Securing Whose Peace? The Effects of Peace-Agreement Provisions on Physical Integrity Rights After Civil War

<p>When civil wars are resolved via negotiated settlement, peace-agreement provisions like power-sharing agreements and third-party security guarantees often are advocated for their purported benefits of ensuring a long-lasting and durable peace. Although scholars have explored the effects of peace-agreement provisions on enhancing the security of states, their influence on shaping individual security outcomes is largely unknown. The strong potential exists that these same provisions that improve a government's ability to deter future violence also increase that government's violation of its citizens' physical integrity rights as a means of coercion and governance. Also rare in the power-sharing literature is exploration of the effects of individual, disaggregated provisions.</p> <p>This dissertation, therefore, asks: <em>Under what conditions do peace-agreement provisions significantly improve the state's protection of its citizens' physical integrity rights?</em> Two models are proposed. Model 1 considers aggregated power-sharing provisions. Model 2 considers disaggregated peace-agreement provisions, and includes both power-sharing agreements and robust third-party security guarantees.</p> <p>Both models are evaluated in light of the situational and historical contexts relevant to each state's civil war experience. The universe of cases includes thirty-six civil wars in twenty-seven states where conflict terminated between 1989-2007 via negotiated settlement. This project leverages a mixed-method research design, including contingency tables and fuzzy-set Quantitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to resolve the "small number of cases, multiple variables" challenge and to account for causal complexity.</p> <p>Four central claims are advanced in this dissertation: First, the common technique of evaluating peace-agreement provisions by aggregating them according to common political, military, and territorial dimensions obscures and misleads scholars; the disaggregation of peace-agreement provisions reveals how measures often act in opposition. Second, a number of commonly present provisions--including integration of rebels into the main military ranks and the granting of territorial autonomy--are consistently inhibitory to individual security after civil war ends. Third, other provisions such as robust third-party security guarantees and the granting of territorial federalism consistently lead to a reduction in the level of political repression used by states after civil war has ended. Fourth, significant human-rights improvement results from favorable causal recipes (i.e., combinations of disaggregated conditions) that together reduce both the motivation and opportunity of a government to repress.</p> <p>These findings will assist decision-makers involved in negotiated settlements, as they (1) identify the appropriate blends of peace-agreement provisions for resolving different civil wars, and (2) balance the need for a post-conflict government to both assure its population and to deter future violence.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Year dc:date.available

2017

Author dc:creator

• Korsmo, Melvin R.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Deborah Avant, Ph.D.
• Erica Chenoweth
• Timothy Sisk

• Civil war
• Human security
• Peace
• Physical integrity rights
• Political repression
• International and Area Studies
• Political Science

Statement dc:rights

• <p>Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.</p>

Language dc:language

en

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/1361

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.du.edu:etd-2361