Patterns of Violence And The Legacies of Internal Conflict

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Civil Wars have wide-ranging legacies on the political and social landscapes of the countries that experienced them, even long after they are over. The works on this panel include a diverse set of cases and methods to advance our understanding of such legacies of conflict, in areas ranging from domestic peace and security, political stability at the macro level, to social relations and socio-political behavior at the micro-level. Case evidence comes from Asia, Europe, Central America and Sub-Saharan Africa, and includes both detailed sub-national and case comparison designs. Methods include spatial and time series statistics, natural experiments, historical process tracing, and ethnographic interviews. The diversity of methods and cases are important for verifying that findings are not due to case-specific or methodologically imposed conditions.

The papers in this panel focus on wartime dynamics such as patterns of violence, strategies of control, and ending of the war, and explore how these dynamics left lasting legacies. Yaylaci and Price’s paper starts with a review of the legacies of civil war on the realms of political psychology, behavior, and identity, distinguishing between the types of civil wars. Authors discuss contentions in the findings, and clarify the circumstances under which civil wars can produce pro-social outcomes. Shesterinina’s paper looks at how conflict processes and actors’ incentives shape post-war violence, using the case of the Georgian-Abkhaz war. After introducing a typology that captures the variation in actors and forms of post-war violence, she demonstrates that the variation in post-war violence followed the different outcomes of the war across Abkhazia and prewar visions of Abkhaz sovereignty. Along the lines of post-war violence, Guliford’s paper examines the legacies of peace agreements and post-conflict reforms on civil war recurrence and democratization. Her paper takes interest in the negative cases of civil war non-recurrence, deploying the example of the Salvadoran civil war, which stands as a puzzle given that the majority of civil wars culminating in negotiated agreements reoccur while El Salvador’s has not. Using process-tracing, she explores the critical mechanisms that explain this puzzle. Liu focuses on the patterns of forced displacement, a common strategy employed for establishing control by warring parties, and asks how strategies of forced displacement affect civilian political life after the conclusion of conflict. To answer this question, she analyzes the use of Protected Villages (PVs) in the Zimbabwe Liberation War, which took root in the early 1960s as a political movement before escalating into a civil war between 1972 and 1979.

This panel presents new research that advances our understanding how violent conflict impacts post-war variables of interest, particularly altruism, participation, identities, and post-war violence. As a group, they advance the existing research agenda by examining how different types of internal conflict affect previous findings on the legacies of conflict.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• Behavioral and Psychological Legacies of Civil Wars - Chris Price, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Wartime Outcomes and Post-War Violence: The Case of Abkhazia - Anastasia Shesterinina, The University of Sheffield

• The Enduring Effects of Forced Resettlement: Zimbabwe’s Protected Villages - Shelley Xuan Liu, Harvard University

• Can Peace Agreements Beget Democracy? El Salvador’s Legacy of War Non-Recurrence - Meg Guliford, Tufts University

Chair

• Regina A. Bateson University of Ottawa