From Civil War to Coup d’état: How Peace Agreements Shape Post-Conflict Violence

• In Event: What Comes Next?: Analyzing Post-Conflict Societies

Abstract

In post-conflict settings, many peace agreements include provisions for political power sharing as well as for integrating formerly warring parties, or the populations they represent, into the state’s new national military. These measures are intended to prevent conflict from resuming by enabling the government to make more credible commitments to uphold the terms of peace, and giving former rebels a stake in the political system. In doing so, however, they inadvertently increase the risk of coups d’état. Recent quantitative work has demonstrates that states that have recently signed peace agreements, particularly those with provisions to integrate rebel forces into the military, are more likely to see coup attempts. Yet the mechanisms linking peace agreement provisions to coups remain under-explored. In some cases, coups may occur because integration generates resentment among existing soldiers; in other cases, coups occur because power sharing provisions give rebel soldiers better access to the centers of political power that are the targets of coup attempts and resources with which to stage them. This paper fleshes out these two potential mechanisms linking civil war peace agreement provisions to subsequent coup attempts, and illustrates their plausibility in two case studies. In Burundi, following the 1993-2000 civil war, soldiers tried to block rebel-military integration from going forward, staging two failed coup attempts in 2001. In Guinea-Bissau, the 1998 peace agreement allocated leadership positions in powerful ministries to the former rebels and enabled them access to the capital; the following year rebel troops were able to use this access to stage a coup that successfully ousted the president from power. While debate remains over whether provisions for power sharing and rebel-military integration make for a more durable peace, the analysis of these cases illustrates two mechanisms through which it can increase the risk of other forms of political violence such as coups.

Author

• Erica Susanne De Bruin, Hamilton College