Violence in Peace: Understanding Increased Violence in Early Post-conflict Transitions and Its Implications for Development

Abstract

A key issue for development in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been an escalation of violence during post-conflict transitions. A long-term goal for international donor involvement is to assist in building legitimate and effective political, economic and legal institutions; however, research and observation has revealed that increased violence is commonplace during peace processes and strongly influences the ways in which these institutions are formed. In turn post-conflict violence itself is strongly influenced and motivated by the way in which peace agreements have been negotiated. Peace processes in the late twentieth century have had a mixed record of success with the results from peace agreements often more divisive than unifying. Representation in the process may be skewed so that ‘after a negotiated ending to a civil war, most countries lie in the intermediate terrain’ between domestic forces who backed peace accord implementation, and ‘hardliners on one or more sides who would prefer a return to armed conflict over implementation of the accords’ (Boyce 2002: 32).