This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This research analyzes the effectiveness of substantive political settlements in ending international conflict. The recent literature on peace agreements often concludes that treaty terms matter little in determining the durability of peace following interstate conflict. The authors argue that this conclusion results from the use of datasets and tests that are ill-suited for examining the role of issue settlement following conflict. Previous research has examined whether negotiation took place, not whether a substantive agreement was actually research. Previous studies have also focused on the peace agreements that follow wars and deadly conflicts, possibly ignoring the many successful agreements that have avoided conflict escalation to war.
The principal investigators plan to collect and analyze data on all negotiated settlement outcomes in the Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) dataset. These data include all threats, displays or uses of force between two or more countries from 1816 to 2001. The PIs will examine the issues at dispute in each conflict and will then match these issues to the agreement ending the conflict. Analysis of this data will take many forms, including qualitative case studies of the various settlements and statistical analyses of the effects of issue settlement.
In addition to the immediate impact on the peace agreement literature, the analyses completed with this dataset have important implications for the scholarly literatures on studies of rivalry, territorial conflict, the bargaining literature, and research programs based on more general theories of cooperation and treaty formation. Each of these literatures has used the dichotomous imposed/negotiated settlement variable in analyses of MID data. Richer information on settlement types would allow more comprehensive tests of these theories.
The implied policy prescriptions of the current peace agreement literature will also be addressed. The current literature suggests that the balance of capabilities controls the likelihood of peace, and agreements must therefore reflect that balance in order to be durable. Policymakers practicing negotiations based on the current literature are using knowledge gained from a severely selected sample of cases, which is particularly unfortunate if political settlements or enforcement mechanisms can indeed prevent disputes from escalating to war. By broadening the scope of peace agreement research, both temporally and for conflicts short of war, the researchers hope to provide a much better understanding of the necessary conditions for a durable peace.
