The Resolution of Civil Wars: Changing International Norms of Peace-Making and the Academic Consensus

ABSTRACT

Since the end of the Cold War, the belief that the international community has a responsibility to support negotiated solutions to civil wars has exercised an enduring influence on research and policy making. However, this belief has relatively recent roots. This article looks at how changing international norms have influenced the way academic researchers view civil wars and expect them to end. The lack of interest in solving internal conflicts during the Cold War was matched among academics by a focus on other security issues and a belief that most civil wars could not be negotiated, although a minority of scholars disagreed. After the Cold War, a new international regime for solving civil wars has emerged, with the active support of a large share of the academic community. However, scholars have also criticised the way Western priorities have shaped liberal peace-making attempts and reflected on the assumptions underlying international conflict resolution. Paradoxically, while the academic community has become increasingly optimistic, the post-Cold War approach has fallen into crisis, due to geopolitical transformations and a change in the nature of contemporary insurgencies. At the end of this article, I suggest new avenues for research in the changing international order.

Introduction

Since the end of the Cold War, few assumptions have been more influential, in both academic research and policy-making, than the idea that the international community has a responsibility to respond to internal conflicts and that the best way to assume this responsibility is to help the warring parties to conclude and implement a peace agreement. However, this approach is relatively recent: before the end of the Cold War, there was relatively little interest among academics and policy-makers in promoting negotiated settlements in areas of the world considered ‘peripheral’. Some policy-makers and academics even believed that solving internal conflicts was undesirable or impossible.

This article argues that the assumptions that have shaped much of the debate on resolving internal conflicts need to be historically situated and seen as part of a specific international order. International developments have influenced academic thought on civil wars and peace-making, although to some extent academics have also been able to anticipate or influence changes. A ‘norm of negotiated settlement’ (Morjé Howard and Stark 2018) or, in other words, a ‘standard treatment’ (Gowan and Stedman 2018) for civil wars, took shape at the end of the Cold War as a result of several converging trends: the unwillingness of the former superpowers to continue to provide support to the warring parties in internal conflicts (Gowan and Stedman 2018), the absence of major security threats to the US and their allies (Morjé Howard and Stark 2018), and a new normative environment characterised by support for human rights and democratisation (Paris 2004, Morjé Howard and Stark 2018).

This ‘standard treatment’ was based on four implicit assumptions: 1) Violent internal conflicts are always undesirable and should be stopped; 2) Negotiations should always, or almost always, be attempted; 3) Negotiated settlements give the opportunity not only to end armed violence, but also to address the ‘root causes’ of the conflict; 4) International involvement is key at all stages for negotiated settlements to succeed. These assumptions led to an unprecedented expansion of international mediation and peacekeeping as instruments to solve civil wars.

This article looks at how normative changes at the international level have also influenced the academic debate on how civil wars end, or should be made to end. During the time of the Cold War, some peace researchers questioned the idea that internal conflicts were impossible to negotiate. In the 1990s, most researchers believed that civil wars can, and indeed ought to be, settled through some kind of negotiated process, although some were critical of the type of peace that the international community was promoting. More fundamental critiques to the ‘standard model’ came from scholars who questioned the assumption that negotiated settlements were truly the best way to a lasting peace: for instance, early research on war termination suggested that decisive military victory had a better record than settlements in preventing war recurrence (Licklider 1995). However, these arguments did not seriously affect policy-makers’ attitudes to solving civil wars.

In the last ten years, a paradox has become evident: while academics have become increasingly optimistic about international efforts to solve conflicts, the post-Cold War model of conflict management has entered into a probably irreversible crisis. Many researchers have long focused on analysing international efforts to solve civil conflicts and suggesting ways to improve them. Even those who have been critical of such efforts have often taken as given the hegemonic status of the liberal model of conflict management. The changing international environment calls for scholars to re-evaluate their role and mission. I conclude this article by suggesting ways in which the academic community can contribute towards understanding the changing international environment and possibly advancing the goal of supporting peace.

The Cold War and the Resolution of Internal Conflicts: An Era of Scepticism

During the Cold War, promoting negotiated solutions to the internal conflicts that broke out in many newly independent countries was not seen as a priority by Western policy-makers, nor by a majority of academics. The automatic response to these conflicts by the two dominant powers – the US and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – was one of supporting the side of the conflict that was perceived as ideologically aligned and close to their interests (Gowan and Stedman 2018, p. 172). Conflict resolution was seen as important only when these conflicts threatened to escalate to a direct confrontation between the super-powers (Gowan and Stedman 2018, p. 172).

The idea that stopping internal conflicts was not always possible, or even desirable, however, was not just held by securocrats in Washington DC or Moscow. The 1960s and the 1970s saw the peak of the ‘revolutionary insurgency’ model (Kalyvas 2011). Inspired by the protagonists of liberation wars and by their writings (Zedong and Griffith 1961, Fanon 1972 [1959]), many political leaders and intellectuals from what was called at the time the third world regarded insurgencies as a necessary evil against neo-colonial or corrupt regimes.

Although the Security Council was paralysed by opposite vetoes, the United Nations (UN) began, from 1948, to deploy peacekeepers. However, with the important exception of the failed UN Operation in the Congo (ONUC) in 1960–64, peacekeeping operations of the Cold War era mainly consisted of small groups of military observers in charge of monitoring the observance of ceasefires, typically in inter-state disputes. In general, insurgencies were treated as internal issues, and leaders of rebel groups were not invited by international actors to the negotiation table (Clapham 1998). An exception was made for conflicts that were seen as part of the decolonisation process: in the 1970s and 1980s, Western states got involved in attempts to negotiate an end to the conflicts in Zimbabwe and Namibia (Stedman 1991, Melber and Saunders 2007). These early experiences provided a blueprint for post-Cold War conflict resolution.

The attitudes of the era were largely shared by academic researchers. With some exceptions (Gurr 2015 [1970]), few Western specialists of politics and international relations were studying civil wars. In the US, which became in this period the leading Western country for the study of international relations, the context of the Cold War favoured a particularly narrow and parochial understanding of security. Influenced by the interests of the US politico-military establishment, most researchers in the fields of international relations and security studies were focusing their attention on deterrence and nuclear weapons (Baldwin 1995). The Social Science Research Council and private organisations like the Ford Foundation provided generous funding for establishing new research centres on non-Western geographical areas. However, even here, US security interests dominated the agenda (Cumings 1997). Modernisation theory encouraged reductionist interpretations of conflict and political instability and was used by government-affiliated think tanks such as Rand to justify military rule as the best way to manage turmoil (Abella 2009, p. 142).

The Invert US and misguided involvement in the Vietnam war could have acted as a stimulus to devote more attention to the study of internal conflicts (Baldwin 1995). It ended up having the opposite effect: its main consequences were the withdrawal of the US military from ‘stability operations’, and a perception that insurgency and counterinsurgency were taboo issues that researchers should best avoid (Taw 2012). The Vietnam war also contributed to tainting the reputation of the area studies community linked to US intelligence, who were seen as having contributed to justifying the war (Cumings 1997).

The lack of interest in internal conflicts in countries seen as ‘peripheral’ among the international relations and security studies community was complemented by an attitude of scepticism about whether internal conflicts can ever come to a negotiated end. Civil wars were assumed to be zero-sum conflicts where the stakes are ‘chiefly indivisible’ (Pillar 2014 [1980], p. 24). Even William I. Zartman, one of the first prominent US scholars to write about conflict resolution in civil wars, believed that their asymmetry made negotiations in internal conflicts harder than in inter-state conflicts (Deng and Zartman 1991). In fact, the widespread belief that civil wars could not be negotiated became a self-fulfilling prophecy: most civil wars between 1900 and 1989 did not end by negotiations but with the decisive victory of one of the warring parties, or in an informal stalemate (Stedman 1991, Licklider 1995) [Table 1].

Table 1. Trends in the termination of intrastate conflicts.

Time Period	Number of intra-state conflicts	Share of intra-state conflicts
1946 – 2020
Peace agreement	44	10.11 per cent
Ceasefire	54	12.41 per cent
Victory (government)	94	21.61 per cent
Victory (insurgent)	36	8.28
Low Activity (Less than 25 deaths)	188	43.22 per cent
Actor ceases to exist	19	4.37 per cent
Total	435	100 per cent
1946 – 1989
Peace agreement	10	6.41 per cent
Ceasefire	7	4.49 per cent
Victory (government)	62	39.74 per cent
Victory (insurgent)	23	14.74 per cent
Low Activity (Less than 25 deaths)	50	32.05 per cent
Actor ceases to exist	4	2.56 per cent
Total	156	100 per cent
1990 – 2009
Peace agreement	31	16.58 per cent
Ceasefire	32	17.11 per cent
Victory (government)	28	14.97 per cent
Victory (insurgent)	9	4.81 per cent
Low Activity (Less than 25 deaths)	81	43.32 per cent
Actor ceases to exist	6	3.21 per cent
Total	187	100 per cent
2010 – 2020
Peace agreement	3	3.26 per cent
Ceasefire	15	16.3 per cent
Victory (government)	4	4.35 per cent
Victory (insurgent)	4	4.35 per cent
Low Activity (Less than 25 deaths)	57	61.96 per cent
Actor ceases to exist	9	9.78 per cent
Total	92	100 per cent

Figures compiled by Nila Zarepour-Arizi (Texas Tech University) using the UCDP Conflict Termination dataset (UCDP 2021). Following the UCDP definition, a conflict is defined as a contested incompatibility that concerns government and/or territory where the use of armed force between two parties, of which at least one is the government of a state, results in at least 25 battle-related deaths in one calendar year.

Still, alternative views occasionally surfaced. In 1964, international relations theorist George Modelski argued that the idea that civil wars ‘represent a fight for a total victory’ was contradicted by ‘the empirically confirmed phenomenon of settlement in internal war’ (Modelski 1964, p. 124). In a book published in 1970, Lincoln Palmer Bloomfield and Amelia Catherine Leiss argued that international powers should take responsibility for solving wars in developing countries, a view that was quickly dismissed by the US academia as utopian (Bock 1970).

Standing against this predominant ‘common sense’, a group of scholars strongly animated by normative commitments worked in the 1960s and the 1970s in North America and Europe to establish the discipline of peace research and conflict resolution (Singer 1976, Rogers and Ramsbotham 1999). These scholars were trying to revitalise a research agenda that had started taking shape before World War II, which addressed war as ‘primarily a problem to be solved, a disease to be cured, rather than an instrument of statecraft’ (Baldwin 1995, p. 120). However, until the 1980s, lack of institutional interest and political divisions contributed to the marginalisation of peace research.

The field of peace studies was built on the assumption that better knowledge about peace and conflicts would have fed into policymaking and ultimately made armed violence less likely (Singer 1976, Rogers and Ramsbotham 1999). The escalation of Cold War-fuelled conflicts destroyed the optimistic expectation that political leaders would have shown interest in limiting violence. In considering how to respond to the changing context, peace scholars split between a moderate current, mainly concerned about making the study of peace a scientific endeavour in the positivist sense (Singer 1976), and a radical current, who believed that peace researchers should challenge capitalism and the Western establishment (Galtung 1969).

In the last decade of the Cold War, these divisions became less salient, due to the field becoming more professionalised and diversified (Rogers and Ramsbotham 1999), although some scholars lamented that these developments resulted in the marginalisation of the most radical perspectives (Gleditsch et al. 2014, Krause 2019). The interest in peace research, particularly in the US, where a new major research programme of research on negotiations was launched at Harvard, intensified (Rogers and Ramsbotham 1999). In 1986, after decades of debates and postponement, the US Congress created the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the first governmental institution that aimed to advance peace research. However, the Ronald Reagan administration, which equated peace research with ‘softness’ towards the USSR, sought to undermine the new institute (Montgomery 2003).

Even among peace researchers, only a minority focused primarily on internal conflicts. The tendency of some critical scholars, following Johan Galtung, to expand the notion of ‘peace’ so that it encompassed economic and social development (Galtung 1969) displaced the focus from armed political violence (Rogers and Ramsbotham 1999). It should also be noted that some of the ‘radicals’ were not in favour of negotiated solutions for conflicts in the Global South, but auspicated the victory of left wing and anti-imperialist insurgents (Singer 1976, Rogers and Ramsbotham 1999).

The positivist group led by J. David Singer should be credited for launching in 1963 the first cross-national database of wars and conflicts, the Correlates of War (CoW), based at the University of Michigan. However, although the database also collected information on civil wars, Singer’s main interests lay in understanding the causes of international wars (Singer 1972). The first database also explicitly focused on intra-state violence, the Minorities At Risk (MAR) project, which mapped politically active communal groups, only started to be compiled by Ted Gurr and his associates in 1986. In the same period, the Uppsala Conflict Data Project – later renamed Uppsala Conflict Data Programme (UCDP) – was also launched (UCDP n.d.). UCDP was to become a key resource in studying internal conflicts because, differently from CoW, it used a lower violence threshold and included many more intra-state conflicts.

In spite of these limitations, it was in the work of some of the peace studies pioneers that the ideas that informed the study of peace-making in civil wars after the end of the Cold War started to emerge (Rogers and Ramsbotham 1999, p. 748). For instance, the work of John Burton proposed a different understanding of conflict resolution, as opposed to what the author saw as traditional arbitration and mediation. For Burton, who, like Gurr, built on Abraham Maslow’s idea that humans have both material and non-material needs, the deepest conflicts were rooted in ‘human needs’ (Burton 1990). Although needs cannot be negotiated in the way interests can, Burton believed that ‘conflict resolution’, facilitated by skilled third parties, could help those involved to redefine their conflict. By applying a series of analytical and problem-solving techniques, parties to a conflict could find new creative solutions to overcome their differences (Burton 1990, p. 26).

Edward Azar, who had emigrated to the US from conflict-affected Lebanon, became one of Burton’s main collaborators. He should be credited for applying some of these ideas to what he called ‘protracted social conflicts’ – essentially, internal conflicts with a strong identity dimension. Azar was critical of ‘the traditional means of coercive diplomacy alone’ (Azar and Moon 1986, p. 393). He advocated instead a combination of problem-solving workshops and ‘development diplomacy’, aimed at ‘the reduction of structural inequalities, a shift in developmental strategies, an alteration of external economic ties, progressive reforms in socio-political structure including redistribution of power among social forces and institutions and consensus building among competing communal groups’ (Azar and Moon 1986, p. 403).

The work of scholars like Azar on internal conflicts, although ‘barely noticed in the mainstream international relations and security studies literature of the time … can be seen to have anticipated much of the post-Cold War shift of focus’ (Rogers and Ramsbotham 1999, p. 748). Some of the assumptions of conflict resolution scholars would however proved to be problematic once adopted by policymakers, such as the refusal to assign blame to any of the warring parties (Burton 1990) and the idea that groups involved in a protracted conflict can be treated as relatively homogeneous entities.

By the 1980s, the peace research movement had spurred the launch of numerous non-governmental initiatives, which aimed to pave the path to peace through ‘unofficial’ or ‘track II’ mediation (Rogers and Ramsbotham 1999). However, without a substantial shift in the international system and the emergence of a more activist UN, it was difficult for these initiatives to reach top-level decision makers. It was only with the end of the Cold War that solving internal conflicts was finally elevated to the status of international priority.

The Emergence of International Peace-Making

The end of the Cold War caused several changes in the pattern of internal conflicts, but it changed even more the way these crises were perceived by policymakers and the general public. It led to the resolution of a number of previously ‘intractable’ conflicts that had been fed by Cold War dynamics, such as internal wars in Central America and apartheid-fuelled conflicts in Southern Africa. However, this positive development was counterbalanced by the outbreak of secessionist wars in post-Communist states and by the collapse of a number of very weak states that were suddenly deprived of Cold War-era international patronage (Kalyvas 2011, Gowan and Stedman 2018). Meanwhile, the decline of revolutionary insurgencies (Kalyvas 2011) contributed to the perception that internal conflicts were now dominated by predatory actors that showed no respect for civilian lives (Kaldor 1999). Although later research has not found much evidence for the claim that conflicts in the 1990s were more brutal than older civil wars (Melander et al. 2009, Kalyvas 2011), calls for stopping these conflicts were reinforced by this perception.

Scholars have since spoken about the emergence of implicit norms (Morjé Howard and Stark 2018), informal rules (Clapham 1998) or even an ‘international regime for treating civil war’ (Gowan and Stedman 2018) to characterise the changes that took place during this period. Looking at previous scholarship, we can summarise the key assumptions that shaped the post-Cold War approach to peace-making as: 1) Violent internal conflicts are always undesirable, and should be stopped; 2) Negotiations should always, or almost always, be attempted; 3) Negotiated settlements give the opportunity not only to end armed violence but also to address the ‘root causes’ of the conflict; 4) International involvement is key at all stages for negotiated settlements to succeed. These assumptions apply particularly well to the 1990–2000 period, but they have continued to shape expectations about how the international community should respond to civil wars in the subsequent decade.

The dominant actors in the international system, particularly the US, who had now become the only superpower, played a major role in shifting the expectations about how civil wars should be addressed (Morjé Howard and Stark 2018, p. 130). The US and other Western states encouraged the UN to get involved in solving internal conflicts. They also directly got involved in promoting negotiated solutions in countries where they had previously supported one side of a conflict (Morjé Howard and Stark 2018). Southern Africa and Central America played a particularly important role in providing a blueprint for future peace processes. In South African-occupied Namibia, where the US was one of the leading mediators, the end of the Cold War made a compromise possible after a decade of unfruitful negotiations (Melber and Saunders 2007). In 1989, the UN were tasked with overseeing Namibia’s transition to independence in what became ‘the UN’s largest and most ambitious mission since ONUC in the 1960s’ (Bellamy and Williams 2020, p.68). In El Salvador and Guatemala, rather than simply withdrawing support from right wing actors responsible for severe human rights violations, the US chose to pressure the warring parties to pursue negotiations (Morjé Howard and Stark 2018). These pressures were accompanied by support for democratic reforms in Central America (Peceny and Stanley 2001).

The new conflict resolution agenda would not have become widely accepted if it had not been to some extent also endorsed by policymakers from the Global South. This endorsement was the outcome of several developments. First, with the resolution of the last decolonisation-related conflicts and the decline of revolutionary insurgencies, war was no longer seen as a tool for social change in the Global South. Second, the end of the Cold War deprived fragile states of the superpower patronage that had, until then, helped their leaders to fend off internal threats (Kalyvas 2011). In this new context, many leaders from the Global South ended up accepting the liberal norms of conflict resolution ‘as the only social vision suitable for maintaining domestic stability’ (Obamamoye 2023, p. 1393). African actors in particular contributed to shaping the conflict resolution agenda. African regional organisations got involved in responding to crises that were initially neglected by the US and other Western powers, such as the Liberian civil war, and developed a sophisticated peace and security architecture in the following years (Obamamoye 2023). Under the leadership of Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan, both from the African Continent, the UN started labelling internal conflicts ‘threats to international peace’ and, in 1992, the Agenda for Peace elevated peace-making to the status of core responsibility of the UN (Boutros-Ghali 1992, par. 20).

Normative developments shaped, and were in turn shaped, by the rise of peace-making. The defeat of the Soviet Union, the so-called ‘third wave of democratisation’ and the activism of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) encouraged Western countries to place an increasing emphasis on democratisation and the respect for human rights in their foreign policies. In this climate, conflict resolution efforts were underscored by a belief that the promotion of democracy and a market economy offered the best ground for peace. Internationally, creating a community of democratic states was supposed to guarantee a peaceful international order (Barnett 1995). Domestically, democracy was seen as a way to demilitarise politics, and to transform a violent conflict into a competition conducted through the ballot box (Paris 2004).

The emphasis on human rights and democracy also contributed to the requalification of the importance of state sovereignty and thus to the birth of a ‘post Westphalian’ conflict management system, where internal conflicts were seen as an international problem (Bercovitch and Jackson 2009, Bellamy and Williams 2020). The Agenda for Peace confidently declared that ‘the time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty … has passed; its theory was never matched by reality’ (Boutros-Ghali 1992, par 17). The preference in favour of officially recognised states was softened and all warring parties potentially included in peace talks and power-sharing agreements (Clapham 1998, Mehler 2009).

The new environment led to an unprecedented expansion of international tools aiming to contribute to the resolution of conflicts. The first of these tools was mediation, which became ‘a frequent, almost automatic international response to civil wars’ (Gowan and Stedman 2018, p. 172), with the UN increasingly involved in mediating conflicts (Gowan and Stedman 2018, p. 175). Mediation can be defined as ‘a form of third-party intervention in a conflict with the stated purpose of contributing to its abatement or resolution through negotiation’ (Zartman and Touval 1985, p. 32). The mediator’s involvement can be limited to improving communication and building confidence among the parties, but mediators can also shape the content of the settlement (Svensson 2007). Post-Cold War mediators played a key role in shifting conflict management from a ‘traditional’ model that simply aimed to stop violence to an ‘emancipatory’ model that aimed to address the underlying causes of conflicts (Clapham 1998, Bercovitch and Jackson 2009). Their action contributed to the frequent inclusion in peace agreements of provisions aiming to strengthen democracy, human rights, the rule of law and at reinforcing civilian control of the security sector (Joshi et al. 2014).

In order to support the implementation of these provisions, the Agenda for Peace introduced the concept of post-conflict peacebuilding, which encompassed ‘monitoring elections, advancing efforts to protect human rights, reforming or strengthening governmental institutions and promoting formal and informal process of political participations’ (Boutros-Ghali 1992, par. 55). Peacebuilding mobilised numerous development actors – aid agencies, NGOs, businesses – in supporting peace processes and contributing to the reconstruction of conflict-affected countries. Although there were differences among these actors and the ways they interpreted their mission, they were united in the 1990s by a common belief in ‘democratisation and marketisation’ (Paris 2004, p. 19) as the best recipe for establishing sustainable peace.

Finally, UN peacekeeping troops were called to provide security guarantees to the belligerents in internal conflicts and to support peace processes (Bellamy and Williams 2020). Endowed with multidimensional capacities – including not just troops but also police and civilian staff – peace operations became increasingly involved in an open-ended list of tasks, from the disarmament of former combatants to the organisation of post-conflict elections.

The Limits of the ‘Standard Treatment’

Already around the end of the 1990s, it became clear that the combination of diplomacy, mediation and peacekeeping that formed the new ‘standard treatment’ (Gowan and Stedman 2018) for dealing with civil wars was not always successful (Stedman 1997, Paris 2004, Gowan and Stedman 2018).

After 2000, the Security Council introduced significant innovations to peacekeeping, spearheaded by the so-called Brahimi report (UN 2000). The key principles of consent, impartiality and minimum use of force were officially retained, but their interpretation underwent substantial modifications. Consent was now required only from ‘the main parties to the conflict’ (UN 2008, p. 31) and UN peacekeeping operations were authorised to use force at the ‘tactical level’ to confront local actors that endangered the peace process or threatened civilians (UN 2008). In particular, the UN started to systematically mandate peace operations to protect civilians in their area of operation (Holt et al. 2009). Impartiality was also redefined as adherence to the principles of the UN (UN 2008, p. 33). Finally, UN missions were supposed to be ‘robust’: endowed with the necessary military capabilities to use force if necessary (UN 2008, p. 34).

In parallel, in the field of peacebuilding, there was a growing recognition that ‘promoting political and/or economic liberalisation without ensuring that a sufficiently strong and effective formal institutional framework was in place to peacefully channel new rights, freedoms, demands and expectations could lead to considerable instability and even fuel further conflict’ (Rocha Menocal 2011, p. 1717). The end goal of turning conflict-affected countries into democratic states was maintained, but policy makers were now stressing the importance of building institutions and ensuring the respect of the rule of law, seen as key preconditions for democratic reform (Paris 2004). After 2001, the securitisation of ‘failed states’ driven by the ‘war on terror’ contributed to shift the focus on statebuilding (Clausen and Albrecht 2021). However, significant differences remained between the post-invasion reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, which was substantially driven by the security interests of the intervenors, and statebuilding efforts in support of locally initiated peace processes, usually led from the UN. Indeed, UN agencies continued to place emphasis on fostering legitimacy and accountability through statebuilding (Rocha Menocal 2011).

While these innovations were significant, international efforts to solve violent conflicts through mediation, peacekeeping and peacebuilding remained to some extent dependent on the good will of the main warring parties, particularly the host state. Even protection of civilians mandates proved difficult to implement when government forces were responsible for human rights abuses (Fjelde et al. 2018). Aware of the limits of consent-based intervention, already in 1992 the Agenda for Peace had proposed that, as a last resort, ‘peace enforcement’ operations would be implemented by special military units directly under the UN control (Boutros-Ghali 1992). The increasing popularity of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the West (Wheeler 2000) also contributed to calls for more forceful action in conflicts where the warring parties refused to commit to a peace process.

Unable to acquire peace enforcement units, the UN Security Council authorised a number of military interventions carried out by third parties, which aimed at stopping a conflict, or at creating the conditions for a negotiated peace. While some have been moderately successful, such as the 2000 British intervention in Sierra Leone or the 2011 French intervention in Côte d’Ivoire, other cases, such as the 1992 US intervention in Somalia, showed that intervenors were in danger of becoming just another party to the conflict.

Debates on ‘humanitarian intervention’ continued through the 1990s and intensified after the controversial North American Treaty Organisation (NATO) intervention in Kosovo, which was conducted without UN Security Council authorisation. These debates led to the adoption in 2005 by the UN General Assembly of the Responsibility To Protect (R2P), which reframed humanitarian intervention in a way acceptable to the majority of states. While in principle the R2P legitimated international intervention, including by military means, to protect victims of mass atrocities, the version endorsed by the UN was noticeably watered down (Hehir 2018). In subsequent years, the R2P has been frequently invoked in the context of preventive measures. It has however been used to justify military intervention to stop an ongoing conflict only in the case of the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya (Hehir 2018). On the whole, the use of international military force to solve internal conflicts has remained a controversial issue and has never become part of the post-Cold War ‘standard treatment’ in the way mediation and peacekeeping based on consent from the main warring parties have (Gowan and Stedman 2018).

In spite of its limits, in the first twenty years following the end of the Cold War, the new conflict resolution regime had a concrete impact, evidenced by the change in the way internal conflicts have ended. Data collected by the UCDP project, covering conflicts with at least 25 battle deaths, shows that the proportion of internal conflicts terminating in some form of compromise grew steadily and overtook the share of military victories between 1990 and 2010 (Kreutz 2010) [Table 1]. What was in the past considered an exceptional event – the resolution of an internal conflict through a negotiated process – became in this period the norm.

The Response of the Academic Community

The academic community was both influenced by the new international environment and, in turn, contributed to shape the new norms of conflict resolution. The post 1990s period saw a sudden explosion of publications about civil wars, which contributed to shaping global discourses about war and peace-making.

Among scholars of international relations, dissatisfaction with the state-centric conception of security adopted by realist and neo-realist researchers grew during this period (Krause and Williams 1996, Cerny 1998). The trend towards a broadened conception of security anticipated and paralleled the embrace of human security by numerous international institutions. In a context where state sovereignty no longer looked to be an intangible principle of international politics, academics contributed actively to shape the discourse on humanitarian intervention (Wheeler 2000) and to its redefinition as ‘responsibility to protect’ (Deng et al. 1996).

For some academics, the wars of the 1990s were a substantially new phenomenon, fed by the process of globalisation (Cerny 1998, Kaldor 1999, Duffield 2001). The intensification of global exchanges seemed to make the nation-state increasingly irrelevant and inadequate to face new security challenges (Cerny 1998). This narrative contributed to creating a sense of urgency in addressing contemporary conflicts and in reframing them as a global issue, even if many of claims about the ‘newness’ of the wars of the 1990s and about their links with globalisation have since been disputed (Melander et al. 2009, Kalyvas 2011).

The increasing tendency of the policy community to interpret development and security as closely related, which justified multi-agency peacebuilding interventions, was also strengthened by a new wave of research about civil wars. The World Bank launched a major research programme headed by Paul Collier, which concluded that poverty was both a major cause and consequence of conflicts (Collier et al. 2003). In the UK, the Conflict Security and Development Research Group (CSDRG) at King’s College was established with support from the UK government Department for International Development (DFID), with the aim of studying security and development in a multidisciplinary way.

In this context, research on negotiating internal conflicts and implementing peace agreements suddenly boomed (Stedman 1991, Deng and Zartman 1991, Walter 1997, Crocker et al. 1999). Although the seeds of research on peace-making had been planted in the years preceding the end of the Cold War, it now found a favourable environment, where governments and research institutions were willing to fund research on solving conflicts once considered too peripheral or impossible to negotiate.

Developments in the US were particularly significant, because of the unique access that US-based scholars had to two key actors – the US government and the UN. The new USIP, headed by Chester Crocker, who had been one of the architects of the peace process in Namibia, played an important role in promoting research on conflict resolution (Hampson 1996, Crocker et al. 1999). Non-governmental US funders, such as the Brookings Institution and the International Peace Academy (today International Peace Institute), a think tank with a strong connection to the UN, followed the example of USIP, launching major research programmes on conflict resolution (Deng and Zartman 1991, Stedman et al. 2002).

One could have expected that the post-Cold War environment would provide fertile ground for peace research as a specific subdiscipline given that, in many ways, the new climate vindicated peace scholars’ ideas about conflict resolution once dismissed as naïve and utopian. In practice, however, the impact of the end of the Cold War on peace research was ambivalent. The new developments initially created some difficulties for European peace research centres, because addressing the East-West confrontation and avoiding nuclear war had played a key role in the narrative that justified their existence (Patomäki 2001). However, historical events, such as the outbreak of major wars in the former Yugoslavia and the peace process in Northern Ireland, helped to reinstate the importance of studying peace and conflicts. In the Scandinavian countries, the Uppsala Department of Peace and Conflict Research and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) consolidated their reputation as centres of excellence for the study of contemporary conflicts and their resolution. Although the UK lacked institutions with a comparable focus, British-based researchers made an important contribution to the development of critical perspectives on contemporary conflict management and peacebuilding processes (Duffield 2001, Richmond 2005, Cooper et al. 2011, Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013).

The proliferation of research on internal conflicts and peace processes failed however to bridge the divide between a more mainstream group of peace and conflict scholars, whose main commitment was to make the study of civil wars and their resolution ‘scientific’, and critical peace researchers, for whom normative commitments and research were closely interlinked (Bright and Gledhill 2018). While in North America the first type of research was predominant, in Europe the academic community was more inclined to take a critical attitude towards international conflict resolution practices.

The first type of research exercised the biggest influence on policy, because it focused on improving current conflict resolution practices, taking a ‘problem solving’ rather than critical approach (Bellamy and Williams 2004), and rarely questioned the main tenets of the ‘standard treatment’. Some of the policy-oriented research conducted in the 1990s and early 2000s contributed towards justifying the expansion of the role of external actors in the resolution of internal conflicts. South Sudanese diplomat Francis Deng and US academic William Zartman, for instance, employed the phrase ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ – an antecedent to the ‘responsibility to protect’ – to emphasise the duty of states to protect their citizens and the right of the international community to step in if this duty was disattended (Deng et al. 1996). In an influential article, Barbara Walter argued that without impartial ‘security guarantees’ (arguably in the form of peace operations with robust military capabilities) the warring parties in a civil war would have remained locked into a ‘security dilemma’, even if they were willing to settle their dispute (Walter 1997). For other researchers, even in the absence of security guarantees, liberal peacebuilding could make a major contribution to the successful resolution of internal conflicts (Hampson 1996, Peceny and Stanley 2001, p. 150). Although not all researchers were equally optimistic about the potential of liberal peace-making (Stedman 1997, Paris 2004), overall, this prolific research agenda was supportive of international efforts at solving conflicts.

On the other hand, some scholars expressed reservation and critiques towards the new approach to solving internal conflicts. These critiques came from very different, sometimes opposite, theoretical and ideological perspectives. One strand of criticism came from those researchers who continued to identify with the critical peace research tradition. They looked with suspicion at mainstream research that aimed to refine the implementation of new conflict management tools. For them, this research did not question the broader ideological and normative assumptions behind post-Cold War peace-making and failed to ‘challenge or seriously reflect upon the global structures that contribute to human suffering and, sometimes, violent conflict in the first place’ (Bellamy and Williams 2004, p. 6). In the eyes of some researchers, Western powers and the UN were appropriating ideas initially advanced by the peace studies community in order to promote a liberal peace based on Western priorities and expectations (Richmond 2005, Cooper et al. 2011, Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013).

While the critique of the liberal peace proved a fruitful avenue for research and debate, on a closer look its contestation of the post-Cold War ‘standard treatment’ was not that radical. In particular, critics of liberal peacebuilding rarely attacked the belief in negotiations and comprehensive agreements as the best way to solve conflicts, or suggested explicitly that international attempts at ending conflict should not be undertaken. For instance, Oliver Richmond dismissed peace based on military victory as ultra-conservative, suggesting that he was still endorsing a peace based on some form of political compromise (Richmond 2005). In another example, Neil Cooper, Mandy Turner and Michael Pugh admitted that by criticising liberal peacebuilding they were ‘addressing the failure to implement liberalism’s own ideals’ (Cooper et al. 2011, p. 2007). Much of the criticism of the liberal peace has focused on the need to incorporate local perspectives and build peace ‘from the bottom up’ rather than imposing a top-down version of peace (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013, Hunt 2023).

On the opposite side of the political spectrum, some traditional realists attacked the promotion of negotiated settlements per se as naïve and potentially counterproductive. The argument was advanced most forcefully by Edward Luttwak, who argued that the international community was involuntarily prolonging conflicts by not ‘giving war a chance’ (Luttwak 1999) and letting them run their ‘natural course’. Luttwak’s views were strongly rejected as simplistic and obsolete by the UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Sergio Vieira de Mello in the pages of Foreign Affairs (Vieira De Mello 2000). Vieira De Mello noticed that conflicts do not automatically ‘peter out’ when left on their own, but they might go on for generations: the idea that the belligerents would exhaust the resources for waging war relatively quickly is especially dubious when they have access to lucrative international markets or external patronage.

Although Luttwak took the argument to its extreme, the idea that military victories could provide a more solid ground for peace than negotiated settlements remained influential in the academic community in the 1990s and early 2000s. In many ways, this argument was a more nuanced formulation of the Cold War idea that internal conflicts were unnegotiable zero-sum struggles, but it received new life from the first wave of statistical studies on the termination of internal conflicts in the 1990s (Licklider 1995). Research carried out by Roy Licklider and other scholars on the impact of negotiated settlements on peace painted an ambiguous picture: settlements appeared to make genocide and other forms of post-war state-sponsored political violence less likely, but they were also more likely than military victories to be followed by conflict recurrence (Licklider 1995). Licklider put forward two hypotheses to explain this finding. First, decisive victory would destroy the organisational capacities of the loser, preventing them from rearming and reorganising. Second, victory would enable post-war governments to achieve substantial reforms (Licklider 1995) – an argument that went against the post-Cold War common sense about the transformative potential of peace agreements.

These arguments were subsequently developed by other scholars, particularly Monica Duffy Toft, who argued that rebel victory provided a better ground for peace than negotiated settlements (Toft 2010), and Jeremy Weinstein, who explored the idea of ‘autonomous recovery’ – a process ‘in which states achieve a lasting peace, a systematic reduction in violence, and post-war political and economic development in the absence of international intervention’ (Weinstein 2005, p. 5). Weinstein explicitly drew from the work of Tilly (1990) on state formation in Europe, in order to argue that war-making could contribute to institution building (Weinstein 2005, p. 14). He offered evidence from Uganda, Eritrea and Somaliland, showing that these countries had been able to emerge from intense civil wars and build or rebuild state institutions without external intervention or, in the case of Somalia, after the intervention had patently failed. Weinstein did, however, acknowledge that regimes emerging from war could slide into authoritarianism. He also recognised that intervention could save lives in the short-term.

A related but distinct criticism was advanced by a group of scholars, mainly from an area studies background, who questioned the assumption that all warring parties have equally legitimate demands and should be invited to the negotiation table. Some scholars, like Mark Duffield, believed that the new approach depoliticised conflicts, treating them as they were just cases of misunderstandings or miscommunications (Duffield 1997, p. 98). For other scholars, this approach, especially when followed by power-sharing agreements, could end up rewarding extremist or predatory actors, whose claims of being the representative of oppressed groups were taken at face value (Mehler 2009). In his scathing critique of the international response to the Rwandan civil war and subsequent genocide, Christopher Clapham observed that the UN and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) had focused their energies on the conclusion and implementation of the Arusha peace agreement, tragically underestimating the danger posed by Hutu extremists (Clapham 1998, p. 206). The risk that extremists with a totalitarian agenda could jeopardise a peace process was also the focus of a famous article by Stephen Stedman (1997). Stedman rejected the Cold War-era argument that belligerents in a civil war always seek total victory, but invited policy makers to pay attention to the nature of the warring parties and their goals.

In the two decades following the end of the Cold War, the UN and other organisations involved in peace-making and peacebuilding have been receptive to criticism from academics and the wider public and have made efforts to improve their interventions. The reforms of peacekeeping prompted by the Brahimi Report (2000) were in part a response to the accusation of ignoring threats from extremists and rewarding violent actors. By redefining the key principles of peacekeeping and introducing protection mandates, they aimed at enabling peacekeepers to distinguish between ‘victims and aggressors’ (UN 2000, p. IX). In practice, however, UN peacekeeping has continued to be constrained by the necessity to keep the consent of the warring parties, particularly the host state.

The risk of imposing peace from the top down and ignoring local issues, raised by critics of the liberal peace, has also been acknowledged. Policy documents produced by the UN and aid agencies in the last decade routinely stress the importance of addressing local conflicts and engaging with grassroots actors, sometimes echoing the language used by academic researchers (Hunt 2023). For instance, the 2005 ‘Sustaining Peace’ report on the review of the UN peacebuilding architecture argues that ‘national dialogue processes should be preceded and paralleled by strenuous efforts to consult with local communities’ (UN 2015, para 35). Similarly, for the UK Department of International Development (DFID), international statebuilding should adopt ‘a “bottom-up” approach that engages with non-state and community-level institutions’ (UK DFID 2010, p. 9). Aid agencies routinely channel funding to civil society organisations in conflict-affected countries (Paffenholz 2015) and UN missions after 2000 have featured civil affairs teams in charge of addressing local-level issues (UN 2012). However, critics argue that much of the change has been rhetorical and that local communities still have little say in the overall peace-making and peacebuilding agenda (Hunt 2023).

In the last ten years, academic researchers have become more optimistic about the impact of international efforts to solve civil wars. This trend has been particularly visible in quantitative studies, which have been able to analyse data about post-Cold War conflicts. Early studies of conflict termination included many Cold War-era internal conflicts, which had not benefited from the increasingly sophisticated conflict resolution tools of the post-Cold War era, particularly the deployment of multi-dimensional peacekeeping missions. Several researchers questioned the previous finding that military victory could lead to a more sustainable peace, arguing that, with proper support from external actors, negotiated settlements could be equally or even more stable (Doyle and Sambanis 2006, Mason et al. 2011). Quantitative studies of UN peacekeeping also started appearing around the end of the 2000s. Their overall conclusion has been that peace operations, particularly those conducted by the UN, are ‘highly effective at preventing violence before it begins, reducing violence in the midst of war and preventing violence from recurring once it has ended’ (Walter et al. 2021, p. 1706).

In sum, in the last twenty years, evidence has accumulated, showing that the post-Cold War ‘standard treatment’ (Gowan and Stedman 2018) for civil wars has been more effective than its critics assumed. Ironically, this has happened at the same time that signs of crisis in the international conflict management architecture have become increasingly apparent.

The Uncertain Future of International Peace-Making

While all scholars agree that the end of the Cold War brought a decisive change in the way internal conflicts were perceived and addressed at the international level, there is less consensus on the subsequent development of international responses to civil wars. Most scholars acknowledge that the post-Cold War approach to peace-making is currently in crisis, but they are divided on when the crisis started and how fundamental it is.

In their 2018 article, Lise Morjé Howard and Alexandra Stark argue that, after 2001 and the outbreak of the ‘war on terror’, we have entered into a new phase, characterised by the rise of ‘stabilisation’ instead of negotiated peace as the main international framework to address internal conflicts (Morjé Howard and Stark 2018). According to Morjé Howard and Stark, after 2001, the most powerful actors in the international system have been mainly concerned with achieving short-term stability in conflict-affected countries. However, they notice that the concern for stabilisation did not completely displace previous norms regarding conflict resolution and that several conflicts continued to be settled by negotiations after 2001 (Morjé Howard and Stark 2018).

In their contribution that focuses on Security Sector Reform (SSR), but also encompasses more general efforts to tackle conflicts worldwide, Maria-Louise Clausen and Peter Albrecht distinguish between the 1989–2001 period, marked by the peak of liberal internationalism, the ‘war on terror’ period (2001 to approximately 2010), when ‘fragile states’ were perceived as posing a direct threat to Western security, and a post-2010 period characterised by disillusion in large scale international interventions. However, their article tends to portray the US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan as representative of international statebuilding in the early 2000s, ignoring numerous peacebuilding operations led by the UN that had more in common with the interventions of the previous decade (Paris 2023).

On their part, Richard Gowan and Stephen Stedman see the entire post-Cold War period as characterised by the resort to a single ‘standard treatment’ to address violent conflicts. They argue that, after 2000, UN peacekeeping experienced incremental changes and that, at some point after 2007, the financial crisis and the rise of new types of insurgencies started to affect the viability of the international regime to address civil wars (Gowan and Stedman 2018).

In fact, it is after 2010 that we observe a marked decline in the number of peace agreements and ceasefires brokered and an increasing number of internal conflicts de-escalating with no decisive conclusion [Table 1]. This is happening in spite of the fact that conflicts have not diminished in number or intensity. This trend is matched by a decline in the attempts to mediate internal conflicts in the first place (Lundgren and Svensson 2020), which is not compensated in a corresponding increase in non-mediated peace talks (Arı 2023). Finally, since 2015, a fall in the number of large, multi-dimensional peacekeeping missions has also been noticeable: between 2015 and 2022, no new large UN mission was authorised by the Security Council and the number of deployed personnel dropped by 31 per cent (Paris 2023).

One of the possible explanations why conflicts in the last ten years have been so rarely settled by peace agreements is the increase in the number of insurgencies that feature Islamist rebels (Lundgren and Svensson 2020). Because Islamist insurgents, particularly those with links to international jihadist groups, have been framed as ‘terrorists’ by the most powerful states in the international system, negotiations with them have been proscribed (Morjé Howard and Stark 2018, Lundgren and Svensson 2020).

The trend has also been reinforced by the declining influence of the West and the rise of multi-polarity (Morjé Howard and Stark 2018). In particular, in a manner reminiscent of the Cold War era, geopolitical rivalries between global and regional powers have made it impossible to find a negotiated solution to some conflicts in spite of repeated peace-making attempts (Hellmüller 2022). In some cases, illiberal powers have directed conflict management processes on their own terms, consolidating and legitimising a victor’s peace (Abboud 2021). This is the case of Syria, where efforts led by the UN to negotiate an end to the conflict based on liberal norm were side-tracked by the Astana process, promoted by Iran, Russia, and Turkey. The talks focused on implementing measures for de-escalating the military situation, on terms favourable to the Syrian regime, rather than on promoting a genuine compromise (Abboud 2021).

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to a return a focus on international conflicts. In a manner reminiscent of the Cold War, a lot of Western discussions on current internal conflicts seem to focus on whether Russia will use them to gain influence in crisis-affected countries. Internal conflicts once largely ignored by the press, such as the one in the Central African Republic, have seen a sudden rise in interest as a consequence of the involvement of the infamous Russian mercenary group Wagner (Ling 2023).

How have scholars of internal conflicts and peace-making responded to this situation of crisis? With the community of scholars studying peace and conflict being much broader and varied than it used to be thirty years ago, the response has also been more diverse and fragmented. One reaction has been to eschew the study of peace and peace-making entirely in favour of analyses of contemporary conflicts that are insightful and sophisticated but have no obvious policy relevance for the purpose of promoting peace. In 2014, the editors of the Journal of Peace Research noticed that the journal was dedicating more space to the study of war than to the study of peace (Gleditsch et al. 2014). In some cases, the deep investment of researchers into optimising the ‘standard treatment’ has led them to just ignore its decline. Some recent analyses of the implementation of peace agreements or the effectiveness of peace operations pay very little attention to the current crisis of peace-making (Walter et al. 2021).

Scholars who have previously focused on the limits and failures of the liberal peace have been taken somewhat by surprise by its demise. For some researchers, inspired by the so-called local turn, small-scale efforts to build peace led by ordinary people offer a response to the current crisis (Autesserre 2021). Yet, much of the academic research on the local turn was developed at a historical moment when international peace-making and peacekeeping interventions were commonplace (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013). It is unclear what a focus on the local means in a context characterised by disengagement from international peace-making. The risk is that, in the absence of a framework provided by national or international initiatives, peace-making is reduced to small local projects, which might bring some level of stability to local communities but become difficult to scale up and vulnerable to external shocks.

Finally, a group of scholars has moved away from studying liberal peace-making efforts in favour of exploring what happens when conflict management and post-conflict reconstruction are shaped by illiberal actors (Lewis et al. 2018, Smith et al. 2020, Abboud 2021). While echoing the previous debate on autonomous recovery as an alternative to international peace-making and peacebuilding, this literature is substantially more pessimistic on the type of peace being built through illiberal processes and does not offer easy solutions.

Conclusion

This article has shown that the idea that solving internal conflicts is an international responsibility and that promoting negotiated settlements is the best way to do it, is not a ‘natural given’, but the product of specific historical circumstances. These circumstances have also influenced academic scholarship. During the Cold War, many academics believed that internal conflicts were impossible, or at least extremely difficult, to negotiate. Some researchers, especially those involved in developing peace research as a distinct field, insisted that it was possible to solve internal conflicts peacefully and that outsiders could play a positive role to this end. Their views were ignored by top-level decision-makers but planted the seeds for future developments.

The end of the Cold War led to a sudden change of attitudes: it resulted in the launch of numerous internationally sponsored peace processes and, in parallel, in an explosion of research on internal conflicts and on the role that international peace-making could play in solving them. A ‘standard treatment’ for addressing civil wars emerged, where international actors would promote negotiated settlements through mediation, peacekeeping, and support for peacebuilding. In general, in this historical period, academics have taken the role of supporters of international efforts to bring peace to countries affected by civil wars. A lot of the criticism of the ‘standard treatment’ has focused on accessory aspects – such as the promotion of a liberal peace based on Western expectations and values – rather than on the idea of promoting negotiated solutions to conflicts per se. Still, pockets of scepticism in academia have remained: inspired by the realist tradition and by the result of the first statistical studies on war termination, some researchers have maintained that victory and post-war reconstruction without international assistance can provide an equally good, or even superior, path to peace. It is only in the last ten years, with more evidence on post-Cold War conflicts becoming available, that the academic consensus has shifted more clearly in favour of international efforts to solve civil wars.

Ironically, it is in the same period that a crisis in the international ‘standard treatment’ to address civil wars has started to become evident. The rise in Islamist insurgencies, the end of unipolarity and the invasion of Ukraine are affecting the ability of the international community to solve contemporary conflicts with the instruments that had in the past proved effective. This trend is evidenced by the decline in the number of successful peace agreements concluded and in new UN multi-dimensional missions authorised.

Many peace and conflict researchers entered the discipline at a time of relative optimism about the possibility to solve civil wars. A number of possible areas of research, which as yet have received only limited attention, will help the discipline to grapple with this new reality. First, more research is needed in order to understand how recent conflicts are actually ending and why negotiated settlements have become more difficult in the last decade. While scholars have traditionally believed that military victory could provide an alternative path to peace, the reduction in the number of peace agreements concluded in the last ten years does not seem to have been matched by an increase in the number of military victories. Rather, the predominant form of conflict termination has been de-escalation without a clear outcome. Moreover, while there is evidence that conflicts featuring Islamist groups are one of the factors behind the decline of peace settlements, it is unclear whether this is due to the nature of these groups, or the way powerful actors perceive them. Rhetoric coming from Western countries implies that they are ‘terrorists’, whose ideological rigidity makes negotiations impossible. Yet, emerging empirical studies paint a less clear-cut picture, suggesting that successful negotiations with Islamist groups do happen – although this is less often the case when these groups claim allegiance to jihadist transnational networks (Söderberg Kovacs 2020).

Second, we need to better understand what kind of practices and actors are filling the void left by the crisis of the current system. Current knowledge is fragmented, with some authors focusing on authoritarian conflict management, others on bottom-up peacebuilding processes, and others on the role of non-Western powers and regional organisations. Research on authoritarian forms of conflict management could pay more attention to the policy implications for liberal actors: does it make sense for them to engage with illiberal processes? Is it possible to exercise a mitigating influence on processes that are shaped by authoritarianism and violence?

The experience of the past suggests that academic research is shaped by the international environment in terms of which themes attract more attention and which approaches become dominant, but also that academics can advance ideas that anticipate change, influence policy, or scrutinise the predominant ‘common sense’ assumptions. It is important that academics continue to play a critical role in the changing international environment.

Acknowledgements

My warmest gratitude goes to Nila Zarepour-Arizi, for helping me to extract the data from the UCDP dataset and compile the conflict termination table for this article. The anonymous reviewers and editors of Civil Wars gave enormous help in improving this article within the tight time frame required for the 25^th Anniversary Special Issue. Finally, Daniel was not only close to me during the intellectual journey that led to the draft of the article, but he patiently proofread the entire manuscript – I cannot thank him enough for his love and support.

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Giulia Piccolino

Giulia Piccolino is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on internal conflicts and post-conflict politics.