Description:
The recent efforts to reach a settlement of the enduring and tragic conflict in Darfur demonstrate how important it is to understand what factors contribute most to the success of such efforts. In this book, Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie review data from all negotiated civil war settlements between 1945 and 1999 in order to identify these factors.
What they find is that settlements are more likely to produce an enduring peace if they involve construction of a diversity of power-sharing and power-dividing arrangements between former adversaries. The strongest negotiated settlements prove to be those in which former rivals agree to share or divide state power across its economic, military, political, and territorial dimensions.
This finding is a significant addition to the existing literature, which tends to focus more on the role that third parties play in mediating and enforcing agreements. Beyond the quantitative analyses, the authors include a chapter comparing contrasting cases of successful and unsuccessful settlements in the Philippines and Angola, respectively.
Brief description: Matthew Hoddie is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Towson University.
Review Quotes:
"This engaging and rigorous research addresses one of the most vexing issues in achieving postwar peace: forging and maintaining power-sharing among the protagonists in conflict. They argue, quite convincingly and with a diverse research design--and against conventional wisdom--that more power-sharing is better to achieve durable peace in war-torn societies. Scholars and practitioners working to negotiate and implement settlements in civil wars will want to read this volume and reconsider some of the skepticism that swirls around power-sharing today."
--Timothy Sisk, University of Denver