Preventing Civil War Recurrence: Do Military Victories Really Perform Better than Peace Agreements? Causal Claim and Underpinning Assumptions Revisited

Abstract

Existing research suggests that peace is more stable after military victories than it is after peace agreements. This article challenges this conventional wisdom. By applying survival analysis, we demonstrate that peace agreements exhibit just as strong of a relationship to enduring peace as military victories do. Moreover, we investigate the assumptions that underpin the aforementioned claim. These assumptions link peace survival to the type of civil war termination and refer to intervening variables. Using time-series data for 48 civil wars that ended between 1990 and 2009, the empirical analysis finds support for only two underpinning assumptions in favour of victories.