Mediated War and Civil War

Ideally, mediation in international conflict is assumed to help the disputants to perceive procedural justice. Mediators aim at overcoming information barriers, they provide exit options so that representatives  of  the conflicting  parties  do  not  lose  face,  and  they  propose  solutions  to  the underlying  issues.  In addition, mediation—in contrast to arbitration—is  an binding  conflict  management  tool,  defined  by  the  absence  of  enforcement mechanisms to impose an agreement.

Although  a  number  of  studies  on  post–civil  war  reconstruction  have been  conducted  in  the  last  decade,  few  have  emphasized  mediation  as  a means to reaching a durable agreement. These studies have mainly focused on  three  sets  of  factors:  peacekeeping  missions,  power-sharing  arrangements, and third-party credible commitments. First,  Doyle  and  Sambanis  (2000)  find  multilateral  peacekeeping  missions to be associated with more peaceful outcomes after the end of a civil war.  They  define  two  measures  of  success—a  “lenient”  and  a  “strict”  one and find some positive impact of peacekeeping missions. While the lenient definition focuses on whether violence was ended, the stricter measure also takes into account whether a democratization process was initiated. Post war peacekeeping also seems to be associated with longer durations of peace(Fortna, 2004a).Second,  Hartzell  and  Hoddie,  in  a  series  of  papers  (Hoddie  andHartzell,  2003;  Hartzell  and  Hoddie,  2003;  Hartzell  et  al.,  2001;  Hartzell,1999), have focused on the presence of power-sharing arrangements as part of the negotiated settlement and whether these devices were actually implemented.  Using  time  duration  models,  they  find  that  implemented  power sharing arrangements on four dimensions—political, territorial, military, and economic—may have a positive impact on the duration of domestic peace(Hartzell and Hoddie, 2003).

Walter (1997, 1999, 2002) develops a theory of credible commitments. She expects third-party commitments that secure the peace to be an important feature  in  accounting  for  success  in  implementing  peace  settlements,  and  finds  empirical  support  for  her  hypothesis.  Walter conceptualizes conflict management efforts to end a civil war as a three-phase process. She  finds  different  factors  significant  in  influencing  moves  to  the  negotiation,  agreement,  and  implementation  phase,  respectively.  Walter  (2002)empirically  compares  six  different  hypotheses  with  her  credible  commit-ment  theory  and  finds  support  mainly  for  factors  associated  with  theconcept of a “hurting stalemate,” mediation, and the credible commitmenttheory. Mediation, however, was only found important at the second stage,enhancing the chances for reaching an agreement (i.e., mediation enhancesthe likelihood of ending a conflict in the short term). Considering practicalpolicy implications, the latter two findings are of importance, since these arethe factors that can be manipulated by third-party actors. It would be clearlyundesirable to wait until a stalemate is reached if successful intervention ispossible at an earlier stage. Operationalizing mediation as a dummy variable(2002)  or  as  a  count  variable  (1997),  however,  Walter  might  have  missedimportant differences between various types of mediation attempts.

Download Files

gursesetal2008mediatingcivilwarii.pdf (0.20 MB )