Ending Civil Wars without International Involvement: New Data from South Asia

• In Event: Advances in the Study of Power Sharing Coalitions

Abstract

A rich literature has shown that negotiated settlements in civil wars are most likely to be implemented when external states are involved in guaranteeing or supporting the process. Yet in a large subset of cases, from Chechnya to Syria to Northeast India, the prospect of serious international involvement is almost unthinkable. This paper uses unique new data on government-armed group political relationships in India, Pakistan, Burma, and Sri Lanka to explore what happens to conflicts in countries largely insulated from international involvement or intervention. Each major armed group's "armed order" with the state is measured on an annual basis since 1947, ranging from total war conflicts to tight alliances, thus capturing periods of both violence and its absence. I examine the trajectories of these dyadic armed orders. Many dyads simply continue with fighting, or end in a group's collapse. But we do in fact see a number of successful de-mobilizations despite no international support, including several fully implemented peace deals. Moreover, a number of conflicts subsided, stabilized, or transformed without the non-state armed group needing to disarm, thus eliding the commitment problems at the heart of existing theories. These stabilization outcomes often informed formal or tacit power-sharing between the central state and non-state armed groups, with rules and norms established over mutually acceptable behavior. This combination of medium- and small-N analysis moves the field beyond its current focus on the international politics of domestic conflict resolution to instead identify the multiple ways that armed groups and the state can end fighting. There are an intriguing range of "niches" that armed actors can occupy, from enforcers of central power to de facto indirect rulers of peripheries to armed political parties.

Author

• Paul Staniland, University of Chicago