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UN involvement and civil war peace agreement implementation

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Abstract

Many studies argue that third-party guarantees, such as those of the United Nations, increase the chances that belligerents will sign peace agreements, but it is unclear how third-party involvement affects the implementation of such agreements. We unpack the relationship between UN involvement and peace agreement success by focusing on the risk of defections during the peace accord implementation phase. We argue that two types of commitment problems, namely involuntary and voluntary defections, emerge from the characteristics of the peace process itself as well as from new opportunities available to rebel groups. We expect that shifts in relative power and polarized voting lead to lower implementation scores overall, but that the deployment of UN troops has a mitigating effect, thereby increasing the prospects of sustainable peace agreements. Using data from the Peace Accords Matrix Implementation Dataset from 1989 to 2010 and personnel commitments to UN peacekeeping operations, we find evidence that large UN missions are better placed to support the implementation and longevity of the peace process.

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Notes

  1. For peace agreement information, see United Nations Peacemaker https://peacemaker.un.org/. Information on UN missions was obtained from Kathman (2013).

  2. For each provision in a comprehensive peace agreement, the peace accord matrix implementation dataset (PAM_ID) provides an implementation ranking in four ordinal categories, ranging from no implementation to full implementation (Joshi et al. 2015). Following Joshi et al. (2015), we use these provision rankings to calculate an overall implementation score.

  3. For arguments as to why actors renege on deals, see Fearon (2004), Powell (2006), Pugh (2009) and Walter (1997).

  4. The replication files and codes are available at http://tigizelis.com/papers.html.

  5. Fortna (2008) discusses how accidents and unauthorized incidents can escalate war.

  6. Many scholars already have highlighted this property of civil war peace processes (e.g., Darby 2001; Höglund 2008). Darby (2001) conceptualizes successful civil conflict resolution as a compromise between the moderates of belligerent parties, reached by overriding the resistance of the zealots within each party.

  7. Stedman (1997) argues that the implementation of multilateral accords can be affected by spoilers who are both inside and outside of a peace process.

  8. In terms of general self-enforcing electoral mechanisms, see Ferejohn (1986). In Ferejohn’s (1986, p. 12) model, voters evaluate policy outcomes ex post, which Ferejohn defines as “a product of policy and exogenous performance”.

  9. Sisk and Reynolds (1998) argue that multiparty elections often fail to introduce democracy in post-conflict environments and exacerbate ethnic tensions.

  10. Letter from the Secretary-General, 23 October 2001, http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2001/988.

  11. The agreement states specifically that, “The Bills to amend the National Constitution will provide for the constitutional amendments to take effect on verification by UNOMB that the weapons are in secure, double locked containers under its supervision.” Letter from the Secretary-General, 23 October 2001, http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2001/988.

  12. Previous literature also highlights such security dilemmas (Fortna 2008).

  13. Previous studies show that the United Nations is more likely to intervene when the government’s army is small (Gilligan and Stedman 2003; Fortna 2004).

  14. Specifically, we remove provisions for UN peacekeeping and UN transitional authority. Information on those provisions is available in the original dataset (Joshi et al. 2015).

  15. In a study of budgetary process, Whitten and Williams (2011) also include the lagged dependent variable owing to its incremental nature.

  16. The sample countries include Angola, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Burundi, Cambodia, Ivory Coast, Congo-Brazzaville, Croatia, Djibouti, Guinea-Bissau, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Liberia, Lebanon, Macedonia, Mozambique, Nepal, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, South Africa, El Salvador, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tajikistan and the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland).

  17. See https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/past/onusalbackgr2.html.

  18. See http://www.un.org/en/sc/repertoire/subsidiary_organs/special_political_complete.shtml.

  19. Further information on the comprehensive peace agreements and UN political missions are provided in the online appendix.

  20. We use estimates for Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Peace Agreement because the United Kingdom’s GDP per capita is very high compared to other cases in our sample. We follow a similar approach for the Bodo Accord (India) and apply values for the state of Assam.

  21. Details are available in the online appendix.

  22. Following the adjustment for GDP per capita (see footnote 20), we used the population of Northern Ireland for the Good Friday Agreement and that of the state of Assam for India. Details are available in the online appendix.

  23. In the case of India, we measure only the rebel groups active in the Assam region because covering the entire country includes many irrelevant groups.

  24. Models are estimated using the xtpcse package in Stata.

  25. We present full results in the online appendix.

  26. For combinations of territorial control and power-sharing provisions, the most frequent combination (territorial control = 0, PS provision = 1) are plugged into the equation.

  27. The 75th percentile value of total UN personnel is 59.79 (thousands); thus, we calculate the log of UN personnel as equal to 4.

  28. For the effects of emotions in conflicts and of socio-psychological structures, see Bar-Tal (2007) and Halperin (2008).

  29. Because of time-invariant variables and the relatively small number of time-series observations, we use the system GMM instead of fixed effects.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to greatly thank Todd Sandler for valuable comments and feedback. We also would like to thank participants at the ISA 2018 Annual Conference, participants at the Eighth Conference on Political Violence and Policy at the University of Texas at Dallas, and anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments.

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  1. Department of Government, University of Essex, CO4 3SQ, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, UK

    Wakako Maekawa, Barış Arı & Theodora-Ismene Gizelis

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  1. Wakako Maekawa
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Correspondence to Theodora-Ismene Gizelis.

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Maekawa, W., Arı, B. & Gizelis, TI. UN involvement and civil war peace agreement implementation. Public Choice 178, 397–416 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-018-0602-9

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