Barriers to the Consolidation of Peace

What causes post-conflict violence to occur in some places emerging from extended violent conflict and not in others? Why does episodic post-conflict violence take different forms? And what causes episodic violence to escalate into larger renewed extended violence? This thesis contributes towards answers to these questions by examining the experience of Indonesia. Six provinces saw civil war or large-scale inter-communal unrest around the turn of the century. In each, war ended. Yet levels and forms of post-conflict violence vary significantly between areas. The Indonesian cases are used to build a theory of the sources of spatial and temporal variance in post-conflict violence. Multiple methods are employed. A new dataset, containing over 158,000 coded incidents, maps patterns of extended and post-conflict violence. Six districts in three provinces are then studied in depth. Comparative analysis of districts and provinces—drawing on over 300 field interviews—identifies the determinants of variations in post-conflict violence levels and forms. Adopting a political economy approach, the thesis develops a novel actor-based theory of post-conflict violence. Violence is not the result of failed elite bargains, dysfunctional inter-group relations, enduring grievances, or weak states. Instead, it flows from the incentives that three sets of actors—local elites, local violence specialists, and national elites—have to use violence for accumulation. Violence is used when it is beneficial, non-costly, and when other opportunities for getting ahead do not exist. How post-conflict resources are deployed, the degree to which those who use violence face sanctions, and the availability of peaceful means to achieve goals shape incentives and hence patterns of violence. Where only violence specialists support violence, post-conflict violence will take small-scale forms. Where local elites also support violence, escalation to frequent large episodic violence occurs. Extended violence only occurs where national elites also have reason to use violence for purposes of accumulation

Consolidation (business) · Development economics · Economic system · Economics · Peacebuilding · Political economy · Political science · Political violence · Politics · Asian Studies and History

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