Measuring the Depth of Post-civil Conflict Peace

• In Event: Durability of Peace

Abstract

Not all peace is created equal. Since Galtung (1959), researchers have often conceived of peace as falling along a continuum, with negative peace (the absence of violence) at one end and positive peace (cooperative coexistence) at the other. This distinction is particularly important for states emerging from civil conflict, as this distinction is frequently blurred in practice, and the chance of conflict recidivism is quite high. Recent work has attempted to flesh out our understanding of peace as a continuum empirically at both the inter- and intra-state levels (Davenport, Melander and Regan 2018; Goertz, Diehl and Balas 2016). We argue that extant empirical measures at the intra-state level have paid insufficient attention to the multi-faceted nature of peace. Using a Bayesian latent variable model, we create a measure of the quality of peace following civil conflict, reflecting the notion of peace as a continuum. To construct this measure, we draw on factors such as the presence of peacekeepers, efforts at post-conflict justice, the settlement type of the previous conflict, characteristics of the previous conflict, the humanitarian situation on the ground, and the political and economic context of the conflict country. We believe this measure will be useful for scholars who have begun to recognize the differences in quality of peace but have lacked a systematic measure to capture those differences. Given the prevalence of conflict recidivism following civil wars, we apply our novel measure of post-conflict peace to the timing of conflict recurrence in order to assess the extent to which deeper forms of peace may reduce the risk conflict recurrence.

Authors

• Susan H. Allen, University of Mississippi

• Benjamin Thomas Jones, The University of Mississippi