Bates College SCARAB Honors Theses Capstone Projects Summer 5-2015 A More Durable Peace: The exN us Between Local Influence and Power-Sharing Governance Benjamin Skorpen Claeson Bates College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses Recommended Citation Claeson, Benjamin Skorpen, "A More Durable Peace: The exN us Between Local Influence and Power-Sharing Governance" (2015). Honors Theses. 138. http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses/138 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Capstone Projects at SCARAB. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of SCARAB. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A More Durable Peace: The Nexus Between Local Influence and Power-Sharing Governance An Honors Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Department of Politics Bates College In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts By Ben S. Claeson Lewiston, ME March 30, 2014 1 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Senem Aslan, for her advice, support, and patience throughout the year. Thanks to the entire Politics Department for fostering my interest in political science, and encouraging my pursuit of extended study. Thank you to Joshua Rubin, Nicole Watts, and James Richter for participating in my defense and for their constructive edits and suggestions. In addition I would like to extend my thanks to all my friends who supported me, and helped with the editing process throughout the year. In particular, I would like to thank Steph and Evan for their thoughtful edits. Thank you to my sister, Hanna, whose wise advice and perspective has helped to shape a considerable proportion of my political and academic viewpoints. Thank you to my brother, Per, whose life outlook I can only hope to emulate, and whose authenticity inspires me. Finally, thank you to my parents, Kate and Bjorn, for their continuous support. Without their unrelenting optimism in my abilities and their tireless willingness to encourage me, I would not be where I am today. 2 Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………...…4 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………....5 Literature Review………………………………………………………………………………..13 I. Internal Environment…………………………………………………………….…13 II. Third Party Guarantors……………………………………………………………..17 III. Causes of the Conflict…………………………………………………………….…23 IV. Local Actor Influence……………………………………………………………….28 V. Power-Sharing……………………………………………………………………….33 VI. Argument…………………………………………………………………………….39 From Sunningdale to the Good Friday Agreement……………………………………………44 I. Overview……………………………………………………………………………..45 II. Civil Rights Movement……………………………………………………………..46 III. Sunningdale……………………………………………………………………….…53 IV. Good Friday Negotiations………………………………………………………….58 V. Good Friday Agreement…………………………………………………………….65 Incomplete Power-sharing, Insecurity, and the Failure of the Sunningdale Agreement…...68 I. The Sunningdale Agreement: Historical Context…………………………………70 II. Incomplete Power-sharing………………………………………………………….71 III. Ethnic Outbidding Culture…………………………………………………………83 IV. Third Party Guarantors……………………………………………………………..86 V. Correlation Between Public Opinion and Trends of Violence……………………91 The Good Friday Agreement: A Success, A Missed Opportunity, or Both?...........................98 I. The Good Friday Agreement: Historical Context………………………………..101 II. Third Party Guarantees……………………………………………………………103 III. Power-sharing……………………………………………………….……………..106 IV. Local Influence…………………………………………………….……………….117 V. Limited Local Empowerment……………………………………………………..129 Conclusion: Hybrid Peace in Communally Divided Peace Processes……………………...133 Appendix ……………………………………………………………………………………….140 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….145 3 Abstract This thesis explores factors conducive to successful settlements within communal civil wars. Through a comparative analysis of the Sunningdale Power-sharing Agreement and Good Friday Power-sharing Agreement in Northern Ireland, it enters a vast literature surrounding both the case study as well as the theoretical underpinnings of successful peace settlements. This thesis identifies five potential factors contributing to the success of a peace settlement: a third party guarantor, inequality reducing measures, power-sharing measures, influence of local actors, and the nature of the conflict itself. Each of these factors is attached to specific indicators that are then cross- analyzed against public opinion data and trends of violence. This analysis is conducted in a four- phased approach: during the negotiations to get to the table, during the settlement negotiations, during the implementation, and during the aftermath of the settlement. This thesis posits that complete power-sharing creates a moderated culture that allows non-sectarian power blocks to develop and challenge communally exclusive blocks, so long as they are given a political space to develop. Contrary to arguments that suggest that power-sharing confines countries to ethnic exclusivity, this thesis explores whether it can in fact create a political space where those divisions may be broken down. 4 Introduction Since the end of the Cold War global conflict has shifted away from inter-state wars, and towards internal conflicts.1 Negotiated settlements to those conflicts, complicated by the necessity of joint governance, have been few and hard to come by. Alexander Downes, coalescing a series of statistical analysis of negotiated settlements, highlights the bleak picture negotiators face in the post- conflict reconstruction process, finding that two thirds of negotiated settlements to communal civil wars ended in failure.2 Military victories, in contrast, are over three times more likely to end in a stable regime.3 The salient question becomes, when do peace settlements succeed, and which particular conditions facilitate agreements that are able to overcome those odds? Inter-communal conflicts plague their countries with brutal violence, pitting former neighbors, friends, and sometimes even family members against each other. Existent alliances are diminished as the script of communal antagonism takes center stage. This results in intense mistrust begat by episodes of violence in which those targeted are selected on the basis of their communal identity rather than individual attributes and actions. Despite those histories, some settlements are able to move beyond, or through, those divides into a durable and lasting peace. Specifying the conditions that facilitate those anomalies helps to illuminate the foundations upon which successful peacemaking policy is created. In the face of an increasingly militarist peacemaking style from international interveners, it is critical that these factors be rigorously assessed in the hopes of informing a more nuanced policy of intervention. To do so, this thesis specifically asks what factors helped negotiators to the Good Friday Agreement overcome the difficulties that the trajectories of communal conflicts present, which, in turn, doomed the previous 1 Roland Paris, At War's End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 12. 2 Alexander Downes “The Problem With Negotiated Settlements to Ethnic Civil Wars,” Security Studies 13, no. 4 2 Alexander Downes “The Problem With Negotiated Settlements to Ethnic Civil Wars,” Security Studies 13, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 230-1. 3 Barbara F. Walter, Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 169-70. 5 Sunningdale Agreement. The Northern Irish case represents an important variation on this question. A series of attempted peace settlements, ceasefires, and negotiations all receded into conflict. Even settlements predicated on the same basic principles as the Good Friday Agreement failed to prevent this regeneration. Understanding why the Good Friday Agreement escaped those trajectories offers a valuable and interesting insight into the complexities of peace settlements. This thesis argues that in the Good Friday Agreement, the coordinated effects of strong third party guarantees to the settlement, along with complete power-sharing within political and security sectors, created a moderated political climate in Northern Ireland. By guaranteeing the protection of communal interests through political, military, and cultural power sharing backed up by a third party guarantee, these interests became a less relevant factor to the continued wellbeing of Northern Irish citizens. As a result, parties were forced to shift to moderated policy platforms in order to remain electorally palatable. This climate allowed for the beginnings of cross community cleavages to develop, forming social networks around issue areas that cut across communal divides. However, while these networks were effective in their isolated implementation, disempowerment of local actors within the agreement undercut their capacity to challenge identity-based political parties. This argument fills gaps in existent literature by building bridges between theoretical arguments that have isolated themselves. Power-sharing theorists have been excluded from debates about dissolving identity divides, because they have been portrayed as reifying communal divisions through institutionalizing them. This thesis bridges those two literatures by examining how power- sharing can, counter-intuitively, create the climate necessary for