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j o u r n a l o f P E A C E R E S E A RC H
0.20
Proportion of countries in war
244
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0.18
0.16
0.14
0.12
0.10
0.08
0.06
0.04
0.02
0.00
1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000
Ongoing wars
New wars
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Policy Implications
How can the international community contribute to ending wars? As all the articles
point out, civil wars are very heterogeneous
in both why and how they start, how they
develop, and how they end (see Licklider,
1993: 303ff.). The policy recommendations
of the articles in the issue are consequently
diverse.5
The first set of policy recommendations is
to promote equitable development. Several
of the articles note how poor access to
alternative employment increases the
chances that potential recruits will join and
remain in a rebel organization. Increasing the
opportunity costs for recruits is likely to
reduce both the risk of onset and recurrence
and the duration and intensity of wars.
Development assistance is often feasible only
after the war has ended, however.
The empirical articles in this issue show
that the curbing of rebel group finances is
effective to shorten at least some types of conflicts. One well-known initiative to achieve
this is the Kimberley Process, which aims to
shut diamonds from conflict zones out of the
market.6 Depending on how successful the
Kimberley Process turns out to be, this
research suggests that corresponding
initiatives could be applied to other commodities such as other gemstones and timber.
However, this type of regulation will be effective only when the goods are legally traded
and where the trading firms are concerned
with their reputation. Hence, rebel group
income from drugs, extortion, and kidnapping have to be curbed by other means.
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for the UN, international financial institutions, and individual governments to help
parties solve the commitment problems.
Walter shows that partition is a poor
solution to secessionist conflicts, although it
would terminate the conflict and solve the
commitment problem. Partition dramatically increases the risk of recurrent war in the
same country, and may also encourage separatism in other countries.
Conclusion
This overview has surveyed some of the most
important topics in the small but growing
theoretical and empirical literature on the
duration and termination of civil war. Like
civil wars themselves, the articles are highly
diverse, and they formulate different
positions in an ongoing debate. The articles
are not in strong disagreement, but the differences in the approaches preclude drawing
very firm conclusions as to where a consensus is forming. All the empirical studies have
to confront the fact that theoretical concepts
such as motivations or perceptions are not
directly observable, and the studies are forced
to rely on proxies. This may explain why the
articles present fairly divergent results. As in
the study of civil war onset, many differences
in results are due to different civil war datasets
(see Ross, 2004). The process of coding when
civil wars start and end is also more difficult
than just coding that they occurred (see
Fearon, 2004: 278279), introducing
another source of variation. There is also
much less of a consensus of what are the
appropriate explanatory variables to include
in studies of civil war duration than in studies
of onset. This is partly due to the heterogeneity of civil wars and to the variety of
theoretical approaches this inevitably entails.8
8 The heterogeneity of civil wars is arguably less of a
problem in studies of civil war onset, since it is not possible
to know what type of civil war a country will experience
before it starts.
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