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Unintended consequences of post-conflict power-sharing. Explaining civilian activism

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Abstract

Under what conditions do civilians mobilize after power-sharing agreements? Research on post-conflict power-sharing has neglected the possible consequences of power-sharing agreements on micro level dynamics, i. e. civilian activism. We argue that (i) power-sharing practices increase the probability of civilian activism, (ii) political and territorial power-sharing practices are especially relevant in this regard, and (iii) ethnic identity groups affiliated to the former rebels are more likely to respond to power-sharing practices compared to other ethnic groups. Using data on power-sharing agreements and civilian activism in African post-conflict countries (1989–2006), we find support for our expectations. The results suggest that the effect of power-sharing practices on protests and riots is particularly high for ethnic groups with linkages to the former rebel organizations.

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Notes

  1. As we use the data from the PSED for our measurement of the implementation of power-sharing provisions, the economic variable does not include wealth power-sharing because of the coding decision of the PSED to focus only on the government-rebel dyad as the relevant conflict parties (Ottmann and Vüllers 2015).

  2. All peace agreements in the considered time period contain power-sharing provisions or are otherwise included in our data set as follow-up agreements. We did not consider the rare instances in which one party manages to defeat the opponent entirely, as these cases do not allow to trace time-specific implementation steps in the peace process comparable to power-sharing practices.

  3. More detailed information on the sample is provided in the appendix.

  4. The focus on the first five years after the conclusion of a peace agreement has proven to be a helpful and commonly used time span in previous research on post-conflict power-sharing (see, for instance, Walter 1999; Hartzell and Hoddie 2007; Jarstad and Nilsson 2008).

  5. Given the structure of our data set, which is disaggregated to the month level, occurrences of multiple protest events during an individual observation is relatively rare and does not exceed 5 instances per month. We thus refrained from using a count-model.

  6. This concerned ‘nationwide’ events, which are by default relegated to the capital, and events with unclear geo-location.

  7. The variable is thus not constant over the entire post-conflict time, but is instead only tied to the period following the peace agreement conclusion. If the conclusion itself rather than practices would yield an effect on civilian activism, it is reasonable to assume that it would manifest in the next month.

  8. The variable was created using SCAD’s “anti-government violence”, “extra-government violence”, and “intra-government violence” categories (Salehyan et al. 2012).

  9. In fact, there are no protest events after economic power-sharing practices for rebel-affiliated groups altogether, resulting in a failure to estimate an interaction coefficient for the lower left part of Fig. 7 (in the online appendix).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Roos van der Haer and Nils Weidmann for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Funding

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by the DFG project “Raise your voices! The occurrence of nonviolent campaigns in civil wars”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany

    Roman Krtsch

  2. University of Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Johannes Vüllers

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  1. Roman Krtsch
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Correspondence to Roman Krtsch.

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The online appendix includes further information on the composition of the sample (Fig. 4 and Tables 2, 3) and the results from the robustness checks (Tables 4 to 6 and Fig. 5 to 7).

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Krtsch, R., Vüllers, J. Unintended consequences of post-conflict power-sharing. Explaining civilian activism. Z Friedens und Konflforsch 8, 239–260 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42597-019-00002-3

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