of major powerinterest. Consistent with our expectations, the firstthree factors reduce the chances of successfulimplementation, while the last improves it. Thesummary scores—conflict difficulty and internationalwillingness—together explain about 65% of thevariance in implementation outcomes. All of the othervariables have an impact that is in the predicteddirection but – given that we studied only sixteen cases– is not statistically significant.

Figure 1 illustrates the intersection of conflictd i f f i c u l t y, the degree of major or regional powerinterest, and implementation outcome. The cases ofGuatemala, El Salvador, Namibia, and Nicaragua allscored as low on difficulty of implementation contextsand high in great or regional power interest. Nots u r p r i s i n g l y, all were successful. Mozambique andZimbabwe fell in the low-to-medium range of

Table 2. Peace Implementation CasesTime Principal Difficulty Willingness

Case Period Implementer Score* Score* Outcome

Zimbabwe 1980 Great Britain 4 1 SuccessSri Lanka 1987-89 India 6 1.7 FailureNamibia 1989-90 UN 0 1.7 Success

Nicaragua 1989-90 UN 1 1.5 SuccessLebanon 1990- Syria 5 2.7 Partial SuccessLiberia 1990-98 ECOWAS 6 2.1 Partial Success

Angola I 1991-93 UN 4 .4 FailureCambodia 1991-94 UN 5 2.2 Partial Success

Mozambique 1992-95 UN 2 1.2 SuccessEl Salvador 1992-94 UN 1 1.5 Success

Somalia 1993 UN 5 1.4 FailureRwanda 1993-94 UN 3 .4 Failure

Angola II 1994-99 UN 4 .9 FailureBosnia 1995- NATO 6 2.2 Partial Success

Guatemala 1996-97 UN 0 1.5 SuccessSierra Leone 1996-98 ECOWAS 6 .7 Failure

*Difficulty Score: 0 = lowest, 8 = highest*Willingness Score: 0 = lowest, 3 = highest

Liberia Sierra Leone

CambodiaLebanon Bosnia


Determinants of Successful Implementation 13

implementation difficulty and, although their interestscores were not as high as the cases mentionedabove, their peace agreements were successfullyi m p l e m e n t e d .

To the right of the graph are the more difficult cases.Where major or regional power interest was low, as in

Angola, Somalia, and Rwanda, or medium as in SriLanka, implementation failed. In the most difficultcases, substantial major or regional power interest wasenough to compensate for the difficulty of environ-ment to produce partial success in Cambodia, Lebanon,Bosnia, and Liberia, but was not enough to achievesuccess in Sierra Leone.

Figure 1: Interest and Difficulty: Case Outcomes

1

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0

Difficulty Score

Success

Partial Success

Failure

0 2 4 6 8

GuatemalaNicaraguaEl Salvador

Namibia

Sri Lanka

Rwanda Somalia

Angola IAngola II

Mozambique Zimbabwe

Strategies, Coordination, andIncentive Compatibility Issues

Our project found that as the difficulty of theimplementation environment increases, there is a needfor greater scope and assertiveness of the transitionalauthority that is supplied by international actors.17

Similarly, the greater the difficulty of the implementa-tion environment, the greater the need for coercivestrategies of implementation.18 Yet, the availability ofmore robust strategies to international implementers isa function of major and regional power interest. Whenmajor or regional powers do not see a particularconflict as affecting their vital security interests, theydo not provide the resources and commitmentnecessary for more intrusive, coercive implementationstrategies.

Incentive compatibility affects not only the choice ofgrand strategy, but also the availability of mechanismsthat are needed to provide strategic coherence andcoordination. As Bruce Jones argues, the more difficultthe implementation environment, the greater the needfor strategic coordination.19 When international actorssuffer from a lack of unity or do not fully support anoperation, would-be spoilers can take advantage ofinternational splits to attack the peace process andthreaten would-be peacemakers. Similarly, the morecoercive the strategy, the greater the civil-militarytensions that implementation will encounter.20 Wheninternational troops are at risk, troop-donating statestend to insist on greater day-to-day management ofthe political conduct of the mission. Such interferencecan undermine the ability of the implementation forceto diagnose and respond effectively to spoilers.

The use of mechanisms such as “Friends of theSecretary General” are fundamentally a function of

great and regional power interest. The willingness ofstates to join a “Friends” group is indicative of a priorjudgment that stabilizing a specific conflict is in thestate’s interest.21 The result is that such mechanisms forcoordination will be unavailable in cases whereinterest is low; for example, there was no “Friends ofSomalia”, because there were no major or regionalpowers who had security interests enough to justifyinvesting resources and effort in building a peacefulSomalia.

Incentive compatibility and the gap between what isneeded in some missions and what the major orregional powers are willing to provide has led toorganizational pathologies within the United Nations.Left unaddressed, these pathologies may lead to theend of UN involvement in making peace.2 2 T h eSecretariat seems to have learned that the SecurityCouncil will authorize a peace mission only if itperceives that the operation will be safe and easy.When threats or dangers have appeared, the reaction ofthe Security Council has been to cut and run. Facedwith these constraints as early as Rwanda, UN bureau-crats have been reluctant to share worrisome conflictassessments and tend only to “ask for what the trafficwill bear.” The need to present optimistic scenarios tothe Security Council precludes contingency planning,since the basic premise of such planning signals thatless than optimistic scenarios are possible. In somecases, pressures for the UN to present a successful faceto its political masters have led missions such asAngola in 1997 and Sierra Leone in 1999 to ignoreblatant non-compliance by the warring parties. At itsworst, as in East Timor in 1999, the UN Secretariatengaged in a reckless gamble to sell the SecurityCouncil on the mission by downplaying its difficulty,hoping that, if things went bad, the Security Counciland UN member-states would be embarrassed into aresponse.


14 Strategies, Coordination and Incentive Compatibility Issues

17 Michael Doyle, “Transitional Authority,” in Stedman, Rothchild, and Cousens, Ending Civil Wars: Volume II.

18 Stephen John Stedman, “From Mediation to Implementation: The Strategy Gap,” in Stedman, Rothchild, and Cousens, Ending Civil

Wars: Volume I.19

Bruce Jones, “The Challenge of Strategic Coordination: Containing Opposition and Sustaining Implementation,” in Stedman,Rothchild, and Cousens, Ending Civil Wars: Vol. II.20

Karen Guttieri, “Civil-Military Relations,” in Stedman, Rothchild, and Cousens, Ending Civil Wars: Vol. II.21

Jones, “The Challenge of Strategic Coordination,” Ending Civil Wars: Vol. II.22

Downs and Stedman, “Evaluating the International Implementation,” Ending Civil Wars: Vol. II.

Evaluation of Sub-Goals

The CISAC-IPA project sought to shed light on theimportance of various sub-goals in peace implementa-tion. The reasons for doing so were twofold. First,when mandates contain multiple tasks and operationsface constraints on resources, implementers will likelyreview the broad set of tasks that they are asked toaccomplish and decide between those which areprimary and those secondary to ending the war. In acomplex environment, it is possible that any attempt toaccomplish all tasks at once will produce incoherentpolicy and strategy that can severely underminechances of success. In such circumstances, adviceabout which sub-goals to prioritize is of utmostimportance. The second reason for our evaluation isthe recent proliferation of implementation sub-goals.During the 1990s, a cottage industry developed aroundpeace implementation as a greater number of non-governmental organizations argued for the overridingimportance of an increasing number of particular sub-goals—human rights, disarmament, economicreconstruction, or civilian security—as critical tosecuring peace. Rarely were these claims subjected toempirical evaluation and, when they were, the findingswere often flawed by basic errors. The threat of failurelooms whenever the priorities of implementers are setby appeals to faith and sentiment, rather than byreference to a careful analysis of what will likely workin a given environment. This danger was underscoredby one implementer who observed that, in hisoperation, the problem was not one of too fewresources, but of resources being earmarked for activi-ties that were either not essential to ending the war orunsustainable in the absence of ending the war.

Before proceeding to a discussion of individual sub-goals, several points require clarification. What hasbeen said above concerning incentive compatibilityand overall success also pertains to sub-goals. Howevernoble they may be, ambitions concerning justice andaccountability, or the ideal conditions for holdingelections, or those for the repatriation of refugees to

their homes have to be commensurate with availableresources and permissible strategies. A demand forsome combatants to be tried as war criminals, forexample, makes sense – indeed is only feasible—ifimplementers are willing to employ a robust, coercivestrategy. But, as pointed out earlier, unless stabilizingthe particular country is perceived by a regional ormajor power to be in its security interests, there will belittle coercive capability or the will to prevail if acoercive strategy is challenged.

A second point concerns the difficulty of evaluatingthe relative contribution of various sub-goals to overallimplementation success. Various sub-goals do interact;success in one area can affect success in another area.The importance of this interaction will be missed,however, if sub-goals are analyzed in isolation fromone another, and this can lead to any number ofmistaken inferences.23 For example, Human RightsWatch asserts that the failure to protect and furtherhuman rights in Angola best explains the UnitedNations’ failure to implement peace there.24 But, asTonya Putnam’s contribution to our studydemonstrates, the protection and furtherance of humanrights during peace implementation dependscompletely on the ability of the implementers topersuade the warring parties to demobilize and disarmtheir soldiers and turn their armies into politicalparties.25 In the absence of progress in demobilizationand the demilitarization of politics, implementers havelittle hope of achieving improved observance of humanrights standards.

Finally, the character of the implementation environ-ment also matters in the evaluation of sub-goals.Again, to use the human rights example, the success ofpeacekeepers in promoting and protecting humanrights during peace implementation can vary dramati-cally according to the conflict environment. Protectinghuman rights in Somalia, for example, where there wasno existing rule of law, no civil society, no functioningstate, and where spoilers sought to destroy the peaceagreement, was much more difficult than protecting


Evaluation of Sub-Goals 15

23 Ibid.

24 Human Rights Watch, Angola Unravels: The Rise and Fall of the Lusaka Peace Process ( N Y: Human Rights Watch, 1999).

25 Tonya Putnam, “Human Rights and Sustainable Peace,” in Stedman, Rothchild, and Cousens, Ending Civil Wars: Vol. II.

human rights in El Salvador, where the two warringparties agreed to make reform of the judiciary andpolicy institutions a key aspect of the peace agreement.

Demobilization and Reintegration of Combatants

Our study found that the demobilization of soldiers andtheir reintegration into civilian life is the single mostimportant sub-goal of peace implementation.26 Theending of a civil war hinges on the willingness ofcompeting armies to relinquish self-help solutions totheir insecurity, to demobilize their soldiers, and inmost circumstances, to create a new, integrated army.These are processes, however, that are fraught withrisks for antagonists. International implementers canreduce such risks by acting as guarantors—by deterringany party from taking advantage of their adversary’svulnerability and by protecting any party that is takenadvantage of during demobilization. Our study,h o w e v e r, found that such guarantees are seldomforthcoming from implementers. With the exceptionsof NATO in Bosnia, Syria in Lebanon, and ECOWAS (onoccasion) in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the implementersin our study did not commit to such guarantees.However understandable, this omission goes to theheart of incentive compatibility and the willingness ofoutsiders to undertake to implement a peaceagreement: the costs of implementation and the risk ofbecoming a direct combatant in a civil war are veryoften more than implementers are willing to bear. Mostof the implementers in the cases we examined limitedtheir role to monitoring, verifying, and facilitatingdemobilization.

As practiced in most of the missions that we studied,such monitoring has been flawed by the lack of anintelligence capacity to assess the motives behindviolations of demobilization agreements and by theunwillingness of implementers to set and maintainstrict standards of compliance. An assessment ofmotives is important because cheating is pervasive inthe demobilization of soldiers. Our study, however,found different motives for cheating – motives that

had important implications for the prospects ofsuccessful war termination. Starting with the mostbenign among them, warring parties may hold troopsback from demobilization as a form of insuranceagainst adversary attack. Less benignly, parties maykeep troops in reserve in order to gain a potentialadvantage in elections, even deploying them for thepurpose of electoral intimidation. Finally, the mostmalignant motive for cheating is a deliberate effort tosucker an opponent or take military advantage of arival who, already having complied with demobiliza-tion accords, is strategically vulnerable.

Since motives are important for outcomes, a premiumshould be placed on the robust monitoring and verifi-cation of demobilization. We found that the greatestdanger stems from implementers who are lax inacknowledging, reporting, or responding to violationsof demobilization agreements. In Angola,implementers did not call the parties to account forsuch violations for fear that condemnation wouldhinder the implementers’ ability to act as impartialbrokers. Worse, the implementers would later falselyverify UNITA’s demobilization in order to claim themission as a success. In Rwanda, the UN Department ofPe a c e keeping Operations (DPKO) prohibited itspeacekeepers from aggressively investigating reports ofhidden arms caches for fear that such investigationmight provoke violence by extremists.

Disarmament

Unlike the demobilization of soldiers, the accomplish-ment of large-scale disarmament does not appear to beas crucial to implementation success.27 Disarmament,when it occurred, followed demobilization; conversely,in the absence of demobilization, disarmament did notoccur. Further, there were cases, such as Mozambique,where demobilization was largely successful butdisarmament was a failure; hundreds of thousands ofweapons were said to have been cached by the warringsides and these weapons were not eliminated byONUMOZ.


16 Evaluation of Sub-Goals

26 Joanna Spear, “Demobilization and Disarmament: Key Implementation Issues,” in Stedman, Rothchild, and Cousens, Ending Civil

Wars: Volume II.27

I b i d .

Successful disarmament is greatly affected by theimplementation environment. Where there is a lack ofa functioning state to provide individual security, orwhere the police is believed to be “owned” by partic-ular groups and is unwilling to provide impartialjustice, then disarmament will be extremely difficult. Insuch circumstances, individuals and groups turn to gunownership as a means of self-protection.

Elections

Our study found that implementers often hold electionsfor multiple, sometimes contradictory goals: wartermination, democratization, and for their ownorganizational purposes.28 When such goals are inconflict, as they often are, our study advocates thepriority of war termination. Critics of these so-called“settlement elections” often compare the results of suchelections against impossibly high standards or againstalternatives that are not politically feasible. Theproblem for implementers is to gauge what is possibleto achieve from holding elections and to consider whatalternatives may be available.

In terms of the process of carrying out elections, ourstudy emphasizes the need for substantial investmentin demilitarizing politics. A concerted effort totransform armies into viable political parties can playa crucial role in persuading rebels to compete forpower peaceably within the political arena, therebystrengthening the prospects for war termination. Evenin elections whose short-term results are unlikely tofurther democratization, the process can matter. Theconstruction of electoral authorities and institutionswith legitimacy and effectiveness can serve as a bridgeto long-term democratization.

Elections decide who will rule in a country emergingfrom civil war and how power will be concentrated.These are fundamental conditions for war termination.But what might be necessary to bring a war to a closemay or may not forward the goal of democracy,depending primarily on who wins the election, how it

is carried out, and the legitimacy that is accorded toboth the process and the winner by the new electorate.Liberia is a case in point. Most international observersbelieved that the election of Charles Taylor in 1998 wasnecessary to bring the country’s civil war to a close.Given Taylor’s authoritarian and corrupt behavior bothbefore and during the war, however, few observers sawthose elections as holding out much hope fordemocracy in Liberia. Indeed, many Liberians saw theelection as a referendum on the terms of bringing thewar to an end: a vote for Taylor was a vote for endingthe war.

C o n v e r s e l y, elections may produce results that arefavorable for democracy in the longer run – theopportunity for citizens to express preferences overwho should rule – but may also prove antithetical towar termination. Where a losing party, such as JonasSavimbi’s UNITA, is committed to returning to war ifit loses an election, then the war will not end, nomatter how legitimate the election is regarded by thec i t i z e n r y.

Human Rights

Our study found that international human rightsorganizations have paradoxically asked for both toomuch and too little with regards to human rights andpeace implementation.29 They have asked for too muchby insisting on a doctrinaire approach to human rightsprotection in environments that are ill-suited for suchan approach. They have asked for too little by dogmat-ically refusing to assist new governments in workingtoward improved human rights performance and to seethat all sub-goals of peace implementation have ahuman rights component.

Although the promotion of human rights and theestablishment of institutions capable of advocating andprotecting human rights are desirable for societiesemerging from civil war, the demands and challengesof implementing peace in war-torn countries requiremore nuanced strategies than those typically chosen by


Evaluation of Sub-Goals 17

28 Terrence Lyons, “Implementing Peace and Building Democracy: The Role of Elections,” in Stedman, Rothchild, and Cousens, Ending

Civil Wars: Volume II.29

Tonya L. Putnam, “Human Rights and Sustainable Peace,” Ending Civil Wars: Volume II.

international human rights organizations (IHROs). TheCISAC-IPA study argues that an “exclusive reliance onthe enforcement approach to human rights protectionis entirely unsuited to the early stages of peaceimplementation.”30 Typically, IHROs have failed toappreciate the specific challenges posed by war-tornsocieties and have used strategies designed forenvironments where functioning governments and ruleof law already exist. This has led IHROs to threecommon errors: 1) to place undue importance onachieving a formal expression of human rightsprovisions in the main texts of peace settlements; 2) todemand individual responsibility for human rightsviolations in societies that lack even rudimentaryinvestigative, adjudicative, and compensatory institu-tions; and 3) to isolate human rights concerns byeschewing direct involvement with post-settlementgovernments and by failing to integrate human rightsconcerns with other key tasks of peace implementation.

Evidence from our cases of peace implementationsuggests that “the formal enumeration of human rightsprovisions in peace settlements correlates only weakly,if at all, with the quantity and quality of human rightsprotection during and after peace implementation.”Moreover, the ability of mediators to insist on theinclusion of human rights language in peaceagreements is extremely constrained.

The findings in our study do not imply that humanrights are irrelevant to the achievement of peace.Rather, they point to the need for a different approachby those who care about the promotion and protectionof human rights. First, human rights objectives must belinked to other instrumental tasks of peace implemen-tation. Second, human rights groups must work tobuild the capacity of locally based human rightsadvocates, who will have to do the heavy lifting overthe long haul.

Refugee Repatriation

Our study challenged two strongly held—if con-tending—beliefs concerning the relationship betweenrefugee repatriation and reintegration and thesuccessful implementation of peace: the belief thatthere can be no peace without repatriation and,conversely, the view that dismisses refugee concerns asperipheral to war termination.31 Instead, we found thatthere is a complicated relationship between refugeerepatriation and successful peace implementation, onethat depends greatly on the conflict environment andthe rhetoric of the implementers. In some cases, forexample, El Salvador, the fact that many refugees wereresettled in other countries and were not repatriatedcontributed to successful implementation of the peaceaccords. Refugees who were resettled became a crucialsource of needed capital at home through remittancesof income. And because so many refugees wereresettled, those who did repatriate faced less competi-tion for scarce jobs and land.

We also found that the relationship between refugeerepatriation and implementation success was affectedby the type of civil war. In wars concerning theexclusion of groups, as in Bosnia, an insistence onrepatriation to areas that had been ethnically cleansedduring wartime can lead to a resumption of violence.This, of course, creates a daunting ethical dilemma:where implementation success is measured simply bythe absence of war, the surest way to avoid new hostil-ities is to avoid repatriation. Yet, in practice, at least inBosnia, the reluctance of policy-makers to repatriaterefugees to their original homes and their unease withthe ethical implications of that choice has led to aworse outcome: a proclaimed right to return withoutenforcement, which, in the words of Howard Adelman,“is no real right to return and leads…to no repatriationand no resettlement.”32


18 Evaluation of Sub-Goals

30 I b i d .

31Howard Adelman, “Peace Agreements: Refugee Repatriation and Reintegration,” Ending Civil Wars: Volume II.

32 I b i d .

Bridges to Peacebuilding

Although our study focused on the short-term effortsof international implementers and judged theirperformance accordingly, we sought to identifyrecommendations for policies that could bridge the gapbetween peace implementation and peacebuilding. Ourstudy identified two important contributions thatimplementers can make in the short-term and withrelatively low costs that could prove to have largepayoffs for longer-term peacebuilding: the reform ofcivilian police and judiciaries and the strengthening oflocal civil society organizations.

Civilian Security

For good reasons, international implementers of peaceagreements focus on assuring the security of ex-combatants. But our study found that assuring thesecurity of the general population is a neglected aspectof peace implementation.3 3 This is problematic,however, given that many civil war settlements arebased on liberal norms and institutions which dependon citizens’ foregoing group-based protections andaccepting individual assurances of security by thenewly reformed state. In the absence of a police forcewhich can effectively provide those assurances, newpost-war arrangements seem unjust and in violation ofgroup rights. In an insecure environment, politicalentrepreneurs can engage in protection racketeeringthat undermines the credibility and authority of thenew state.

As Charles Call and William Stanley observe, “virtuallyall post-1989 cases of negotiated civil war terminationexperienced perceptions of heightened public insecu-rity, often as a result of documented increases inviolent crime.”34 As they point out, civil war settle-ments offer unique opportunities for redesigning andreforming civilian security institutions. The inclusionof civilian security reform into peace agreementsprovides implementers with clear guidelines forassistance programs. Our cases suggest importantlessons for such programs: the need to design andimplement judicial, penal, and police reforms intandem; and the importance of creating specializedpolice units, especially Criminal Investigative units andoversight offices (e.g. Internal Affairs, Inspectors-General, and Civilian Commissions).

Local Capacity Building: Civil SocietyOrganizations

At a relatively low cost, implementers can supportlocal civil society organizations that can play key rolesin sustaining peace after the implementers leave.35 Civilsociety organizations can help to sustain peaceagreements by working at the grassroots level tolegitimize peace and make it more than an eliteconcern. Local organizations can address key issuessuch as reconciliation, justice, and human rights—issues that go to the heart of what many consider to bethe root causes of civil wars. Moreover, local organiza-tions tend to have a longer time horizon and are moreadept at sustaining long term processes that areintegral to peacebuilding.


Bridges to Peacebuilding 19

33 Charles Call and William Stanley, “A Sacrifice for Peace? Security for the General Public During Implementation of Pe a c e

Agreements,” Ending Civil Wars: Volume II.34

I b i d .35

John Prendergast and Emily Plumb, “Civil Society Organizations and Peace Agreement Implementation,” Ending Civil Wars:Volume II.

Conclusion

The two worst humanitarian emergencies of the1990s—Angola in 1993 and Rwanda in 1994—followedthe failure of international actors to implement peaceagreements. In those countries, far more people died inthe aftermath of failed peace implementation than haddied from the preceding years of civil war. Whencombatants in civil wars sign a peace agreement, thereis potential for progress: long-standing wars withstaggering costs can be brought to an end and peoplecan gain the opportunity to rebuild shattered lives andsocieties. But the potential for harm is also great: fearand predation are potent threats to peace. As ourproject demonstrates, however, appropriate strategiesand adequate resources can help to counter thesethreats.

Our findings provide prospective implementers withuseful knowledge. Employing the findings of ourresearch, they will be better equipped to gauge thelikely difficulty of the implementation environmentand to make accurate assessments of whethernecessary resources and correct strategies will beprovided. They can also improve the allocation of theresources they have at their disposal. Our findings alsohelp policymakers to better identify the gaps in howpeace agreements are currently being implemented—ininformation gathering, analysis, and sharing, and incontingency planning.

This said, our findings also present a dauntingdilemma: to the extent that past behavior predictsfuture behavior, there will be more occasions whereimplementers face highly difficult environments withthe knowledge that commensurate resources will notbe forthcoming. Throughout the 1990s, the signing of

a peace agreement has been sufficient to triggerinternational involvement to implement thatagreement, but nowhere near sufficient to ensure theinternational commitment to do the job right. Ourresearch began with the ethical concern of how best tosave lives and end deadly civil wars; it concludes witha more circumspect but more daunting challenge: howbest to save lives and end deadly civil wars in a worldwhere there are limited resources and multiple civilwars—some of which pose far greater challenges toprospective implementers than others. We urge would-be implementers to remain attentive to this dilemma, tothe fact that major and regional powers treat differentcivil wars differently, such that their commitment tomaking peace in war-torn countries is much greaterwhen their motives are based on vital securityinterests, rather than on humanitarian concerns alone.

What, then, is to be done about the tough cases ofpeace agreements in countries that are clearly periph-eral to those vital interests? Should the UN decline thechallenge of assisting peace implementation in suchcircumstances? In lieu of a definitive answer, we offerthe advice of two of our project’s authors:

Is this a sensible strategy? On the one hand,the answer seems obviously no. It seems likethe equivalent of a hospital choosing to turnaway cancer patients and people in need oftransplants in favor of orthopedic proceduresand gall bladder operations. On the other hand,if the UN is under constant financial pressureand there are situations where the probabilityof success is virtually nonexistent, there is nomore to be gained by ignoring these facts inthe context of peace implementation thanthere is in the context of healthcare.36


20 Conclusion

36 Downs and Stedman, “Evaluating the International Implementation,” Ending Civil Wars: Volume II.

Aldo AjelloFormer Special Representative of the Secretary-General inMozambiqueEU Special Envoy to the Great Lakes Region

Dame Margaret AnsteeFormer Special Representative of the Secretary-General inAngola

Reginal AustinFormer Head of Elections Department, UNTAG and UNTACDirector, Legal and Constitutional Affairs Division,Commonwealth Secretariat

Jean ArnaultSpecial Representative of the Secretary-General inGuatemalaHead, MINUGUA

Derek BoothbyFormer Deputy Transitional Administrator, UNTAES

Michael BrownGeorgetown University

William DurchThe Henry L. Stimson Center

James FearonStanford University

Shepard FormanDirector, Center for International Cooperation,New York University

Sir Marrack GouldingFormer Undersecretary-General of the United Nations

David HamburgPresident Emeritus, Carnegie Corporation

Jeffrey HerbstPrinceton University

Terry KarlStanford University

Odin KnudsenFormer Country Director andResident Representative for the World Bank inWest Bank/Gaza;Senior Adviser, The World Bank

Chetan KumarOffice of the Secretary-General’s Special Representative forChildren in Armed Conflict

Andrew MackFormer Director of Policy Planning, United NationsFellow, Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy andConflict Research

David M. MalonePresident, International Peace Academy

Stephen MarksHarvard University

Eric MorrisFormer Deputy Special Representative of theSecretary-General to Bosnia

Stephen MorrisonFormer Director, African Affairs, Policy Planning Staff,U.S. Department of StateDirector, Africa Program, Center for Security and StrategicStudies

Michael O’HanlonBrookings Institution

Olara A. OtunnuSpecial Representative of the Secretary-General for Childrenand Armed Conflict

Amb. Frank RuddyFormer Deputy Chairman, Referendum for MINURSO


Appendix I: List of Project Contributors 21

APPENDIX IList of Project Contributors

Brig. Gen. Y. SaksenaFormer Deputy Force Commander with the UN in Angola

James SchearFormer consultant to UN missions Cambodia and theformer YugoslaviaDeputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping andHumanitarian Affairs

Alvaro de SotoUN Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs

Chandra SriramInternational Peace Academy

Mark TaylorPeace Implementation Network, Fafo

Christine WallichFormer Country Director for Bosnia-HerzegovinaDirector, Strategy Group, The World Bank

Robert WassermanFormer Deputy Police Commissioner, UNMIBH

Teresa WhitfieldDepartment of Political Affairs, United Nations


22 Appendix I: List of Project Contributors

APPENDIX II

Ending Civil Wars: Volume 1. From Mediation to ImplementationStephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth Cousens, Editors

A Project of the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the International Peace Academy

Introduction

1. IntroductionStephen John Stedman

2. The Nexus Between Mediation and ImplementationDonald Rothchild

Case Studies: Non-Coercive Implementation Strategies

3. Peace in Stages: The Role of an Implementation Regime in NicaraguaCaroline Hartzell

4. Everyone Participates, No One is Responsible: Peace Implementation in GuatemalaWilliam StanleyDavid Holliday

5. Implementing the Arusha Peace Accords in Rwanda: The Problem of Myopic StrategyGilbert Khadiagala

Case Studies: Coercive Implementation Strategies

6. Flawed Mediation, Chaotic Implementation: The 1987 Indo-Sri Lankan Peace AgreementSumantra Bose

7. Peace By Unconventional Means: Lebanon’s Ta’if AgreementMarie-Joëlle Zahar

8. Liberia: A Warlord’s PeaceAdekeye Adebajo

Reflections on Strategy

9. Settlement Terms and Post-Agreement StabilityDonald Rothchild

10. Strategy and Transitional AuthorityMichael Doyle


Appendix II 23

11. The Growing Challenge of Strategic CoordinationBruce Jones

12. Strategic Choice and Civil-Military RelationsKaren Guttieri

13. From Mediation to Implementation: The Strategic GapStephen John Stedman

Ending Civil Wars: Volume 2. Evaluating Implementation of Peace AgreementsStephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth Cousens, Editors

Introduction

1. IntroductionStephen John Stedman

2. Evaluation IssuesGeorge Downsand Stephen John Stedman

Cases

3. Assessing El Salvador’s Transition from Civil War to PeaceCharles Call

4. Implementing Cambodia’s Peace Agreement: Challenges, Strategy, and OutcomeSorpong Peou

5. From Missed Opportunities to Overcompensation: Implementing Bosnia’s Dayton AgreementElizabeth Cousens

6. Implementing Peace Agreements in Civil Wars: The Case of MozambiqueJoão Honwana

Evaluating Sub-Goals

7. Demobilization and Disarmament: Key Implementation IssuesJoanna Spear

8. Economic Priorities in Peace ImplementationSusan Woodward

9. Implementing Peace and Building Democracy: The Role of ElectionsTerrence Lyons


24 Appendix II

10. Refugee Repatriation and ReintegrationHoward Adelman

11. Human Rights and Sustainable PeaceTonya Putnam

12. A Sacrifice for Peace? Security for the General Public During Implementation of Peace AgreementsCharles CallWilliam Stanley

13. Building Local Capacity: From Implementation to PeacebuildingJohn PrendergastEmily Plumb

Conclusions

14. Implementing Peace Agreements in Civil Wars: Findings and RecommendationsStephen John Stedman

Other Studies of the CISAC-IPA Project on Peace Implementation

Implementation Ad Seriatum: Angola’s Protracted Peace Process (1992-3, 1994)V. Page FortnaStephen John Stedman

The Attempt that Worked: Peace Implementation in NamibiaLisa M. Howard

Implementing Peace Agreements in Civil Wars: The Case of Sierra LeoneAbioudun Alao

Somalia: From Flawed Agreement to Failed ImplementationAmeen Jan

Western Sahara: Sheiks, Soldiers and Sand (1992-96)Adekeye Adebajo

A Precarious Peace: The Decolonization and Consolidation of ZimbabweTandeka Nkiwane

Implementation and Peace and ReconciliationDonald Rothchild


Appendix II 25

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