Pundits and policymakers have recently debated whether a deal could and should bring the Taliban into Afghan politics as a party. The feasibility of a deal remains uncertain, however, as the militant group has so far shown few signs of engagement. Furthermore, even such a deal would not guarantee peace. Organizations such as the United Nations sometimes assume that holding elections after conflict, usually including the participation of former militant groups, facilitates a durable peace. Yet militant groups vary greatly in whether they run candidates in elections and otherwise behave like political parties during and after conflict, and, importantly, in whether they are willing to relinquish violence while participating.
We know very little about why militant groups participate in elections, and how this affects the subsequent likelihood of peace. The few case studies addressing these questions focus on a small number of large militant groups at the end of full-scale civil wars, and so they tend to assume that peace results from militant group participation rather than exploring its prospects in different contexts. Moreover, this work fails to generate comprehensive, causal theories exploring militant group motivations for participation that also account for their reactions to the expected behavior by other actors. In conflicts ranging from small terrorist campaigns to large civil wars, this project seeks to answer two related questions: why do some militant groups participate in elections while others do not? And, why do some subsequently continue to use violence while others do not?
The study employs a multi-method approach to understand militant group electoral participation, as well as the subsequent tactical use of violence. The researcher specifies a theory of militant group electoral participation based on her fieldwork on multiple militant groups in Colombia and Northern Ireland. The theory identifies both the group and the government as strategic actors whose incentives and actions jointly determine the outcome in terms of the militant group's participation, as well as in terms of post-election peace. Specifically, there must be a rough alignment between how the militant group expects to do competing in elections against the government versus fighting it militarily; the government's expectations must similarly align. Amid civil conflict, surprising events can shift these beliefs into such a configuration. The potential presence of an international actor, such as another government or a non-governmental organization, also influences both sides' decisions. The researcher located factors that change these expectations about competing through ballots or bullets in the case studies already conducted, but the states examined may differ for a variety of reasons. Thus, this project will test the theory more broadly. The researcher is building a global dataset of all militant groups, which features a measure of whether each participates in elections. With NSF support, the researcher will hire undergraduate assistants to finish coding this measure, and then collect a series of other variables permitting empirical tests of the hypotheses making up the project's theory. By examining these indicators across many cases, the researcher can assess the theory's validity in different contexts.
This project makes theoretical, pragmatic, and methodological contributions. First, social science research has not yet generated solid explanations for many of the political decisions made during civil conflicts, especially militant group electoral participation. This study analyzes such participation as an initial step toward engaging this neglected research area. Second, understanding the incentives of the actors in these situations and their impact on the outcome--in terms of electoral participation and peace--informs policy recommendations for the conflicted state, as well as other states and international organizations. Finally, this project provides an unprecedented, sourced, and transparently coded dataset of all militant groups that includes information on group and government actions, as well as measures of popular and international support. This research on all sizes of militant groups using any type of violent tactics also facilitates collaboration between the often separate civil war and terrorism research communities by providing a forum for testing theories of tactical decisions during fighting, and their impact on conflict termination.
This project examined when and why militant groups and governments trade bullets for ballots. Case studies that included in-depth fieldwork in Colombia and Northern Ireland provided the foundation for a theory of why civil conflicts sometimes move from the battlefield to the ballot-box, and whether the combatants then continue to contest power peacefully once such a strategic shift takes place. Specifically, within a bargaining framework, I hypothesized that electoral participation is a mechanism to overcome a commitment problem where each side worries that the other will renege on a peace agreement once the conditions of the deal place it in a better position. Electoral participation helps international actors, where they are willing to become somewhat involved, to monitor and punish either side that agrees to a settlement and then violates it. Having the former militant group participate in elections eases observation and sanctioning. An interested outside actor can thus facilitate the termination of civil conflict and increase the chance of sustained peace afterward, without deploying troops in a peacekeeping mission. In order to test the commitment theory against alternative arguments in other cases, I conducted new and extensive data collection. I documented whether each militant group — those using terror, insurgency, or guerrilla tactics to achieve political aims — participated in national legislative elections as a political party. I also identified whether the participation occurred after signing a negotiated settlement, or if it instead obtained without an explicit peace agreement between the two sides. Although participation occurs relatively rarely within the universe of militant groups (about 10 percent of the time), it is fairly frequent in peace agreements following civil wars that occur after the end of the Cold War. Analysis of this dataset indicates that electoral participation leading to peace is associated with certain group characteristics — it usually happens only with larger, stronger militant groups — and certain contextual factors that are even more telling. Most notably, such participation primarily occurs after the end of the Cold War and often in states that are highly monitored and aided by the international community. These cases are consistent with what the commitment theory predicts. Moreover, the theory implies that electoral participation will be useful in maintaining peace over time. Further data work after the project suggests that they are. In contrast to more skeptical views of post-conflict elections, which argue that they are at best useless and at worst dangerous, this work shows that they are effective tools of conflict resolution under the right circumstances. Overall, then, this project suggests that post-conflict elections in which both a militant group and the government compete can increase the duration of peace between these combatants after intrastate war. Such agreements only occur under the specific international conditions and with specific types of combatants, however. This project identifies where the agreements are likely and what effect they have in order both to answer a largely unexamined question in political science and to assist the policy community in identifying cases in which this conflict resolution tool may work effectively.
