Dancing After the Rebels’ Pipe? : Explaining the Relationship between Rebel Violence Against Civilians and the Onset of Peace Negotiations

This study seeks to contribute to a lively debate on the relationship between one-sided violence and the outcome of armed conflict by examining whether the degree of one-sided violence, committed by rebel groups, affects how long it takes until peace negotiations are initiated. It is argued that rebels attack civilians to increase the government’s costs of war and enforce concessions in negotiations. In light of these attacks, governments quickly convene negotiations to prevent more violence in the future. Furthermore, democratic governments are expected to start negotiations more quickly than autocracies, as one-sided violence affects democratic leaders’ chances of reelection. These arguments are tested in a quantitative analysis of 104 African conflict dyads from 1989 to 2009, using a Cox Proportional Hazards Model. The empirical analysis provides no support for the claim that higher levels of rebel one-sided violence lead to a quicker onset of negotiations. There is weak evidence that negotiations begin more quickly in democracies compared to autocracies, but no violence at all would result in the quickest onset. The analysis also indicates that negotiations have a pacifying effect on violence in that they seem to reduce the number of civilians killed in rebel attacks, even though conflict continues