Mac Ginty (2006): Highlights examples of ongoing conflict despite peace ostensibly being reached through a formal process that often went beyond simply ceasing hostilities.
Mac Ginty (2006:2-3): “many contemporary peace accords have failed to deliver durable, high-quality peace. Instead, the peace that prevails is often prefixed with terms attesting to its compromised quality: ‘brittle’, ‘fragile’, ‘turbulent’, ‘armed’, ‘nervous’ and so on. Many of the characteristics of the ‘prefix peace’ resemble those of the war that preceded it: inter-group tension and systematic discrimination against out-groups, widespread insecurity arising from the presence of armed groups, grinding poverty with few prospects for economic advancement, militarism, poor provision of public goods and a profound disconnection between government and people. Rather than peace, many post-peace accord societies experience a ‘no war, no peace’ situation: a grudging hiatus in violent conflict crowned with an internationally supported peace accord that finds little approval at home after initial enthusiasm has worn off.”
Mac Ginty (2006:3): Key problems: greater external support for peace than domestic; failure to resolve inter-group tensions; lack of involvement or ownership by local actors compared to international ones; peace agenda driven by donors’ needs, rather than those of local community.
Mac Ginty (2006:4): Notes same ‘no war, no peace’ situation may occur where there is no finalised peace agreement, but peace and ceasefire become semi-permanent. Cites Sri Lanka, Nepal, Colombia and Israel-Palestine as examples “whereby the language of a peace process is used, a routine of inter-group meetings is established and elements of the international community deploy their peace-support machinery and rhetoric.”
Mac Ginty (2006:4): “On meeting impasse, the parties – for sometime at least – demurred a resumption of full-scale conflict but failed to seriously re-engage with the peace process. In a sense, the peace process became a comfort zone. The parties could gain international kudos from their involvement in the peace process (however hollow that involvement may have become) and could enjoy the advantages of respite that accompany a ceasefire. For all intents and purposes though, the peace process was no longer a vehicle capable of enabling effective conflict transformation.”
Mac Ginty (2006:4-5): Examines ‘quality’ of peace in post-peace and stalled peace societies where civil war has occurred. Challenges problem-solving approaches that accept the ‘blueprint’ of peace and focus on fixing failures of implementation. “Many contemporary peace accords minister to conflict manifestations rather than causes, reinforce rather than challenge inter-group division, attend to armed groups but neglect less vocal but more vulnerable constituencies and fail to deliver appreciable quality-of-life changes to many inhabitants. In short, they deliver poor quality peace.”
Mac Ginty (2006:5): “In a socially constructed world, it is disingenuous to pretend that there can be a science of peace or peacemaking that is ignorant of affective and human factors.” Thus adopts a normative position.
Mac Ginty (2006:5): Sees a ‘liberal democratic peace,’ promoted by key international actors (organisations, financial institutions and states) as becoming hegemonic, and promoting a universally applicable model of peace and focusing on violence rather than structural conditions.
Mac Ginty (2006:14): “The peace that follows the cessation of large-scale violence in contemporary ethnonational wars is often deficient.”
Autesserre (2021:94): Sees most intervention strategies designed around the idea of trickle-down peace: conflicts are between elites, governments, and countries, and if you can resolve these and get elites to stop fighting and bureaucracies to start working, all will be well. Focusing on grassroot tensions is pointless in this model, because the average person is powerless to affect elite relations.
Autesserre (2021:97): This model sees that “all good things come together”: elections, good governance, human rights, separation of powers, free press, education, gender equality, etc. Therefore pursued as a package deal, with a particular focus on elections.
Autesserre (2021:99): Criticises the idea that a six-month or year-long project and a few workshops will somehow create peace. Similarly rejects the focus on “quantifiable results as the gold standard — such data is [viewed as] objective, concrete, and it can be produced with minimal involvement from local populations.”
Autesserre (2021:103): Democracies are on average more peaceful than nondemocracies, and no two democracies have ever gone to war. Democracies experience few civil wars. But wars are more likely in countries transitioning to democracy, and the greater the shift, the greater the upheaval is likely to be. Gives example of Rwanda, where peace treaty to end civil war culminated in genocide. Democratization also sparked violence in Angola, Congo, former Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Cambodia, Central African Republic, El Salvador. Says this was caused by focusing on accelerated process, not underlying conditions that are necessary for that process to be healthy and safe. Elections held quickly increase the likelihood of conflict; elections also decrease the chance of economic recovery.
Autesserre (2021:103): “In brief, the various components of the ‘package deal’ that peacebuilders offer are often in tension with one another. In the short term, there is often a trade-off between democracy and peace (or economic prosperity) in societies emerging from war. Elections can be organized quickly, but doing so may fuel violence. Alternatively, the time, resources, and efforts required to organize elections could be used instead to address the root causes of conflict.” Education and state reconstruction can similarly fuel conflict.
Autesserre (2021:105): Two further problems: local conflict may not mirror national conflict; and national or international peace will not always trickle down to local environment. “A team of leading experts recently assessed how frequently elite bargains end wars. After years of work and in-depth analyses of 21 recent conflicts on different continents, the researchers reached a disheartening conclusion: There is not a single clear-cut example where deals among elites have actually ended violence. Trickle-down peace, it turns out, is just as fraught an ideology as trickle-down economics.”