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Peace Processes and State Building: Economic and Institutional Provisions of Peace Agreements

Author: A Suhrke and T Wimpelmann
Date: 2007
Size: 82 pages (802 KB)

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Summary

To what extent have recent civil war peace agreements included state-building provisions? This paper, prepared for  the World Bank and the UNDP by the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), reviews the academic literature and examines recent peace agreements to assess the degree to which they make provision for future state operations. State-building provisions may involve a trade-off between the goals of ending hostilities and setting norms for peace-building. The characteristics of a conflict may determine the effectiveness of peace agreement provisions.

A peace agreement has a dual function: to end a war and to build peace. The latter element may provide an outline for future reforms, create momentum for change and bring together aid agencies and the post-conflict government. However, it may also overload the agreement with reforms lacking in local legitimacy and ownership. Whilst international development actors can encourage parties to buy into a peace agreement by providing financial and technical guarantees of peace-time reconstruction, post-conflict provisions will only succeed if they rest on national acceptance. Including more controversial measures may help to set peace-time norms, but can also jeopardise agreement.

Therefore, although agreements should address some of the ‘core state functions’ (security, public administration, justice, economic recovery, political accountability and post-war integration), the types of provisions needed will be context-dependent. A general survey of 27 recent peace agreements and a more specific examination of agreements in Mozambique, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Liberia and Sierra Leone identify the conditions under which certain state-building provisions tend to be included and prove successful.

The following findings emerge from the general survey:

• While most core functions are addressed in the majority of agreements, provisions covering public administration, justice, economic reform and integration tend to show less specificity than those addressing security and political accountability.
• Peace agreements increasingly cover a broader scope of issues but contain fewer mechanisms to verify implementation, particularly in security and public administration.
• Security reform and public administration issues increasingly figure in agreements, a sign of the growing international concern with governance, ‘failed states’ and state-building as elements of peace-building.
• Besides the growing international involvement in peace processes, other factors which influence the contents of agreements include the nature of the conflict, the relative strength of the parties and the depth and length of peace negotiations. 

The five case studies reveal that where conflict was shaped by social grievances, peace negotiations focussed on political and economic reform. However, where violence was a result of a ‘weak state’, agreements tended to prioritise a swift end to violence through power-brokerage pacts:

• The Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan agreements contained few economic and governance provisions, but for different reasons. The Mozambique agreement was negotiated before state-building had become an international priority. The other two agreements omitted such provisions for the sake of a quick peace, although the omissions were partly compensated for by provisions in other instruments.
• The Guatemala agreement was the most comprehensive, containing a detailed reform agenda and clear obligations imposed on the parties. These characteristics emerged from the lengthy negotiations and the broad recognition of the need for socio-economic reforms.
• The Liberia agreement was negotiated during a humanitarian crisis and thus prioritised an end to violence. Domestic and international recognition of the causal significance of ‘state failure’ and the misuse of natural resources informed the provisions on state accountability and economic management.

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Source: Suhrke, A. and Wimpelmann, T., 2007, 'Peace Processes and State building: Economic and Institutional Provisions of Peace Agreements', Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen
Author: Astri Suhrke , Astri.Suhrke@cmi.no ; Torunn Wimpelmann , Torunn.Wimpelmann@cmi.no
Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), http://www.cmi.no