Abstract
Since the end of the Cold War, over 20 violent internal conflicts have been ended, at least temporarily, by formal accords among the warring parties. The consent of these peace agreements are often discussed, but rarely analysed. Nina Caspersen’s new book is the best work I know of to assess the nature of such peace agreements around the world. Well-written, insightful and genuinely comparative, it will be a particularly useful not just for scholars but as a resource for teaching graduate students and informing practitioners too.
Caspersen’s key findings, based on analysis the provisions to be found in peace deals, represent a challenge to much of the scholarly literature. The role of the international community, much lauded by some academics, is more influential in theory than in practice. Domestic political reforms—another major focus of scholarship—are often subjugated to more immediate security and temporal concerns. Likewise, with the language but not the reality of human rights—‘most peace agreements are “surprisingly illiberal”’ (p. 90), with group rights typically trumping individual rights. Gender and minority rights considerations are also less prevalent in peace agreements than in the political science literature: Caspersen finds that in only two cases were women specifically included in the peace negotiations, while representations of minorities not directly party to the conflicts was also weak.
Stability, not justice, is the core preoccupation of most peace agreements. Amnesties for former combatants, by contrast, are relatively common. Elections, if they are held at all, typically return the former government (along with those responsible for the conflict) to power sometimes undergirded by explicit guarantees, as in Sudan. Security is a constant preoccupation, with political and economic reforms only possible once ‘security first’ has been established. Mostly, this requires the involvement of international actors—but the impact of such third-parties can vary enormously, from full military interventions such as Bosnia and East Timor to unarmed peace monitors in Bougainville. The role of disciplined forces remains a preoccupation after peace has been established, with a key question being whether militaries are left in place or merged with former enemies, or whether a separate force is created. The international community has a role to play—but more in identifying ripe moments, bringing spoilers on board and helping isolate agreement signatories from popular pressures than in large-scale transitional administration and peacebuilding.
While human rights are mentioned in most peace agreements, Caspersen argues that this is often carried out more to confer legitimacy internationally than to entrench genuine rights guarantees. Actual peace agreements are much more focussed on military and territorial cake-cutting than on the varieties of rights guarantees. Territory, often used as a proxy for ethnicity, remains central to nearly all peace deals; by contrast, human rights provisions are mentioned in passing if at all. However, one preoccupation of the academic literature is at least reflected in contemporary peace agreements: regional autonomy is a widely used and—crucially—relatively successful conflict management mechanism.
By contrast, more creative solutions beloved in the academic literature (such as complex power sharing, electoral engineering or shared sovereignty) have struggled to spread beyond Northern Ireland and a few other cases. However, Caspersen’s claim that not a single contemporary peace agreement follows centripetal principles (p. 80) misses some important cases. The Bougainville peace agreement, for instance, includes a number of centripetal elements such as cross-voting reserved seats for women, youth and ex-combatants, as well as both parliamentary and presidential elections held under the alternative vote, a key centripetal institution. Indonesia’s constitution also includes numerous centripetal elements. The relative success of such Asia-Pacific cases underlines the need for geographically balanced appraisals of peace deals. To be fair, this is one area in which Caspersen does well, analysing relatively obscure cases, such as Nagorno Karabakh, South Sudan and Bougainville alongside better-known examples such as Bosnia, Northern Ireland or Israel-Palestine.
Caspersen’s conclusions are arresting: the much-touted ‘liberal peace’ finds little practical expression in post-Cold War peace deals—particularly in separatist conflicts, which often opt for decidedly illiberal measures in the content of the agreement. Regional autonomy, not liberal cosmopolitanism or complex power-sharing, is the key trend—with autonomy sometimes even being prescribed in non-territorial conflicts. Federalism, by contrast, has ‘become delegitimized by the Soviet and Yugoslav collapse’ (p. 115). On the rare occasions when rights are discussed in peace deals, they are usually for ethnic groups rather than individuals. And ambiguity is a consistently useful device, particularly in interim agreements—again in contrast to the more prescriptive recommendations of the scholarly literature.
This book represents not just an admirable comparative analysis of an important topic, but a useful corrective to some off-target academic enthusiasms. It deserves wide circulation in both the scholarly and policy worlds.