La Tierra como factor o insumo de producción diferenciado (Palmquist, 1989)

When a civil conflict arises, international actors and scholars typically view it through a humani-tarian lens, asking three questions. First, how can domestic and international actors bring an end to violence for as long as possible? Second, how can they resolve the underlying issues of conflict, disarming rebels and settling the underlying policy issues? Third, how can they protect civilians, whether in peace or conflict? International actors, then, hope to achieve all of these goals by pres-suring both sides to halt hostilities and open negotiations. If unsuccessful, they generally work to reduce civilian casualties and empower the most favorable combatants.

Yet cases like Sri Lanka, Georgia, and Lebanon demonstrate that international pressure can stop the fighting without catalyzing meaningful negotiations to resolve the underlying issues. Instead, truces leave both sides intact and policy disagreements unresolved. Rather than historical flukes, these truces represent an underexplored type of conflict ending.

From one perspective, truces offer a promising alternative where peace agreements are difficult

to achieve and preserve. Scholars have long lamented how difficult it is to build an enduring peace out of civil conflict.¹ Peace agreements frequently fall apart, and military victories can invite backlash. If one side must disarm at the end, that side has little guarantee that its rights will be protected. Truces, on the other hand, leave both sides armed and prepared to fight, making them more like international peace agreements than intrastate peace agreements. Moreover, truces are tremendously flexible. Rather than committing to a long-term division of power, rebel and government forces can adjust the deal over time and enforce it with force.² Therefore, even in civil conflicts when commitment problems make a peace agreement difficult to negotiate and enforce, two sides may be able to negotiate a durable, self-enforced truce. If offered a choice between open war and a frozen conflict, many international and domestic actors would prefer truce.

On the other hand, truces rarely lead to peace agreements and serve as poor substitutes. Con-flicts in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Serbia have languished for decades in an uncomfort-able stalemate with little momentum toward settlement. Of the long-term truces documented in Chapter 2, just four resulted in a long-term settlement. Three of these agreements — Northern Ireland, East Timor, and Kosovo — took a concerted effort from the international community to break the stalemate, and one (Kosovo) is still somewhat contested. The other case (the Bandera Roja in Venezuela) was resolved only with a wholesale regime change at the center. Governments who kick the can of conflict down the road are unlikely to pick it up unless they have an over-whelming reason to do so. Some actors may even prefer frozen conflict to real resolution and work to sabotage any attempts at a peace agreement. The cases of Northeast India and Sri Lanka demonstrated just how attractive truces can be for rebel leaders in the short run, even if it weakens them in the long run. Truces bring safety, comfort, and opportunities for profit. The Nagaland state government receives more than double the per-capita funding of the average Indian state be-cause rebel leaders tax — and sometimes double- and triple-tax — every state project and salary.

1Walter (1997), Fearon (2004), Posen (1993), Fortna (2008)

2When the balance of military power shifts but political power is bound up in an inflexible arrangements, it can spark renewed conflict. Daly (2016) documented this in depth on the local level among militias in Colombia.

Instead, while most peace agreements last, especially with international support, most truces end sooner or later in renewed conflict.³ If truces are a replacement for peace agreements rather than a complement, they look a lot worse by comparison.

The bigger issue, however, is that truces may make conflicts more difficult to resolve peacefully.

Maintaining a peace agreement takes an extraordinary effort on behalf of armed leaders on both sides, straining both discipline and cohesion. Individual soldiers may undermine negotiations by killing civilians or government forces at the wrong time in an act of score-settling or opportunism.⁴ Internal rivals, meanwhile, may have an explicit incentive to disrupt negotiations with violence, hoping to secure a larger slice of the pie.⁵ Truces, however, flood rebel movements with selfish, opportunistic recruits and enable intra-movement rivals to mobilize. As a result, truces make it much more difficult to constrain individual disobedience and strategic spoiling.

But whether armed actors are able to maintain peace or not, truces put civilians at increased risk of exploitation and abuse. Both the cross-national and case work in this book shows that governments can and do end conflicts by offering a truce. That is, they halt or dramatically reduce battlefield violence. But ending battlefield violence does not necessarily protect civilians. This book bolsters a growing scholarly literature showing that armed groups play important roles in politics and society during peacetime.⁶ Thanks to the corrosive effects of truce, those roles can be even more chaotic and dangerous than in peacetime. Some of the selfish opportunists who flood into rebel organizations during a truce use their newly bolstered power to steal from civilians, settle scores with old enemies, and abuse civilians. Rebels in Nagaland, once restrained around civilians, have undermined their reputation with rampant extortion of abuse. Cross-national violence data show just how much this impacts civilians. While battlefield fatalities decline dramatically after truces, violence against civilians actually rises in the long run. Compared to pre-truce years, rebel movements are more than three times as likely to kill civilians during and after a truce offer.

3Licklider (1995), Fortna (2008)

4Worsnop (2017)

5Kydd and Walter (2002), Pischedda (2018)

6Arjona (2016),Daly (2016), Staniland (2012), Staniland (2017), Marten (2012), Driscoll (2015)

These are all sobering outcomes for policymakers and scholars looking to resolve conflicts and protect civilians. For international actors, reducing battlefield violence may make conflicts more difficult to resolve. For governments, offering a temporary truce empower bad actors to abuse civilians. For scholars, it emphasizes the importance of investigating and evaluating how truces can be designed to protect civilians and pressure armed actors to the negotiating table.