REBELS WITH A CAUSE: POWER SHARING, NEGOTIATED SETTLEMENTS AND THE LOGIC OF PREEMPTIVE DEFECTION By Chelsea Blake Johnson A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Associate Professor Leonardo R. Arriola, Chair Associate Professor Jason Wittenberg Assistant Professor Aila Matanock Professor Ann Swidler Fall 2015 © Copyright by Chelsea Blake Johnson 2015 All Rights Reserved Abstract Rebels with a Cause: Power Sharing, Negotiated Settlements, And the Logic of Preemptive Defection By Chelsea Blake Johnson Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science University of California, Berkeley Professor Leonardo R. Arriola, Chair Why are some negotiated settlements successful at resolving intrastate conflict, while others fail? Are settlements involving agreement to share power more effective and, if so, why have conclusions about power sharing been so mixed? I theorize in this project that power-sharing guarantees improve the prospects for a peaceful settlement by reducing the stakes of winning post-conflict elections, thereby increasing the likelihood that rebels will willingly demobilize. Contrary to the preeminent model of bargaining for peace in the literature, I posit that the costs of complying with a negotiated settlement are asymmetrical. For rebels, compliance means forfeiting military capacity and bargaining power. In contrast, the government never concedes its monopoly on the use of force and, therefore, always retains the option of resorting to military action. Given this, and the risk of competing against an entrenched incumbent with an electoral advantage, it is a rational strategy for rebels to resist demobilization until expectations of future benefits are sufficiently high. Power-sharing reforms can help to increase the perceived value of the payoff to rebel elites, thereby increasing willingness to demobilize, but only when they are designed to outlast elections. Institutions that expire after a transitional period, such as coalitions and governments of national unity, fail to redress the incumbency advantage or to reduce the importance of winning post-conflict elections outright, heightening incentives for rebels to preemptively defect. The logic of my theory of preemptive defection explains why rebels would be willing to trade military capacity for long-term power sharing, and it also acknowledges the 1 potential for rebel splintering after a settlement is signed. In the absence of power- sharing guarantees, certain elements of the rebel leadership might still be able to secure a deal that is personally beneficial. As this process of selective cooptation reveals winners and losers during the implementation period, disgruntled rebel elites have an incentive to defect unilaterally, and the likelihood of conflict recurrence is determined by their capacity to access the resources of war. Specifically, my work shows that splintering is enabled by two factors. First, the failure to sign an all-inclusive settlement means that excluded groups are more willing to form an alliance in order to facilitate continued conflict. Second, governments with a reputation for defecting on their peace agreements are easy targets for rebel leaders hoping to mobilize defection from within their own ranks. Empirically, this project relies on a nested design. It starts with new data collection on 138 negotiated settlements to domestic armed conflict signed between 1975 and 2005. I coded each settlement for its inclusion of power-sharing provisions, with specific attention to different types of power sharing and the distinction between permanent and transitional guarantees. A binomial logistic regression analysis of conflict termination reveals strong support for the central expectations of this study. Settlements that include provisions for permanent power sharing are significantly more likely to result in peace, all else equal, while transitional arrangements have no effect. I then selected a best-fit case exhibiting change over time in order to examine the underlying mechanisms at work. Through extensive field research in Uganda, including interviews with rebel and government representatives and archival and secondary research, I sought to understand why members of the insurgent party eventually rejected four of the five settlements signed, and what conditions allowed them to continue fighting for a more favorable bargain. My research indicates that settlements are more likely to succeed in resolving conflict where they include provisions for power sharing over the long term. Such guarantees increase the willingness of rebels to surrender their weapons, and they create more diffuse benefits and long-term time horizons throughout the leadership, which reduce the potential for splintering. These findings offer a number of contributions to the literature on conflict resolution and post-conflict power sharing. Most importantly, they show that including permanent and transitional formulas under the same umbrella concept have led to faulty and contradictory conclusions about the effectiveness of power sharing. In addition, by disaggregating the way that the benefits of a settlement are perceived across the rebel elite, this project helps to explain why many are signed that have few prospects of success, 2 and it provides lessons for identifying such bargains before they can degenerate into renewed conflict. Finally, the theory departs from the common focus on coercive third-party enforcement of peace agreements by emphasizing the rationality of rebel decisions to comply or defect and showing that settlements are most effective where insurgents prefer compliance—namely, where the benefits offered outweigh the costs of both continued fighting and democratization. This suggests a different role for the international community in peace processes, specifically in disseminating new norms and strategies for engineering institutions, rather than investing in costly peacekeeping missions. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables iv List of Figures vi List of Acronyms vii Acknowledgments viii 1. The Settlement of Domestic Armed Conflict: Questions, Theories, and Research Design 1 1.2 The Puzzle 5 1.3 Theory of Preemptive Defection 7 1.4 Scope and Definitions 12 1.5 The Data 16 1.6 Research Design and Case Selection 23 1.7 Plan of Study 26 Part I: On Peace via Power Sharing 29 2. A Theory of Preemptive Defection: Reconsidering Strategies during the Implementation Period 30 2.2 The Implementation Period: Current State of the Literature 32 2.2.1 Unitary Actors 35 2.2.2 Simultaneous Decision-Making 37 2.2.3 Identical Options and Strategies 38 2.3 The Theory of Preemptive Defection 42 2.4 Developing Hypotheses: Power Sharing and Rebel Splintering 49 2.4.1 Permanent Versus Transitional Power Sharing 49 2.4.2 Splintering and Inclusive Settlements 53 2.4.3 Reputation and Patterns of Defection 55 2.5 Conclusions 58 3. Negotiated Settlements and Power Sharing: A Concept Analysis 60 3.2 Conflict Outcomes and Negotiated Settlements 63 3.3 Negotiated Power-sharing Settlements 68 3.4 Power-sharing Provisions: A Typology 74 3.4.1 Inclusive Power-sharing Provisions 75 3.4.2 Diffusive Power-sharing Provisions 79 3.5 Conclusions 83 i Part II: Testing the Hypotheses 84 4. Cross-national Analysis of Negotiated Settlements and Conflict Termination 85 4.2 Testable Hypotheses 87 4.3 Data and Methods 94 4.3.1 Independent Variables 96 4.3.2 Control Variables 100 4.4 Empirical Analysis 103 4.4.1 Power-sharing Settlements 103 4.4.2 Inclusive Settlements 108 4.4.3 History of Government Defection 112 4.5 Addressing the Potential for Bias 117 4.6 Conclusions 124 Part III: Power Sharing and Elusive Peace in Uganda 126 5. The 1985 Nairobi ‘Peace Jokes’ And the National Resistance Army 127 5.2 The National Resistance Army and the Second Bush War 129 5.3 Terms of the Nairobi Peace Agreement 134 5.4 Legacies of the Nairobi “Peace Jokes” 139 5.5 Conclusions 144 6. Rebel Splintering, Alliances and Conflict Recurrence: The Uganda People’s Democratic Army/Movement 146 6.2 The Pece Peace Process 150 6.3 Reputational Rhetoric as a Defection Strategy 155 6.3 The Addis Accord: Splintering and Alliances 157 6.4 Conclusions 161 7. Splintering, Reputation and Permanent Power Sharing: The Uganda National Rescue Front I and II 164 7.2 Settlement as Contract: The Uganda National Rescue Front I 167 7.3 Selective Cooptation and Rebel Splintering 171 7.4 The 2002 Yumbe Peace Process 174 7.5 Explaining the Success of the Yumbe Agreement 179 7.6 Conclusions 183 ii 8. Conclusion: Summary of Findings and Policy Implications 187 8.2 Summary of Findings 188 8.3 Contributions to the Field 192 8.4 Policy Recommendations 194 8.5 Remaining Problems and Questions 198 Bibliography 200 Appendix A: Complete regression tables and robustness checks 218 Appendix B: List of interview subjects 226 Appendix C: Coding descriptions 232 iii LIST OF TABLES Table 1.1: Negotiated Settlements Signed between 1975 and 2005 17 Table 1.2: Variation across Five Peace Processes in Uganda, 1985-2002 25 Table 3.1: Summary Statistics across Four Categories of Outcomes, Conflicts Ending between 1975 and 2005 67 Table 3.2: Possible Provisions Included in Peace Agreement Subtypes 74 Table 3.3: Selected Sample of Coding Decisions on Well-known Negotiated Settlements 82 Table 4.1: Comparison of the Proportion of Settlements Ending in Peace for Different Definitions of Power Sharing