Generating a Quality Peace: Negotiated Settlements and Government Respect for Rights in the Wake of Civil War

How can a quality peace be established in the wake of civil war? What role do peace agreements play in shaping what peace looks like following the resolution of civil war? This dissertation builds and tests a theory of how peace agreements and their contents influence the quality of post-conflict peace. Moving beyond negative or minimalist definitions of peace, I define a quality peace as one that is politically inclusive in nature. Specifically, I focus on two key components of a quality peace within this work: women’s political rights and the political rights of societies more broadly. I argue that peace agreements both constrain and incentivize actors to commit to more politically inclusive outcomes. As such, I assess the extent to which peace agreements not only end war but go on to create a peace that is meaningful for those living in post-conflict societies. I identify two characteristics of peace agreements, their gender-specificity and context-specificity, and argue that these characteristics influence progress made toward women’s political rights and broader political inclusivity, respectively. Peace agreements, through their language, lay the framework for the structures, behaviors, and norms of the post-conflict state; their content, through direct and indirect mechanisms identified within this dissertation, influence progress toward a quality peace. I quantitatively test the theoretical expectations on a set of civil war peace agreements signed between 1981 and 2011 using new data that I have collected on the gender-specificity and context-specificity of agreements. I also present a number of case illustrations to assess the plausibility of the mechanisms identified herein. In sum, this dissertation contributes strong evidence that peace agreements play a unique role in shaping post-conflict societies, and it offers new data to strengthen understanding of when and through which mechanisms peace agreements shape both the end of violence as well as the consolidation of peace.Doctor of Philosoph