Why peace agreements in civil wars succeed or fail: Insurgent motivations, state responses and third party peacemaking in Liberia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone

This dissertation uses approaches and concepts from conflict resolution literature to answer two related questions concerning civil war peace agreements. First, it seeks to explain why some peace agreements are signed while others do not get signed, and second, why some agreements that get signed do not hold to bring an end to protracted civil wars.; To improve our understanding of the process through which civil war agreements are concluded and why some settlements hold while others do not, the dissertation looks at empirical evidence from three mediated sets of peace agreements. The focus is first a series of fourteen agreements that finally ended the first civil war in Liberia in 1997; second is the 1993 Arusha peace accord that failed to prevent the escalation of conflict into genocide in Rwanda; and third, a series of three agreements that were signed but did not initially hold to end the conflict in Sierra Leone.; The dissertation examines four independent variables that are key to understanding why peace agreements succeed or fail. These are: the role of third parties in peace agreements; conflict dynamics; the role of regional politics in conflict resolution; and the structure of settlements in peace agreements. The study shows that the accords resulted from stalemates contrived by external military interventions. Third parties including neighboring states, sub-regional organizations, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the United Nations, and Western donors also exerted political and economic pressure on the warring parties to sign the peace accords. Some factions also signed the accords because of promises of power sharing.; The agreements, with the exception of the Abuja II accord of the Liberian civil war, however, failed to end the conflicts. The reasons for the failure are: proliferation of armed factions; opposition from soldiers who were facing demobilization; presence of "spoilers"; hostility of neighboring states towards the accords; and inadequate assistance from the international community. In contrast, the Abuja II accord was implemented successfully because of rapprochement between Charles Taylor and the Nigerian military government under General Sanni Abacha. Second was the consensus among ECOWAS states to support the peace process. Third, members of the international community gave major assistance to the Abuja II accord.