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Which type of international organizations can settle civil wars?

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Abstract

International organizations (IOs) take on an increasing share of civil war mediation around the world. The determinants of IO mediation effectiveness remain poorly understood, partly because prior research has not adequately captured the institutional heterogeneity of peace-brokering IOs. To explore how mediation effectiveness depends on institutional variation, I combine newly gathered data on the design of 13 peace-brokering IOs with existing data on 109 civil war mediation episodes in the 1975-2004 period. I find that IOs with institutionalized capabilities to deploy field missions, such as peacekeeping operations, outperform other IOs as mediators of civil wars, whereas information-gathering capacity does not yield a significant advantage. The results suggest that IO enforcement assistance has a forward-looking effect: the ability to credibly signal, ex ante, that peacekeeping or monitoring forces will be deployed to enforce an agreement, helps IOs shape negotiations long before forces are actually deployed. Reaffirming the credible commitment theory of conflict resolution, the study demonstrates that there is considerable variation among external guarantors, which explains why some IOs can shift civil war disputants away from violent bargaining strategies whereas other cannot.

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Notes

  1. See Hafner-Burton et al. (2008) for a more extensive argument for moving beyond IO homogeneity assumptions.

  2. In the most comprehensive review of the bargaining literature on conflict resolution to date, Kydd (2010, p. 101) states: “Providing information via mediation is seen as effective in preventing conflict, but questions remain about precisely how it works. . . [the literature] leaves unmodeled how the mediator acquires the information he shares with one of the participants.”

  3. Kalyvas and Balcells (2010, p.415) emphasize: “incorporating the international system into the analysis of civil wars is critical for understanding the evolution and transformation of internal conflict.”

  4. See Anderton et al. (2010) for a discussion of alternative mechanisms, including issue indivisibility, political bias, and malevolence.

  5. One might argue that guarantees, being formal reassurances that certain conditions relating to an agreement will be fulfilled in the future, are always “forward-looking” in one way or another. I use “forward-looking” to emphasize the fact that these guarantees are used instrumentally, before combatants agree, to increase the likelihood that they will do so, and before any deployment is actually made.

  6. Table 1.1 in the online appendix provides an overview of the variables, coding, and sources.

  7. For a discussion of the complexities involved when evaluating mediation, see Kleiboer (1996) and Greig and Diehl (2012).

  8. United Nations (UN), Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), Organization of American States (OAS), Organization of African Unity (OAU) / African Union (AU), Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), League of Arab States (LAS), Commonwealth of Nations (CON), European Union (EU), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)

  9. Further details on the content and compilation of these data may be found in the online appendix available on the Review of International Organizations webpage.

  10. The institutionalization scores in Fig. 2 are calculated as follows. First, for each year and IO, I aggregated the scores for the two principal institutional variables, diplomatic capability and field mission capability. Second, I averaged across all IOs in a given year. Third, I set 1975 as the base year with a value of 100, from which I calculated a yearly index score.

  11. Data expanded to 2007.

  12. Full robustness checks can be found in the online appendix available on the Review of International Organizations’ webpage.

  13. http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/operations/past.shtml

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Lundgren, M. Which type of international organizations can settle civil wars?. Rev Int Organ 12, 613–641 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-016-9253-0

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