Spoiled or Foiled? Pro-government Militias and Peace Processes

• In Event: Militas and Mercenaries at War

Abstract

Recent scholarship finds that when states employ pro-government militias (PGMs) as a component of their counterinsurgency campaigns, intrastate conflict has a high probability of recurrence. We shift focus to the transition from conflict to peace by probing how PGMs affect the probability of negotiations and peace settlements with insurgent groups.
We conjecture that PGM presence heightens the probability of negotiations, particularly when militias target rebel groups, but does not significantly affect the probability of peace settlements. PGMs act as spoilers during diplomacy because they are often excluded from negotiations and stand to lose from the process. By using PGMs as cheap force multipliers, and relegating violence to militias, governments possess a stronger hand vis-à-vis rebels. Since governments can relegate violence to militias, they have diminished incentives to accede to rebels’ demands. However, governments may still seek to open negotiations to curry favor with international audiences and to buy time on the battlefield. Coupled with PGMs’ roles as spoilers, negotiations are not likely to yield a settlement. We further maintain that PGM actors with direct ties to the government are more likely to dent the prospects for peace, as states will more effectively leverage these militias during conflicts, with the lower odds of their defection compared to relatively independent PGMs.
We test our arguments by marrying Carey et al’s (2022) PGM v2 to Ari’s (2022) Peace Negotiations in Civil Conflict (PNCC) dataset, covering 79 states, 305 rebel groups, from 1981 to 2013. Our paper contributes to emerging literature on the consequences of paramilitary groups for civil wars by highlighting how non-state actors on opposite sides of the conflict affect peace prospects. As well, by distinguishing between negotiations and settlements, it contributes to emerging scholarship on the consequence of PGM actors for post-conflict transitions.

Authors

• Nazli Avdan, University of Kansas

• Brittnee Ashten Carter, University of Kansas