On Monday 8 July 2024, the Foreign Policy Centre and the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham (POLSIS) hosted an online roundtable with policymakers, government officials, NGO representatives, and academics to discuss the findings of the research project ‘Learning from Failure: How to Prevent Civil War Recurrence’. Funded by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the project explored how to prevent the resumption of large-scale conflict-related violence after the conclusion of a peace accord.

The meeting was chaired by Dr Giuditta Fontana, Associate Professor in International Security at the University of Birmingham, who co-directed the project with Professor Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham. They were joined by the other members of the research team, Dr Argyro Kartsonaki (University of Hamburg) and Professor Natascha S. Neudorfer (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf). The team presented their research process and shared the key findings before engaging in a broader discussion with participants on how peace processes can be developed and maintained.

Research Findings and Discussion

The overarching conclusion from the ‘Learning from Failure’ project is that carefully designed and managed peace processes can help prevent civil war recurrence. Two factors were identified as having a key impact: UN leadership of peace processes, and peace agreement provisions that map the inclusion of women in post-conflict institutions (particularly in economic and social institutions). The research team explained that this is because together, UN leadership of peace processes, and provisions for including women in post-conflict societies, can create and nurture multi-level coalitions invested in maintaining and implementing a peace accord (‘coalitions for peace’).

The five key takeaways that emerged from the discussion, were as follows:

1. Civil war recurrence can be prevented through the creation and long-term support for multi-level ‘coalitions for peace’ that help craft peace accords (or agreements), monitor their implementation, provide early warning, and devise context-appropriate actions to address localised tensions and prevent their escalation. Coalitions for peace are most effective when they build on pre-existing networks and use context-specific mechanisms to provide early warning and early response before localised tensions escalate.

2. The UN is uniquely positioned to support the prevention of civil war recurrence because it can provide the necessary international leadership to deliver mediation that is perceived as legitimate and impartial, deploy technical support and know-how, and mobilise resources in support of the peace process.

3. Provisions for the inclusion of women in post-conflict society can help prevent civil war recurrence when they empower existing, locally legitimate, networks. Women-led organisations are often cross-communal and cross-ethnic, so can nurture grassroot coalitions during the negotiation and crafting of a peace accord. Where such cross-community networks exist, based on traditional practices and customs, international actors can invest in these pre-existing informal networks to provide impetus for negotiations and/or strengthen buy-in for the peace process.

4. Power sharing and territorial self-governance may be important components of a sustainable settlement, and are consistently adopted in the accords examined by the research team. While these provisions do not impede a lasting agreement, they also do not appear to prevent subsequent relapses into violence.

5. The UN and other like-minded multilateral actors now face serious challenges as a result of renewed and intensifying geopolitical competition. However, their role in successfully preventing civil war recurrence underscores the importance of such multilateral international organisations and the need to preserve them.

Summary of the Research Process

The research sought to understand why civil war recurred and how, if at all, this could be prevented.

The researchers developed an innovative MultiStage Mixed Methods Approach to generate hypotheses and test them through original empirical data and carefully sequenced methodologies, including supervised machine learning, regression analysis, survival analysis, congruence analysis, and elite interviews with negotiators, mediators, case study experts, and practitioners.

The research proceeded in three main stages: The first step of research aimed to identify which components of peace processes may predict the stable end of conflict-related violence. It focused on fourteen peace processes in eleven countries: Angola, Bangsamoro, Bougainville, Burundi, Aceh, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Myanmar, and Sierra Leone. These internal conflicts encompass territorial ethnic, and governmental conflicts. These peace processes (1) took place between 1976 and 2015; (2) achieved a peace accord bringing to the end large-scale conflict-related violence among the same belligerent groups; and (3) did so after experiencing at least one relapse into large-scale conflict-related violence.

The second step of the research tested whether these elements could predict the non-recurrence of conflicts across all 235 political agreements concluded worldwide between 1989 and 2016.

A third step explored the relationship between the end of conflict-related violence and UN leadership of the mediation process and provisions for the inclusion of women in post-conflict societies in selected case studies (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Cote d’Ivoire).

Click here for more information about the work of Conflict and Peace Processes Research Group of the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham.

For further comments and questions, please contact:

• Giuditta Fontana, Associate Professor in International Security, POLSIS, University of Birmingham: g.fontana@bham.ac.uk
• Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, POLSIS: University of Birmingham, s.wolff@bham.ac.uk
• Alice Copland, FPC Policy and Parliamentary Affairs Manager: alice.copland@fpc.org.uk