Institutional Adoption in the Resolution of Civil Conflicts

Abstract

What type of political institutions has been arranged in ending violent civil conflicts and why? In this article I review intellectual debates on consociationalism and the power sharing approach to civil war resolution and formulate three testable hypotheses: an institutional affinity hypothesis, a United Nations (UN) intervention effect hypothesis, and a conflict characteristics hypothesis. These hypotheses are empirically tested with thirty-six cases of negotiated settlements of civil wars in the post-Cold War period. The empirical results present that parliamentarism has greater institutional affinity with executive power sharing than other types of government, that federalism is highly conducive to regional autonomy arrangements, and that UN intervention plays a pivotal role in arranging power sharing institutions between government and rebel groups in the transition from civil war to peace. These finding imply that the UN and other international actors should seriously consider the institutional context of civil-war torn countries when they intervene in and propose a power sharing deal during peace negotiations, because an incompatible set of institutions is far more difficult to be arranged and would not function as effectively as designed.