Peace Agreements and Civil Wars in Africa: Insurgent Motivations, ...

The choice is arbitrary, but it serves to delimit the study to the period immediately following the conclusion of an agreement. Moreover, the rather short period in which an agreement will be considered to have held will avoid the implementation stage of peace accords, which often runs for several years.

Conflict resolution in a civil war requires belligerents to conclude peace agreements as a first step toward its resolution. Yet reaching peace agreements is a particularly difficult task. It is even more difficult for agreements that have been negotiated and signed to hold to bring an ultimate end to protracted civil wars. One study by Barbara Walter puts the successful implementation of peace agreements in civil wars at 57 percent.² To understand the nature of peace agreements arising from civil war termination, why it is difficult for belligerents to endorse them, and why those signed do not often ultimately end the conflict, this book examines four independent variables that explain why it is difficult for peace agreements to be signed and why it is even harder for them to hold. These independent variables belong to broad categories of causal factors that explain outcomes in negotiated settlements. Further, each independent variable will be operationalized and subvariables developed in order to provide a more thorough treatment of the subject of peace agreements. Moreover, specific questions will be raised to guide the analyses of the relationship between these independent variables and the nature and stability of the peace agreements.

1.3. Frameworks And Hypotheses

The Role of Third Parties

What role did third parties (nongovernmental organizations [NGOs], states, statesmen, subregional and international organizations) play in mediating an end to the civil wars? Third-party roles in intrastate conflicts fall into mediation, peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peace-enforcement activities. Third parties, like powerful states and international organizations, commonly perform most or all of these activities together. A cluster of subvariables or attributes related to the third party to be analyzed are its identity, interests, leverage, and impartiality, as well as the strategies third parties use in the process of mediation. The following hypotheses will be examined: