1

Understanding the victor’s peace in civil wars: a research agenda

Giulia Piccolino, German Institute for Global and Area Studies

Paper prepared for the DVPW ‘Comparative Politics’ Conference, German Institute for

Global and Area Studies, Hamburg 25-27 February 2015. Panel “Autonomous and

illiberal peacebuilding in comparative perspective”

Work in progress. Please do not cite without permission.

Military victory has been for a long time the dominant form of civil war termination and some

scholars have suggested that it might be again on the rise. However, the ‘victor’s peace’ as an

alternative model of peacebuilding and post conflict reconstruction with respect to the liberal

peace has been little investigated. Within the framework of the literature on war termination, a

number of scholars have advanced the hypothesis that victory might offer better chances for

sustainable peace than negotiated settlements, but their argument remains controversial.

Drawing from existing empirical evidence on post-conflict societies that have experienced a

military victory and on a new literature on illiberal and autonomous peacebuilding, this article

looks at the particular characteristics of the peace being built in the aftermath of victory and at

the implications of the victor’s peace for liberal peacebuilding. With a view to stimulate further

inquiry, it sets forth hypothesis about the link between victory and illiberal peacebuilding and

victory and post-conflict statebuilding.

Keywords: victory, peace, peacebuilding, statebuilding, civil war, conflict

Introduction

In 2009, the Sri Lankan civil war, one of the longest contemporary internal conflicts,

terminated after thirty years. Peace in Sri Lanka was not the result of successful

negotiations. A 2002 negotiation attempt mediated by the Norwegian government,

which had been initially regarded as a credible option for solving the conflict, had

2

indeed collapsed. In the end, the termination of the civil war was the outcome of four

years of massive military offensive, waged by the Government of Sri Lanka against the

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) (Höglund and Orjuela, 2012; Lewis, 2010).

The Sri Lankan case has been but one case of contemporary conflict solved on the

battlefield, rather than on the negotiation table. In 2011, opposition forces defeated the

discredited incumbent regimes of Muhammar Gheddafi and Laurent Gbagbo in Libya

and Côte d’Ivoire. Differently from Sri Lanka, the Libyan insurgents and the forces

allied with internationally recognized president Alassane Ouattara in Côte d’Ivoire

could count on the sympathy and the military support of the West, albeit to a different

degree (Bellamy and Williams, 2011; Piccolino, 2014).

The case of Côte d’Ivoire is particularly interesting because, between the

outbreak of the conflict in 2002 until its resumption in 2011, the so-called international

community, particularly France and the United Nations, which eventually helped

Ouattara winning the war, had been the staunchest advocates of a negotiated solution

(Smith 2003; Marshall 2005; Piccolino 2012) Yet, nine years and many failed peace

agreements later, international discourse had reversed. It was now more or less

explicitly hinted that the Ivorian conflict had needed a military winner in order to be

solved (Confidential communication, 2012). Although one might dismiss this U-turn as

a simple manifestation of the Machiavellic character of international politics, the shift

of the Western diplomacy from support for negotiations to support for a ‘military

solution’ shall be also seen as a manifestation of a painful dilemma in responding to

violent conflicts. Are negotiations the best way to achieve lasting and self-sustained

peace? May it be better in some cases to let wars ‘run their natural course’ (Luttwak,

1999)? And what offers more opportunities for a ‘positive’ or ‘transformative’ peace

(Galtung, 1969; Lederach, 1997): a negotiated solution or a decisive victory?

Although there is a burgeoning literature on post-conflict peacebuilding and

reconstruction, we know still very little about the type of peace that follows victory.

3

Research on post-conflict transitions within the disciplines of International Relations

and peace and conflict studies has tended to focus on negotiated settlements and their

aftermath or to avoid to make distinctions between post-negotiation and post-settlement

peace (Walter, 1997; Stedman et al., 2002; Hartzell and Hoddie, 2007; Höglund and

Söderberg Kovacs, 2010). The aim of this article is to assess the importance of the

‘victor’s peace’ in civil wars, review the existing literature and propose a new research

agenda investigating it. It doing this, it tries to bring together the insights of the

quantitative (and mostly American) literature on civil war termination and the

qualitative (and mostly European) literature on post-conflict peacebuilding.

This article also responds to recent calls to go beyond the discussion on ‘liberal

peacebuilding’ (Zaum, 2012; Heathershaw, 2013; Selby, 2013) and refocus the debate

on post-conflict reconstruction. In particular, this article follows John Heathershaw’s

call for building ‘mid level theories’, whose aim should be to ‘shed light on how post-

conflict environments emerge, what kind of environments they are and why these may

be stable or unstable’ (2013: 281). Differently from Heathershaw, however, the main

focus is not just on ‘partially internationalised rule’ but encompasses also endogenous

mechanism that shape the transition from war to peace.

In the first section of this article, I assess the relevance of victory in

international politics and look at the reasons why victory has become a ‘blind spot’ of

research on post-conflict transitions after civil war. In the second section, I look

critically at the ‘case for victory’ – the hypothesis, upheld by a minority of scholars, that

victory might offer better chances for peacebuilding, whether defined in terms of

‘negative peace’ only or ‘positive peace’. After reviewing the quantitative literature on

war termination, I advocate in the third section an alternative research agenda, focusing

on the specific challenges of post-victory transitions, which might offer a more

promising avenue for policy relevant research. I draw from a diverse body of recent

literature investigating case studies of conflicts terminated with a decisive outcome and

4

alternatives to the ‘liberal peace’ in order to formulate hypothesis on the specificity of

post-victory peace and on the causal mechanisms that might be at work.

From victory to peacemaking – and back to victory?

Civil wars have become a major international policy concern after the end of the Cold

War (Clapham, 1998; Duffield, 2001; Paris, 2004). This period has been marked by the

unprecedented expansion of tools aiming at contributing to the resolution of conflicts

and to the prevention of their resumption. One of the most dramatic consequences of

this change of attitude has been the rise of ‘peacemaking’. There is well established

evidence showing that, irrespectively from the exact definition of civil war used, there

has been a decrease in the number of internal conflicts terminated with a military

victory and an increase in negotiated settlements after the end of the Cold War (Fortna,

2004; Kreutz, 2010; Söderberg Kovacs and Svensson, 2014; Balcells and Kalyvas,

2014). According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, one of the most widely used

sources, between 1946 and 1089 only 9.9% of internal major and minor conflicts

terminated with either a peace agreement or a cease fire, while 58.2% ended with the

victory of one of the warring parties. On the other hand, between 1990 and 2005 38.1%

of conflicts have been concluded by a peace agreement or a cease fire and 13.6% by a

military victory (Kreutz, 2010: 246). The once predominant paradigm, which assumed

that victory was the ‘natural’ outcome of internal conflicts, has thus been replaced after

1989 by the belief in the feasibility and in the ethical superiority of settlements, whose

conclusion and implementation have been usually promoted and overseen by third party

actors (Clapham, 1998; Hampson and Hall, 2007). Closely associated has been the

expectation that post-settlement peacebuilding can address the underlying causes of the

conflict and thus trigger processes of political and social reform. In practice, a ‘liberal

peacebuilding’ model, promoting liberalization and marketization in post-conflict

settings as an avenue to sustainable peace, has seen the light (Paris, 2004).

5

It has been contended that, since the start of the new millennium, we would be

witnessing an inversion to this pattern (Söderberg Kovacs and Svensson, 2014). Less

peace agreements have been concluded in the last decade and victories might be

enjoying a new popularity. Mimmi Söderberg Kovacs and Isak Svensson (2014)

attribute this trend to the sum of very different international developments, such as the

growing influence of non Western actors, a general disillusion for the outcomes of

peace agreements concluded in the past decade, the ‘War on terrorism’, the emergence

of a militant human right attitude, and the Arab Spring.

Whether the rise in the number of conflicts terminated with a military victory is

confirmed in the following years, military victory has constituted for a long time the

predominant form of civil war termination and a sizeable minority of civil wars still

terminated with a decisive outcome. In spite of its historical and contemporary

relevance, the ‘victor’s peace’ has been very little investigated by the recent stream of

academic studies dealing with post-conflict reconstruction, peacebuilding and

reconciliation (Toft, 2010; Lyons, 2013). Indeed, it has tended to be reduced to ‘an

analytically unimportant role’ (Toft, 2010: 10). One reason for this gap might be that

the field has been very much dominated by a ‘problem-solving’ approach, where

scholars have concentrated over the engineering of peace processes, such as the

advantages and shortcomings of power-sharing, or the timing for post-conflict elections,

without questioning the (unstated) assumption that underscore contemporary peace-

making and peacebuilding efforts (Bellamy and Williams, 2004).

Scholars who have defined themselves in opposition to the ‘problem solving’

approach, however, have been even stauncher in their defense of negotiated settlements

and their rejection of the ‘give war a chance’ argument (Woodhouse, 2000). This is

perhaps little surprising, given that most of these scholars belong to the tradition of

radical conflict resolution studies and endorse its normative underpinning (Ramsbotham

et al., 2011). This critical literature, expressed by the work of authors such as Oliver

6

Richmond (2006) and Roger Mac Ginty (2010), maintains a commitment towards a

very high ideal of peace and is uncomfortable at discussing experiences that might be

successful on their own terms but that produce oppression and exclusion.

Another problem is that the critical peacebuilding literature has been up to now

very much focused on international intervention and interested in unpacking the liberal

peace as a technology of power (Heathershaw, 2013). As a consequence, the

peacebuilding debate has tended to focus on a few high profile cases – such as

Afghanistan or Kosovo – ignoring other cases where international intervention has

played a less prominent role, which include the majority of internal conflicts terminated

with a military victory (Goodhand and Korf, 2011).

When the victor’s peace has been discussed, it has been thus usually understood

with reference to international wars, particularly the cases of countries occupied by the

US army, and been attributed a series of undesirable qualities, such as illiberalism,

conservatism, repression and iniquity. For instance, Oliver Richmond identifies the

victor’s peace tradition with the most conservative strand of the liberal peace, which

prioritize stability, security and order (2006). He furthermore associates this strand with

the ‘top down and heavily externalized approaches to peacebuilding’ (Richmond, 2006:

560) that have prevailed in Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving aside cases where the victor is

an internal party and international intervention has played a much more limited role.

Most recently, the critical peacebuilding literature has started to recognize that

the liberal peace is not the only game in town and has acknowledged that the

international power relations that have supported up to now the consensus around

liberal peacebuilding might be shifting (Richmond and Mac Ginty, 2014; Richmond and

Tellidis, 2014). However, it is still reluctant to discuss the possibility that the most

prominent current alternative to the liberal peacebuilding model would not be an ‘every-

day’ or emancipatory peace, focused on the needs of people affected by conflicts, but

the experiments of often illiberal, state-driven peacebuilding that typically follow

7

military victory (Lewis, 2010; Soares de Oliveira, 2011). As a consequence, calls to

look at ‘autonomous recovery’ (Weinstein 2005, 5) and ‘illiberal peacebuilding’ (de

Oliveira 2011, 288) have remained largely unanswered.

A case for victory?

In spite of the neglect for the victor’s peace within the academic discourse on

peacebuilding, a few scholars have advanced the ‘strong’ argument that victory is

generally superior to negotiated settlements (Luttwak, 1999; Toft, 2009) while others

have uphold the more moderate arguments that outsiders should not always pressure

belligerents into concluding cease-fires and engaging in negotiations (Clapham, 1998;

Licklider, 2009; Weinstein, 2005; Mac Ginty, 2008). Most of the debate on the potential

advantages of victory has been conducted within the (mostly US-based) quantitative

literature on war termination, in insulation from the (mostly European) qualitative

literature on peacebuilding.

In a controversial article published in the magazine Foreign Affairs Edward

Luttwak argued more than fifteen years ago that we should ‘give war a chance’

(Luttwak 1999). His argument reposes on the belief that peacemaking induced by

international pressures may lead to a temporary end of the hostility but will in the end

undermine long-term chances of peace. The negotiation-cum-power-sharing and

peacekeeping model would freeze an unstable distribution of power, only to give time

to the belligerents to reorganize and rearm.

A more sophisticated defence of the victor’s peace has been provided by Robert

Harrison Wagner (1993) and Roy Licklider (1995), in their pioneering work on civil

war termination. Harrison Wagner noticed that military victory may lead to a peace that

is self-sustainable by destroying the organizational structure of the losing side. While

grievances within the society at large may persist, without an organizational and

material basis opposition groups will not be able to channel them into a violent struggle.

8

This argument in favour of military victory, which has been termed the repressive

hypothesis, looks at the opportunities to launch a civil war and focuses on the

achievement on what could be termed ‘negative peace’ (Galtung, 1969).

In his empirical analysis of civil war termination, while attempting to test

Harrison Wagner’s hypothesis, Roy Licklider formulated a second hypothesis in

support of the argument that peace after a military victory would be more sustainable

(1995). He pointed out to the fact that, if a civil war has broken out in a given country,

this is probably for one reason: reconstructing the pre-war order that has caused the war

would not be a viable peacebuilding option. Negotiated settlements are unable to

radically alter power relations within the society and thus to destroy the power of

groups that have vested interests in preventing institutional and social reforms. On the

other hand, victories would bring to power a regime that has a free hand in pursuing its

own political agenda. Such liberty may allow the new rulers to address some of the root

causes of war and help with the establishment of a political order that might represent

an improvement with respect to the pre-war order. Licklider did not make however a

strong case for victory. He argued that military victory makes a political and social

revolution possible, but this does not mean that such revolution will in fact always take

place.

Building on Licklider’s work, Monica Duffy Toft has claimed to have found

evidence about the transformative potential of victory through her statistical analysis of

civil wars (2009; 2010). Toft has not only argued that war recurrence is less frequent

after victories, but also that post-conflict countries where rebels achieved a decisive

victory display a better quality of peace. In particular, they would be more likely to

experience sustainable democratic improvement and higher economic growth rates. Her

causal explanation is that rebels generally start a civil war in a disadvantaged position

and need a high level of institutional capacity for surviving and winning. In addition,

rebels typically criticize the government’s shortcomings and espouse popular

9

grievances in order to gain support. They must at least partially deliver on their

promises if they want to gain internal and international legitimacy. Thus, legitimacy and

capacity would be endogenous to rebel victories and might trigger processes that are

conducive to democracy and economic development.

On the overall, however, quantitative research has produced mixed results on the

impact of victory on civil war termination. In a literature review summarizing the

findings of fifty quantitative studies, Jeffrey Dixon has concluded that there is ‘an

emerging consensus that military victories are more likely to interrupt the cycle of war

than are negotiated settlements’ (Dixon, 2009: 128). However, he has also found that

military victory is believed to increase the risk of several forms of post-war political

violence and decrease the chances of successful post-war democratization. In short,

Dixon suggests that war outcomes would give way to a normative dilemma, especially

for external interveners that might want to see a conflict end soon, but also prevent

human rights abuses and promote democratization. Moreover, some scholars contest

that military victories would bring any benefit in terms of post-war stability, pointing

out that, with international support, negotiated settlements can also be pretty stable

(Doyle and Sambanis, 2006; Quinn et al., 2007). Others argue that, in the long term, the

outcome of a civil war has no substantial impact on the chances of democratization in

terms of the sustainability of peace and the chances of post-war democratization (Fortna

and Huang, 2012). In short, the response to the question if we should ‘give war a

chance’ has no clear cut answer.

Victor, illiberal peacebuilding and statemaking: a research agenda

A binary vision, where interveners’ choice is seen as limited to let the war run its course

or promoting a settlement, is perhaps not the most helpful in policy terms. Policy

makers are usually influenced in deciding their course of action with respect to a civil

war by factors such as state interests, geopolitical consideration, feasibility of a military

10

intervention, not by a coherent peacebuilding vision. Moreover, negotiation and all-out

war are typically not mutually exclusive in diachronic terms: often the resort to one

solution is the consequence of the failure of the other, with negotiated settlements

emerging from the acknowledgement that the war cannot be won, and decision to

pursue the military option following a failed settlement attempt. As for the time being

some wars will end in negotiated settlements and others with a military victory, the task

of third party actors should be in both cases to nurture peace or, at least, to avoid doing

harm. Moreover, important knowledge about how countries emerge from conflicts and

rebuild viable institutions could be gained by enlarging the peacebuilding inquiry to the

victor’s peace.

Three sets of research questions about post-victory transitions appear

particularly relevant. First, what currency has the ‘victor’s peace’ at the international

level and to what extent does it represent an alternative to the ‘liberal peace’? How

strong is the link between the fall in the number of negotiated settlement in the last

decade and the post-2001 international order? Secondly, is peace following a military

victory really different from peace following a negotiated settlement and in which

ways? The mechanisms through which peace is achieved after a peace agreement or a

victory are sensibly different, and it seems plausible to expect that this will have

consequences on the type of peace being built. Third, which are the implications of

victory for the relationships between liberal peacebuilders and national actors? Do

victories undermine the influence of liberal peacebuilders, or have they a positive role

to play in post-conflict reconstruction after victories?

Although this research agenda is still at its very beginning, it might gain

inspiration from analyses of single case studies of post-conflict reconstruction following

victory. I recognize that historical cases might offer relevant insights but, since my

focus is on the relevance of the victor’s peace to contemporary international politics, I

limit my selection of the literature to case studies of post Cold War civil wars.

11

Important insights are also provided by the work of authors that have explored: 1. forms

of peacebuilding alternative to the liberal peace, labelled in different ways (illiberal

peacebuilding/peace, hybrid governance, autonomous recovery); 2. post-conflict

reconstruction applying classic statebuilding theory. For the purpose of this inquiry,

these works have several limits. Not all of them adopt a comparative perspective and

their criteria for case selection are often not representative. Several authors have

explicitly aimed at selecting the most atypical cases (with respect to the ‘liberal peace’

paradigm), resulting in an over-emphasis of the differences between post-settlements

and post-victory peace (Weinstein, 2005; Soares de Oliveira, 2011; Jones et al., 2012;

Lyons, 2013). In other cases, countries appear to have been to some extent ‘hand

picked’ to prove the argument of the author (Weinstein, 2005; Toft, 2009; Diaz and

Murshed, 2013).

Nevertheless, these studies suggest some possible answers to the questions

above and allow to formulate the following hypothesis:

1. Governments and insurgents draw from a range of international discourses

(counterinsurgency, rebel greed, defence of democracy) to legitimate the choice of non

engaging in negotiations and pursuing victory. The ‘victor’s peace’ becomes possible

when these narratives are credible and gain acceptance at the international level.

2. Processes of post-victory peacebuilding are predominantly shaped by the

vision and ideas of the victorious elite for the future of the country and by the will

and/or capacity of this elite to translate this vision into effective policy.

3. The post-conflict reconstruction process takes in most cases an illiberal

character, and the victor shows relative disregard for internationally-sponsored

democratization.

4. Because of the asymmetry of power between the victor and the vanquished

and the mutual denial of legitimacy, reconciliation between communities and equitable

transitional justice is particularly difficult after a victor’s peace.

12

5. Military victories give to the winners the possibility of undertaking far-

reaching reforms. They are associated with institutional innovation and successful

statebuilding but also with the dangers of a top-down, ‘high modernist’ approach to

post-conflict reconstruction.

With respect to the first sets of questions, Sri Lanka provides an interesting case

to show how a government can build wide international alliances and use the discourse

of counter-insurgency to legitimize ‘alternative tenets of conflict management,

including a focus on state-centric economic development and political processes, an

avoidance of democratic and liberal political prescriptions (which are seen as divisive

and often provoke conflict) and the use of force to repress insurgency and dissent’

(Lewis, 2010: 662; see also Goodhand 2010). In Angola and Colombia, governments

exploited the international discourse about ‘rebel greed’ in order to justify their decision

to pursue ‘total wars’ against insurgents (Diaz and Murshed, 2013; Péclard, 2008).

Angola ‘became a banner in the struggle against ‘blood diamonds’ and the ‘rationality’

of Savimbi’s struggle was reduced to the ‘greed’ of profit-seeking rebels’ (Péclard

2008: 10). In Angola, as well as in Côte d’Ivoire, the fact that the losing warring party

had refused to recognize election results has also been a powerful factor legitimating the

victor, irrespectively from its subsequent record in terms of democratization once in

power.

The nature of decisive war outcomes suggests that the political order emerging

in post-victory countries could be substantially different than in a post-settlement case.

The victor of a civil war is typically in a stronger bargaining position, both in material

terms than in terms of legitimacy enjoyed in the eye of the population and the

international community, with respect to a party to a peace agreement. Thus, the victor

has more freedom to pursue its own political and economic choices without having to

compromise with its former enemies and with international supporters of the ‘liberal

peace’. Indeed, a case has been made for paying more attention to the agency of

13

national ‘power elites’ in post-conflict settings, especially in cases of military victories

(Sesay et. al., 2009; Jones, 2014).

For several reasons this freedom could translate into an authoritarian outcome.

First, since it grants to both parties a chance to hold power in the future, post-war

democratization has been regarded as a way for the former warring parties to find a

compromise on the post war order (Wantchenkon, 2004). Such need to compromise is

obviously absent in post-victory transitions. Secondly, negotiated settlements offer a

window of opportunity to international peacebuilders for introducing liberal practices. If

democratization is seen as the outcome of a bargaining process between national elites

and liberal interveners, the fact that the balance would tip more in favour of the national

elites in case of post-victory transitions suggest that the outcome would be more often

illiberal (Barnett and Zürcher, 2009; Zürcher et al., 2013). Moreover, outsiders typically

promote liberal ideas and practices by pushing for the introduction of relevant

provisions in peace agreements (Joshi et al, 2014), a mechanism that does not hold for

victory.

Several case studies confirm the openly illiberal character of the post-conflict

reconstruction process after a military victory, typically driven by a national elite

pursuing a hegemonic vision. Moving from the case of Angola, Ricardo Soares de

Oliveira proposes a definition of illiberal peacebuilding as ‘a process of post-war

reconstruction managed by local elites in defiance of liberal peace precepts regarding

civil liberties, the rule of law, the expansion of economic freedoms and poverty

alleviation, with a view to constructing a hegemonic order and an elite stranglehold over

the political economy’ (Soares de Oliveira, 2011: 288). Terrence Lyons applies a

similar perspective while dealing with four cases of insurgent victory (Ethiopia, Eritrea,

Uganda and Rwanda) where the victors ‘re-created themselves into authoritarian parties

that dominated post-conflict politics’ (2013: 2). In these countries, transitional justice,

demobilization of former combatants and post-conflict elections have been subordinated

14

to strategies of power consolidation and used to reinforce political authority and

authoritarian statebuilding. Will Jones, Ricardo Soares de Oliveira and Harry

Verhoeven have remarked the emergence on the African continent of a wave of

‘illiberal statebuilders’ emerged from decisive wars, ‘unified and well-organised

movements that have, in the aftermath of conflict, captured the state and established

durable political order, building a core of functional institutions’ (2012: 5). In Angola,

Ethiopia, Rwanda and Sudan these illiberal statebuilders ‘rule in defiance of liberal

peace precepts, having first used war and then the post-conflict situation to establish a

hegemonic order and a stranglehold over the political economy’ (2012: 5). In cases

where international intervention has given a decisive contribution to victory, lip service

is at least paid to liberal prescriptions. However, the case of Côte d’Ivoire suggests that

the post-victory government has not been heavily constrained and has made choices that

have been controversial on issues such as transitional justice and reintegration of former

combatants (HRW, 2013a).

It shall also be noticed that, while Jones, Soares de Oliveira and Verhoeven

(2012) and Lyons (2013) focus on cohesive victorious movements that have been able

to rule as unitary actors, power-sharing remains relevant in the cases when victory has

been achieved by an alliance of forces. In Libya, the fragility of the post-conflict phase

is in great part attributable to the composite nature of the coalition that defeated

Muhammar Gaddafi. In Côte d’Ivoire, president Alassane Ouattara has been forced to

deal with two uncomfortable allies: the Parti Démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI),

which has given a decisive contribution to his electoral victory, and the former armed

insurgents of the New Forces, who have enabled him to take power militarily. Because

they repose on a compromise, ‘coalition victories’ might offer better chances for a

modest improvement in democratic freedoms, but they might be less successful in

achieving political stability.

15

Even when conflict is absent, the victor is still confronted with the problem of

how to incorporate actors associated with the vanquished in the social and political

order. The problem of ‘reintegration’ poses on different terms with respect to post

negotiation settings, because of the absence of power-sharing, the asymmetry of power

between victor and vanquished and the lack of mutual recognition of legitimacy, but it

is not irrelevant, as the ‘repressive’ hypothesis on the effect of victory would suggest.

There is a broad range of variation in the extent to which victory disrupts the military

and organizational structure of the vanquished and neutralizes the challenge that they

pose. In the end, the ruling regime cannot completely ignore the former defeated party

or its civilian constituency. In Angola, the oil-buttressed MPLA regime has successfully

reduced UNITA to the role of figurehead opposition. However, research conducted in

former UNITA strongholds suggests that UNITA cadres and their former supporters

continue to see themselves as the embodiment of an alternative statebuilding process

and to conceive political competition with the MPLA as a ‘zero sum’ game (Pearce,

2008; Pearce, 2011). In cases where the victor lacks the resources of the MPLA in

Angola, the process of reintegration can be even more complicated. Looking at the

Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurgency in Sri Lanka, a less investigated case

with respect to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelan (LTTE), Hill argues that in a long

term perspective reintegration of former combatants after victory can be as challenging

as after settlement (Hill, 2013).

Other potential differences between post-settlement and post-victory peace

regards the pursuit of reconciliation and equitable transitional justice. This could be

considerably more complicated in presence of a sharp asymmetry of power between the

victor and the vanquished. Opening a debate on war time human rights violations,

whether through classical judicial mechanisms or forms of ‘restorative justice’, might

not be in the interest of the victor, which would typically have been involved in such

violations. The victorious elite could also pursue a ‘victor’s justice’, where the

16

punishment of crimes committed by its opponents becomes a way to reinforce its power

and to promote a narrative of the civil war that attributes most of the faults to the

vanquished. Especially in the case of conflicts with an ethnic or religious overtone,

political hegemony of the victor and victor’s justice could aliment among the former

constituencies of the vanquished a feeling of marginalization and a revanchist mentality.

Case studies lends some confirmation to the hypothesis that reconciliation after a

military victory is a difficult endeavour, especially in ethno-regional conflicts. While

explicit policies of discrimination against social, ethnic or religious groups associated

with the defeated enemy have not been common, in many cases the picture is one of

unspoken exclusion, covered by a rhetoric of reconciliation and multi-ethnic harmony.

In Sri Lanka and Rwanda, evidence suggests that, beyond enforced unanimity, divisions

associated with the conflict have not disappeared (Höglund and Orjuela, 2012; Straus

and Waldorf, 2011). In Côte d’Ivoire, a rhetoric of reconciliation, including the

establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission, has been a cover under which

pursuing a substantial ‘victor’s justice’, while local grievances over land tenure pitting

different communities against each other have yet to be solved (HRW, 2013b).

While the ‘illiberal peacebuilding’ lens suggest a rather pessimistic

interpretation of post-victory peace, a state-building focused perspective suggest that

lack of civil and political freedoms may be counter-balanced as ‘brutal or predatory

processes may counter-intuitively participate in social transformation and the

consolidation of institutions’ (Soares de Oliveira, 2011: 310). While conventional

wisdom has, up to now, posited that theories of statebuilding through war making are

inapplicable to contemporary developing countries, a number of scholars have argued

that this might not be the case, or at least not always (Taylor and Botea, 2008;

Weinstein, 2005). One particularly interesting and well documented case is Rwandan

post-conflict transition, which has been described a process of ‘mutually reinforcing

murder and creation’ (Jones, 2014: 7). Rwanda has showed after the 1994 genocide

17

impressive growth rates and is widely seen as a statebuilding success, while having at

the same time conceded little to the liberal model (Straus and Waldorf, 2011; Campioni

and Noack, 2012; Reyntjens, 2013; Jones, 2014).

Other evidence has been provided by Fabio Andres Diaz and Syed Murshed,

who have looked at how Colombia and Sri Lanka have struggled to establish a

monopoly of force on their territory. In this process, they have expanded the size and

capabilities of their armed forces and increased both state revenues and expenditures

(2013: 282). In discussing autonomous recovery, understood as a process ‘in which

states achieve a lasting peace, a systematic reduction in violence, and post-war political

and economic development in the absence of international intervention’ (2005: 5),

Jeremy Weinstein has contended that, provided that certain conditions are met, civil

wars can result in institutional innovations and in the establishment of more viable state

structures. Two of the three case studies used by Weinstein to provide evidence in

favour of his thesis – Uganda, Eritrea, and the Somaliland and Puntland regions of

Somalia – are cases of rebel victories.

However, the ambition to redraw state institutions might also carry dangers.

James Scott identified military victory as one of the conditions that might enable

dangerous ‘high modernist’ statebuilding projects (1999). Scott Straus and Lars

Waldorf have explicitly made reference to Scott’s concept of ‘high modernism’ in

accounting for the political, economic, and social engineering undertaken by the

Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) government in Rwanda (2011). Eritrea, where post-

liberation statemaking seems to have degenerated into hyper-authoritarianism and

paranoid securitization, might provide another example of this danger (Dias and

Dorman 2014).

Liberal peacebuilders and the victor’s peace

18

Although victory is often depicted as an internally-engineered outcome, international

peacebuilders have not been absent from post-victory countries. Some recent military

victories have been supported by Western states under the banner of the R2P (Bellamy

and Williams, 2011), while other countries, such as Rwanda, have hosted peacekeeping

missions and received substantial amounts of aid. However, the place of international

peacebuilders after a victor’s peace is problematic. On the overall, experiments of post-

conflict reconstruction after victory challenge the ‘liberal peace’ project, as they often

question two of its fundamental tenets – that democratization is the most secure avenue

to achieve lasting peace and that no statebuilding project outside the West-promoted

project is possible.

International peacebuilders have tried in a number of cases to moderate the

‘winner take all’ character of victory, by insisting on the importance of democratization

or issuing call for national reconciliation. However, not only they have often had little

leverage over victorious elites, but in several cases they have also showed little

awareness of the particular challenges of post-victory reconstruction. In cases such as

Sri Lanka, where the post-conflict regime had already showed its ability to challenge

the liberal peace tenets by its decision to pursue total war, the margin of manoeuvre of

international peacebuilders has been clearly limited from the start. But leverage has

been limited also in cases where victory has been achieved with substantial international

support, such as in Côte d’Ivoire. Such support is typically spurred by the international

perception that the defeated party was an illegitimate actor and, as a consequence,

international peacebuilders might not be well placed for advocating power-sharing or

reconciliation. Moreover, some post-victory countries have engaged in complex

‘strategies of extraversion’, aiming to maximize the influx of foreign aid, while at the

same time preserving a considerable political margin of manoeuvre (Straus and

Waldorf, 2011; Jones et. al, 2012). Such is the case of Rwanda, which highlights the

little leverage of liberal peacebuilders in post-victory countries: in spite of the country’s

19

dependency on international assistance, the RPF government has managed to retain

considerable independence from donors and, until recently, has been able to stifle

criticism for its authoritarian practices (Hayman, 2011). In Côte d’Ivoire, although

ostensibly trying to protect political pluralism, international peacebuilders have in the

end helped legitimizing the regime’s victor’s justice when the International Criminal

Court (ICC) has made the controversial choice to concentrate its action on former

president Gbagbo and his associates (HRW, 2013; Viti, 2014). Thus, a better

understanding of how post-conflict reconstruction after victory work might also be

important to avoid errors that might reinforce the less desirable characters of the

‘victor’s peace’.

Conclusion

A comparative research agenda on post-victory peace processes is still to be built, but

several strands of existing literature might be useful in conceptualizing and

understanding the victor’s peace. A large number of statistical studies have tried to

assess how war outcomes affect the prospects for sustainable peace and post-war

democratization. Although important, these studies are affected by the typical

limitations of quantitative research – they cannot provide a fine-grained analysis of war-

to-peace transitions, being forced to focus on a limited number of variable. A growing

literature is investigating models of peacebuilding alternative to the ‘liberal peace’.

These studies have sometimes relied on anecdotic evidence or failed to dialogue among

each other. Nevertheless, their insights help us gaining a preliminary understanding of

the victor’s peace. The image that emerges is highly ambivalent: the victor’s peace

might be a ‘revolutionary’ peace and present higher potentialities in terms of

statebuilding, institutional innovation and economic recovery than post-settlement

transitions. However, it might also tend to verge towards authoritarianism, militarism,

securitization, and to show little consideration for human rights.

20

In order to understand explain how countries emerge from war after a military

victory, researchers should be able to put aside a series of assumptions that have guided

up to now research on peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction. Whether they

have held the view that liberal peacebuilding is currently the best solution for war

shattered countries or claimed that the ‘liberal peace’ agenda is ultimately hegemonic

and oppressive, researchers have put international intervention at the centre of the stage.

Instead, a new research agenda should aim at explaining and understanding local

agency, shedding ultimately light on endogenous attempts at building institutions and at

creating a legitimate order in the aftermath of war, be they successful or failed.

21

Barnett M and Zürcher C (2009) The Peacebuilder’s Contract: How External Statebuilding Reinforces

Weak Statehood. In: Paris R and Sisk T (eds) The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting the

Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations. New York: Routledge.

Bellamy AJ and Williams PD (2004) Introduction: Thinking Anew about Peace Operations.

International Peacekeeping 11(1): 1–15.

Bellamy AJ and Williams PD (2011) The new politics of protection? Côte d'Ivoire, Libya and the

responsibility to protect. International Affairs 87(4): 825–850.

Campioni M and Noack P (eds.) (2012) Rwanda Fast Forward: Social, Economic, Military and

Reconciliation Prospects. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Clapham C (1998) Rwanda: The Perils of Peacemaking. Journal of Peace Research 35(2): 194–210.

Dias A and Rich Dorman S (2014) ‘We Didn’t Fight for This’: The Pitfalls of State and Nation

Building in Eritrea. Conference Paper, United Kingdom Association for African Studies (ASA-UK)

Conference, University of Sussex, 9–11 September.

Diaz FA and Murshed SM (2013) ‘Give War A Chance’: All-Out War as a Means of Ending Conflict

in the Cases of Sri Lanka and Colombia. Civil Wars 15(3): 281–305.

Dixon J (2009). Emerging Consensus: Results from the Second Wave of Statistical Studies on Civil

War Termination. Civil Wars, 11(2): 121-136.

Doyle MW and Sambanis N (2006) Making War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace

Operations. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Duffield MR (2001) Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and

Security. London: Zed Books .

Fortna VP (2004) Where Have All the Victories Gone? War Outcomes in Historical Perspective.

Conference paper, Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Available at:

http://www.columbia.edu/~vpf4/apsa04.pap.pdf (accessed 26 January 2015).

Fortna VP and Huang R (2012) Democratization after Civil War: A Brush-Clearing Exercise.

International Studies Quarterly 56(4): 801–8.

Galtung J (1969) Violence, Peace, and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research 6(3): 167–91.

Goodhand J (2010) Stabilising a Victor’s Peace? Humanitarian Action and Reconstruction in Eastern

Sri Lanka. Disasters 34(3): 342–67.

Goodhand J and Korf B (2011) Caught in the Peace Trap? In: Goodhand J, Korf B and Spencer J

Conflict and Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka. London: Routledge, pp. 1-15.

Hampson FO and Hall PR (2007) Negotiation and International Conflict. In Webel C and Galtung J

(eds) Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies. London; New York: Routledge, pp 35-50.

Harrison Wagner R (1995) The Causes of Peace. In Licklider R (ed) Stopping the Killing: How Civil

Wars End. New York: New York University Press, pp. 235–68.

Hartzell CA and Hoddie M (2007) Crafting Peace: Power-Sharing Institutions and the Negotiated

Settlement of Civil Wars. University Park (PA): Penn University Press.

22

Hayman R (2011) Funding Fraud? Donors and Democracy in Rwanda. In Straus S and L Waldorf

(eds) Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence. Madison (WI):

University of Wisconsin Press, pp 118-131.

Heathershaw J (2013) Towards Better Theories of Peacebuilding: Beyond the Liberal Peace Debate.

Peacebuilding 1(2): 275–82.

Hill, THJ (2013) The Deception of Victory: The JVP in Sri Lanka and the Long-Term Dynamics of

Rebel Reintegration. International Peacekeeping 20(3): 357–74.

Höglund K and Söderberg Kovacs M (2010) Beyond the Absence of War: The Diversity of Peace in

Post-Settlement Societies. Review of International Studies 36(2): 367–90.

Höglund K and Orjuela C (2012) Hybrid Peace Governance and Illiberal Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka.

Global Governance 18(1): 89–104.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) (2013a) Turning Rhetoric into Reality. Accountability for Serious

International Crimes in Côte d’Ivoire. Country Report. Available at:

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2013/04/04/turning-rhetoric-reality (accessed 26 January 2015).

Human Rights Watch (HRW) (2013b) ‘That Land is my Family’s Wealth’. Addressing Land

Dispossession after Côte d’Ivoire’s Post-Election Conflict. Country Report. Available at:

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2013/10/09/land-my-family-s-wealth (accessed 26 January 2015).

Jones W (2014) Murder and Create: State Reconstruction in Rwanda since 1994. PhD thesis, Balliol

College, University of Oxford.

Jones W, Soares de Oliveira R and H Verhoeven (2012) Africa’s Illiberal State-Builders. Working

Paper 89, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford.

Joshi M, Lee SY and Mac Ginty R (2014) Just How Liberal Is the Liberal Peace? International

Peacekeeping 21(3): 364–89.

Kalyvas SN and Balcells L (2014) Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil

Wars, Journal of Conflict Resolution. Epub ahead of print of 4 September 2014. DOI: 2014

10.1177/0022002714547903.

Kreutz J (2010) How and When Armed Conflicts End: Introducing the UCDP Conflict Termination

Dataset Journal of Peace Research 47(2): 243–50.

Lederach JP (1997) Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. Washington:

United States Institute of Peace Press.

Lewis D (2010) The Failure of a Liberal Peace: Sri Lanka’s Counter-Insurgency in Global

Perspective. Conflict, Security & Development 10(5): 647–71.

Licklider R (1995) The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945-1993. The

American Political Science Review 89(3): 681-690.

Licklider R (2009) Civil War Outcomes. In Midlarsky MI (ed), Handbook of War Studies III The

Intrastate Dimension. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 193-225.

Luttwak EN (1999) Give War a Chance. Foreign Affairs, July/August. Available at:

23

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/55210/edward-n-luttwak/give-war-a-chance (accessed 26

January 2015).

Lyons T (2013) The Importance of Winning: Victorious Insurgent Groups and Post-Conflict Politics.

Conference paper, Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago. Available

at: http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2315753 (accessed 26 January 2015).

Mac Ginty RM (2008) No War, No Peace: The Rejuvenation of Stalled Peace Processes and Peace

Accords. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mac Ginty RM (2010) Hybrid Peace: The Interaction between Top-down and Bottom-up Peace.

Security Dialogue 41(4): 391–412.

Paris R (2004) At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Pearce J (2008) L’UNITA à la Recherche de ‘son Peuple’. Politique Africaine 2: 47–64.

Pearce J (2011) State Building in War and Peace in Angola. Conference paper, European Conference

of African Studies, Uppsala.

Péclard D (2008) Les Chemins de la ‘reconversion Autoritaire’ en Angola. Politique Africaine 2: 5–

20.

Piccolino G (2012) David against Goliath in Côte d’Ivoire? Laurent Gbagbo’s war against Global

Governance. African Affairs 111(442), 2012, pp. 1–23.

Piccolino G (2014) The Dilemmas of Consent in UN Peace Operations: the case of the United Nations

Operation in Côte d’Ivoire. In Wyss M and Tardy T (eds) Peacekeeping in Africa: the Evolving

Security Architecture. London: Routledge.

Quinn JM, Mason TD and Gurses M (2007) Sustaining the Peace: Determinants of Civil War

Recurrence International Interactions 33 (2): 167–93.

Ramsbotham O, Woodhouse T and Miall H (2011) Contemporary Conflict Resolution. Cambridge:

Polity Press.

Reyntjens F (2013) Political Governance in Post-Genocide Rwanda. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Richmond OP (2006) The Problem of Peace: Understanding the ‘Liberal Peace’. Conflict, Security &

Development 6(3): 291–314.

Richmond OP and Mac Ginty R (2014) Where now for the critique of the liberal peace? Cooperation

and Conflict. Epub ahead of print of 20 August 2014. DOI: 10.1177/0010836714545691.

Richmond OP and Tellidis I (2014) Emerging Actors in International Peacebuilding and Statebuilding:

Status Quo or Critical States? Global Governance 20: 563–584.

Scott JC (1999) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have

Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Selby J (2013) The Myth of Liberal Peace-Building. Conflict, Security & Development 13(1): 57–86.

Sesay A, Charles U, Osman G and Olawale I (2009) Post-War Regimes and State Reconstruction in

24

Liberia and Sierra Leone. Dakar: CODESRIA.

Shearer D (1997) Exploring the Limits of Consent: Conflict Resolution in Sierra Leone. Millennium

26(3): 845–60.

Soares De Oliveira R (2011) Illiberal Peacebuilding in Angola The Journal of Modern African Studies

49(2): 287–314.

Söderberg Kovacs M and Svensson I (2014) The Return of Victories? Conference Paper, General

Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), Science Po Bordeaux.

Available at: http://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/8b5c9fb5-9173-47da-969f-28d8124cbc67.pdf

(accessed 26 January 2015).

Stedman SJ, Rothchild DS and Cousens EM (2002) Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace

Agreements. Boulder (CO): Lynne Rienner.

Straus S and Waldorf L (2011) Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass

Violence. Madison (WI): University of Wisconsin Press.

Taylor BD and Botea R (2008) Tilly Tally: War-Making and State-Making in the Contemporary Third

World International Studies Review 10(1): 27–56.

Toft MD (2009) Securing the Peace: The Durable Settlement of Civil Wars. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

Toft, MD (2010) Ending Civil Wars : A Case for Rebel Victory? International Security 34(4): 7–36.

United Nations (UN) (2013) Final report of the Group of Experts on Côte d’Ivoire pursuant to

paragraph 16 of Security Council resolution 2045 (2012). Group of Experts on Côte d’Ivoire,

S/2013/228 Security Council, 17 April.

Viti F (2014) Une crise peut en cacher une autre. Retour sur une narration pacifiée. In : Viti F (ed) La

Côte d’Ivoire, d’une Crise à l’Autre. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 211-236.

Walter BF (1997) The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement. International Organization 51(3):

335–64.

Walter BF (2004) Does Conflict Beget Conflict? Explaining Recurring Civil War. Journal of Peace

Research 41 (3): 371–88.

Wantchenkon L (2004) The Paradox of Democracy: A Theoretical Investigation. American Political

Science Review 98(1): 17–33.

Weinstein J (2005) Autonomous Recovery and International Intervention in Comparative Perspective.

Working Paper 57, Center for Global Development. Available at:

http://www.cgdev.org/publication/autonomous-recovery-and-international-intervention-comparative-

perspective-working-paper (accessed 26 January 2015).

Woodhouse T (2000) Conflict Resolution and Peacekeeping: Critiques and Responses. International

Peacekeeping 7(1): 8–26.

Zaum D (2012) Beyond the ‘Liberal Peace.’ Global Governance, 18(1): 121–32.

Zürcher C, Manning C, Evenson K, Hayman R, Riese S and Roehner N (2013) Costly Democracy:

25

Peacebuilding and Democratization After War. Palo Alto (CA): Stanford University Press.