The two books discussed in this review address the same substantive question: How does one establish sustainable peace after civil war? However, their approaches are quite different. The Roeder and Rothchild edited volume focuses on one aspect of establishing postwar peace—the post–civil war political institutions of the country. Doyle and Sambanis focus on the role of the United Nations in helping to establish sustainable postwar peace. I will first address the edited volume and then turn to the Doyle and Sambanis book before offering a few concluding remarks.
Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy after Civil Wars is a terrific edited volume. I can think of no edited volume where the individual chapters fit more nicely together into a cohesive whole. As with the other volume discussed in this review, the primary purpose of the book is to offer policy prescriptions regarding how to establish peace in post–civil-conflict settings. The focus of the book is on domestic political institutions—which postwar political institutions are most conducive to establishing a postwar sustainable peace. In addressing this topic, the book calls into question what might be called the conventional wisdom on this topic, namely that power-sharing arrangements are the best approach to establishing sustainable peace in postconflict countries and offers instead another prescription what the editors call “power-dividing institutions.”
Power-sharing arrangements have been employed by the international community recently in the peacebuilding efforts in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and other post–civil-conflict situations. The editors of this volume identify what might be called “the dilemma of power sharing”: “Power-sharing institutions frequently facilitate a transition from civil war but they thwart the consolidation of peace and democracy” (p. 12). Power-sharing arrangements can induce combatants to lay down arms by assuaging their fears that they will be locked out of power in the subsequent peace; however, these arrangements also ossify the political cleavages that lead to the war in the first place. The argument makes a great deal of sense, and contributions to this edited volume do a very good job of calling into question the empirical validity of any claims that power-sharing arrangements produce sustainable postwar peace and democratization.
The editor's policy recommendation is for post–civil-conflict planners to create power-dividing rather than power-sharing institutions. They argue power-dividing (i.e., separation-of-powers) institutions create cross-cutting cleavages that require actors to make political alliances across the divide of the old ethnolinguistic or religious cleavages along which the previous war was fought and in that way encourage political stability and sustainable peace. In their words, “one limits majorities not by empowering minority groups with parts of the government's power but by expanding individual liberties and rights at the expense of government and by empowering different majorities in independent organs of government” (p. 15).
To bolster its case against power-sharing institutions, the book offers chapters on some of the common power-sharing prescriptions for postwar stability (e.g., territorial decentralization, ethnofederalism, proportional electoral system, and fiscal power sharing) and shows that none of these institutions is significantly related to postwar sustainable peace. The book also offers case studies of Lebanon, India, Ethiopia, and South Africa that suggest that the instances of sustainable peace following civil conflict in deeply divided societies may be outliers. The book is convincing about the questionability of power-sharing arrangements as a means to sustainable postwar peace, but one obvious question concerns the issue of military force. It seems imprudent to apply the same prescription about power-dividing institutions to that particular state function. Some kinds of power trump others. A program of “empowering different majorities”—one in charge of the judiciary, one in charge of economic policy, and one in charge of the armed forces—leaves two majorities with powers that exist only as long as the third is willing to allow. To be fair, the book is not silent on this issue; one contribution shows quite clearly that power-sharing arrangements for the armed forces are correlated with longer-lasting postwar peace.
However, the question of military power brings me to my one criticism of the volume. The focus of the book is explicitly on domestic political institutions. The chapters of this volume do a thorough job of dismantling confidence in power-sharing institutions, but one is left wondering if the power-dividing institutions they espouse could fare any better. Are any domestic political institutions self-enforcing in the contexts where these civil wars occur? How can institutions be created to make the use of violence too costly for those who control the armed forces? The absence of much sustained discussion of the role of military force or the threat of violence in a book about post–civil war politics is a shortcoming.
While these comments indicate that the book does not provide the full story regarding the establishment of postwar peace, the book does do a good job contesting the conventional wisdom regarding power-sharing institutions and it offers an alternative. The book is quite accessible. I have already assigned it to students, both graduate and advanced undergraduate, who are doing research on the effects of political institutions on averting civil war.
The second book in this review is Making War and Building Peace by Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis (hereafter DS2006). To review a book on UN peacekeeping that comes with a laudatory blurb on the back cover from the current secretary general of the UN is, to say the least, a daunting task. The argument of this book will be very familiar to those who have read the authors' earlier article (“International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and Quantitative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 94 [no. 4, 2000]: 779–801; hereafter DS2000) on the same topic. The theory of peacebuilding offered by DS2006 is the same “peacebuilding triangle” from DS2000. Peacebuilding success is characterized as a triangle-shaped reservoir filled by “local capacity” and drained by “hostility.” If the reservoir is insufficiently full, peacebuilding fails. When local capacity is low and hostility is high, both can be compensated with “international capacity,” which, in this case, mainly refers to UN operations. What is missing is a theoretical story about why the agents in a civil war behave in such a way as to produce the triangle. While the correlations posited by the triangle are certainly plausible (e.g., more international capacity, more local capacity, and less hostility make sustainable peace more likely), the triangle fails to explain why individuals involved in the war would actually behave in a way as to produce the triangle, that is why UN operations encourage individual combatants to lay down arms and not take them up again.
The main policy recommendation that the triangle offers is that, when it comes to UN intervention, more is better than less. In other words, more international capacity is more likely to bring about sustainable peace than less international capacity is. Only at the limit where hostility is at its maximum and local capacity is nonexistent can international capacity be ineffectual according to the peacebuilding triangle. However, the link between the area of the peacebuilding triangle and the prospects for peacebuilding success is less clear when the authors turn to the empirical section of the book. For example, Cyprus, which is characterized as a failure by the authors, has a peacebuilding triangle that is about 50% larger than that of East Timor, which is characterized as a success (although the events of last summer may prompt the authors to change their coding of the latter conflict).
The quantitative empirical analysis is quite similar to the original DS2000 analysis, which has been criticized of late by Gary King and Langche Zeng who argue that the results are highly “model dependent,” meaning the results are driven mainly by their specification assumptions rather than by the data. The inferences about the effect of UN intervention are based on extrapolations of what would have happened in counterfactual cases that are very different along a variety of dimensions (e.g., duration of conflict and number of casualties). The problem is that the cases in which the UN intervened are quite different from the cases in which the UN did not intervene. Thus the analysis compares apples and oranges, or more precisely, it draws inferences about the effect of a treatment on apples based on the effect of that treatment on oranges. This book does not address this issue, presumably because it was in print before the issue was raised. The qualitative empirical section of the book has been expanded over DS2000 and accounts for the great increase in the length of the project over the last six years, mainly through the inclusion of several in-depth case studies of successes and failures in UN peacebuilding efforts.
Finally, the authors offer more policy prescriptions in addition to those described above. In particular, they offer a seven-step program for peacebuilding success. The steps include establishing national and regional security, achieving quick “wins” by distributing food and supplies, establishing the rule of law and property rights, and democratizing and improving education. Each step of this program certainly sounds plausible, however it is unclear how these recommendations follow from the peacebuilding triangle or the empirical analysis earlier in the book.
Taken together the two volumes discussed in this review are a good example of the old adage, “It is better to light a single candle than curse the darkness.” Both books, despite the daunting challenges to their tasks, seek to offer insight into how to build sustainable peace after civil war. The Roeder and Rothchild volume focuses on domestic political institutions, questions the assessment that power-sharing institutions are the most effective way to build sustainable peace, and offers instead power-dividing institutions as a possibly superior alternative. Doyle and Sambanis, by contrast, do not focus on domestic political institutions but instead address the most effective ways that the international community, mainly through the UN, can foster post–civil war sustainable peace. Although neither book completely dispels the darkness over our understanding of civil wars, both books illuminate an important piece of this complex and important political phenomenon.
