Carter Johnson: Rezumat, CV şi introducere la comunicare
Partitioning for Peace
Sovereignty, Demography, and Ethnic Civil Wars
Carter Johnson
cjohnson@gvpt.umd.edu
Department of Government and Politics
University of Maryland, College Park
Abstract:
Partition is proposed as a solution to ethnic civil war. Partition theorists advocate a demographic separation of ethnic groups into two states, arguing that this is the best chance for an enduring peace. Opponents argue that partition is costly for human lives and that its advocates have yet to demonstrate its effectiveness beyond a limited number of self-selected case studies. This analysis systematically examines the outcome of partition, highlighting the centrality of demography by introducing an index that measures the degree to which a partition separates ethnic groups. This index is applied to all civil wars ending in partition from 1945 to 2004. Those partitions that completely separated the warring groups do not experience a recurrence of war and low-level violence for at least five years, outperforming both partitions that do not separate ethnic groups and other ethnic war outcomes. These results challenge other studies that examine partition as a war outcome. The results also have direct implications for Iraq’s civil war, post-independence Kosovo, and other ethnic civil wars.
Short CV
CARTER JOHNSON
University of Maryland
Department of Government and Politics
cjohnson@gvpt.umd.edu
Education
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Maryland, College Park, U.S.A. (2003-Present)
Contentious Politics, Civil War, Ethnopolitical Conflict
MSc Comparative Politics, London School of Economics, U.K. (1998-1999)
Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict Regulation; Central and Eastern Europe
Hon.BA, Political Science (Dean's Honor List), McMaster University, Canada (1993-1997)
Ethnic Conflict, Northern Ireland, European Union
Exchange Program: Politics Department, University of Leeds, U.K. (1995-1996)
Work Experience
o Lecturer: University of Maryland, College Park
Civil Wars: Onset, Dynamics, and Termination (2007, 2008); Introduction to Comparative Politics (2004)
o Project Coordinator: Minorities at Risk Project (2005-2006)
o Research Assistant: Minorities at Risk Project (2004-2008)
o Visiting Fellow and Academic Coordinator: Civic Education Project (CEP)
Moldova State Pedagogical University (2002-2003); National University of Uzbekistan (2000-2001)
Refereed Journal Articles
“Partitioning to Peace: Sovereignty, Demography, and Ethnic Civil Wars,” International Security, Vol.32, No.4 (Spring, 2008), pp.140-170.
“The Use and Abuse of Minority Rights: Assessing Past and Future EU policies towards Accession Countries of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe,” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, Vol.13 No.1 (2006), pp.27-51.
“Ten Years of Democratic Transition in the Balkans: A Comparative Analysis of Romania’s Hungarian and Bulgaria’s Turkish Minority (1989-1999)” in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Vol.8 No.2, (2002), pp.1-28.
Book Chapters
“Ethnopolitical Violence and Terrorism in the Middle East” with Victor Asal and Jonathan Wilkenfeld in Hewitt, Joseph, Wilkenfeld, Jonathan, and Gurr, Ted Robert (eds.), Peace and Conflict 2008 (USA: Paradigm Publishers, 2007).
“Future policy of the Euro-Atlantic structures toward minorities in the new neighboring countries of the enlarged EU” in Euroregions: a potential for inter-ethnic harmonization. (Chernivtsi: Bukrek Publishers, 2004). pp. 113-127. In Ukrainian.
‘Semipalatinsk Movement (Kazakhstan)’, Levinson, David and Karen Christensen, et al., (eds.) Encyclopedia of Modern Asia (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002).
Country Report Moldova 2000 (London: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2000).
Introduction
(pentru versiunea completă a textului, vă rog să contactaţi autorul sau Forum Plural)
Since the early 1950s, civil wars have been longer lasting and more frequent than international wars, producing high levels of death and disability.[1] Ethnic wars have been especially common, comprising anywhere from 55 percent (70) to 72 percent (91) of all civil wars between 1945 and 1999.[2] Moreover, cross-national evidence suggests that ethnic wars last longer than nonethnic wars.[3] These numbers are even more troubling given that, during the 1990s, more than 200 ethnic minorities and subordinate majorities throughout the world were contesting their political status.[4] In addition to the challenge of ending civil wars, one of the vexing problems has been their high recidivism rate, with postconflict countries facing up to a 50 percent chance of experiencing renewed war within the first five years of establishing peace.[5]
Since the mid-1990s, one solution to preventing the recurrence of ethnic civil war that has gained international policy and scholarly attention has been partition.[6] The debate surrounding partition emerged at the end of the Cold War as ethnic conflicts came to the forefront of Western policymakers’ attention and international boundaries were once again open to large-scale change. Still, Western governments have demonstrated ambivalence toward partition, opposing the recognition of several de facto partitions, such as Nagorno Karabakh in Azerbaijan, and yet promoting the incorporation of partitions into the peace plans of Sudan and Papua New Guinea.[7] The negotiations surrounding Kosovo’s final status further reflect ambivalence, with proposals to separate Kosovo from Serbia being fiercely contested within the European Union; there is also the possibility of a further partition of Kosovo into majority Albanian and Serbian regions.[8] In addition, policymakers have increasingly proposed partition as one way to solve Iraq’s civil war.[9]
Scholarly debate about the relative merits of partition is not new.[10] Since the end of the Cold War, however, the debate over partition has primarily emphasized humanitarian issues. When scholars and policymakers have proposed partition, it has been as a last resort, to end ethnic wars when widespread massacres and forced population transfers have already begun to occur and where long-term military commitments by the international community are either not forthcoming or are unable to establish peace.[11] Under these conditions, advocates of partition argue, partitioning groups into separate states where they can protect themselves militarily, provides the best chance for ending ethnic wars and establishing an enduring peace. Partition advocates do not, however, support the blanket application of new borders to solve ethnic civil wars. Rather they argue for the need to separate warring populations – with population transfers where necessary – in an effort to create relatively homogeneous units where ethnic groups’ security fears are reduced and prospects of demobilization and reconstruction can begin without the need for long-term commitments of international troops.
Studies contributing to this debate have largely remained theoretical or focused on case studies and policy-prescriptions.[12] Evidence has pointed to some successes, such as the 1974 partition of Cyprus, which led to decades of peace, and some failures, such as the partition of British India, which led to widespread death and subsequent war. This article offers a systematic, cross-national test of all partitions that have followed ethnic civil wars between 1945 and 2004. It finds that partition is a uniformly effective tool in preventing a recurrence of war and low-level-violence but only if it includes the physical separation of ethnic groups. This finding challenges that of Nicholas Sambanis, who, in 2000, produced the first empirical study of partition using a large-n, cross-national database.[13] Based on his results, Sambanis concluded that “partition does not significantly prevent war recurrence [which] suggests, at the very least, that separating ethnic groups does not resolve the problem of violent ethnic antagonism.”[14]
Sambanis’s analysis helped to further scholarly understanding of partition’s relationship to conflict recurrence but it did not test the core theoretical argument of partition advocates. The Sambanis analysis suffers from a methodological error because it identified new borders (i.e., sovereignty) as the critical independent variable to represent partition, and not the demographic separation of warring ethnic groups. Testing the relationship between sovereignty and conflict recurrence does not capture – and therefore cannot refute – the position of partition advocates.[15] This article, in contrast, introduces an index to calculate the amount of unmixing of ethnic groups that occurs with partition, therefore capturing partition advocates’ core argument.
The article is divided into five sections. First, I review the theoretical and empirical literature on partition. Second, I examine partition’s empirical record and raise critical questions about Sambanis’s main conclusion that partition is not particularly effective at preventing war recurrence. Third, I propose an alternative variable – the Postpartition Ethnic Homogeneity Index – for testing whether partition is a viable solution for ending ethnic wars. Fourth, I demonstrate that, where the index shows warring ethnic groups were in fact separated, neither war nor low-level violence reoccurred for at least five years, suggesting that partition advocates are correct. Fifth, I discuss some of the policy implications that follow from the analysis, focusing on the final status of Kosovo and proposals to partition Iraq.
References:
[1] James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin write, “Between 1945 and 1999, about 3.33 million battle deaths occurred in the 25 interstate wars that killed at least 1,000 and had at least 100 dead on each side. These wars involved just 25 states that suffered casualties of at least 1,000 and had a median duration of not quite 3 months. In contrast, in the same period there were roughly 127 civil wars that killed at least 1,000, 25 of which were ongoing in 1999. A conservative estimate of the total dead as a direct result of these conflicts is 16.2 million, five times the interstate toll. These civil wars occurred in 73 states—more than a third of the United Nations system—and had a median duration of roughly six years.” Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1 (February 2003), pp. 75-90, at p. 75. The number of ongoing civil wars has declined since its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it remains high (ranging between 20 and 30 wars over the past 15 years), and recent data show a second upward trend beginning in 2004. See Joseph Hewitt, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, and Ted Robert Gurr, Peace and Conflict, 2008 (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2007). For a discussion of the toll of civil wars on civilians, see Hazem Adam Ghobarah, Paul Huth, and Bruce Russett, “Civil Wars Kill and Maim People—Long after the Shooting Stops,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 2 (May 2003), pp. 189-202. See also Paul Collier, Lani Elliott, Havard Hegre, Anke Hoeffler, Marta Reynal-Querol, and Nicholas Sambanis, Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003).
[2] In his study of civil war duration, James Fearon codes his cases as “ethnic,” “nonethnic,” and “ambiguous.” Ethnic wars made 55 percent of all civil wars between 1945 and 1999, and ambiguous wars 17 percent. See James D. Fearon, “Why Do Some Civil Wars Last So Much Longer Than Others?” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 3 (May 2004), pp. 275-301.
[3] Roy Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945-1993,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 3 (September 1995), pp. 681-690.
[4] Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute for Peace, 1993); and John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, “Introduction: The Macro-Political Regulation of Ethnic Conflict,” in McGarry and O’Leary, eds., The Politics of Ethnic Conflict Regulation (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.1-40.
[5] See Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, and Mans Soderbom, “On the Duration of Civil War,” Policy Research Working Paper, No. 2681, (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, September 2001); Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis, “Understanding Civil War: A New Agenda,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 46, No. 1 (February 2002), pp. 3–12; and Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars.” For other recurrence statistics, see Barbara F. Walter, “Does Conflict Beget Conflict? Explaining Recurring Civil War,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 3 (May 2004), pp. 371-388.
[6] John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary present a taxonomy of macro-political forms of ethnic conflict regulation identifying partition as one of eight. See McGarry and O’Leary, “Introduction”; and Nicholas Mansergh, The Prelude to Partition: Concepts and Aims in Ireland and India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
[7] Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the war between the Khartoum government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army included provision for a referendum on independence for the South. See International Crisis Group, “The Khartoum-SPLM Agreement: Sudan’s Uncertain Peace,” Crisis Group Africa Report, No. 96 July 25, 2005. Similarly, the 2001 peace agreement between Papua New Guinea’s government and the separatists in Bougainville included a referendum on independence. See the Bougainville Peace Agreement at the Conciliation Resources website:
http://www.c-r.org/our-work/accord/png-bougainville/key-texts37.php.
[8] The Dutch foreign minister, Maxime Verhagen, became the first European foreign minister to state that partition of Kosovo into majority Albanian and Serb political territories would be an acceptable outcome on August 28, 2007. This was followed by a similar comment by Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, on August 31, 2007. See Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Dutch Minister Says Partition of Kosova Acceptable” RFE/RL Newsline, Vol. 11, No. 160, Pt.2, August 29, 2007; and, “Russia Rules Out Crossing ‘Red Line’ on Kosova, but Would Accept Partition” RFE/RL Newsline, Vol. 11, No. 163, Pt. 2, September 4, 2007. As far as I am aware, no state has actively lobbied for a further partition of Kosovo, though some have suggested that such an outcome would be acceptable if Kosovo and Serbian leaders accepted this compromise. For discussion of the debate within the European Union over recognition of Kosovo independence, see “The Waiting Game,” Economist, September 27, 2007, p.33. Russia’s opposition to recognition and the United States’ support are well known.
[9] For suggested partitions for Iraq, see Peter W. Galbraith, “Iraq’s Salvation Lies in Letting It Break Apart,” Sunday Times, July 16, 2006; Chaim Kaufmann, “Separating Iraqis, Saving Iraq,” in “What to Do in Iraq: A Roundtable,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 4 (July/August 2006), pp. 156-160; Leslie H. Gelb, “Last Train from Baghdad,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 4 (July/August 2006), pp. 160-165. One of the earliest proposals on partition came from Leslie H. Gelb, “The Three-State Solution,” New York Times, November 25, 2003. See also the symposium, “Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Partition, and U.S. Foreign Policy” sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, D.C., January 15, 2003. On September 27, 2007, the U.S. Senate passed a non-binding measure calling for Iraq to be divided into federal regions, with the likely outcome of separate Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni states. See Alissa J. Rubin, “In Iraq, Repeated Support for a Unified State,” New York Times, October 1, 2007.
[10] In 1985, Donald Horowitz stated, for example, “Separating the antagonists - partition - is an option increasingly recommended for consideration where groups are territorially concentrated.” Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), at p.588.
[11] Chaim Kaufmann, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Wars,” International Security, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 136-175; Chaim D. Kaufmann, “When All Else Fails: Ethnic Partitions and Population Transfers in the Twentieth Century,” International Security, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Fall 1998), pp. 120-156; Jaroslav Tir has also suggested that peaceful partitions are extremely unlikely to produce war onset. See, Tir, “Keeping the Peace after Secession: Territorial Conflicts between Rump and Secessionist States,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 49, No. 5 (October 2005), pp. 713-741. Although Tir’s addition to the literature is useful, it does not address the problem of how to prevent civil war recurrence.
[12] Alexander Downes, “The Problem with Negotiated Settlements to Ethnic Civil Wars,” Security Studies, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer 2004), pp. 230-279; John J. Mearsheimer, “The Case for Partitioning Kosovo,” in Ted Galen Carpenter, ed., NATO’s Empty Victory: A Postmortem on the Balkan War (Washington, D.C.: CATO Institute, 2000), pp. 133-138; Alexander Downes, “The Holy Land Divided: Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Wars,” Security Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Summer 2001), pp. 58-116; Kaufmann, “When All Else Fails”; Kaufmann, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Wars”; Radha Kumar, Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annals of Partition (New York: Verso, 1997); Radha Kumar, “The Troubled History of Partition,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 1 (January/February 1997), pp. 22-34; Mansergh, Prelude to Partition; Robert Schaeffer, Warpaths: The Politics of Partition (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Jan Tullberg and Brigitta S. Tullberg, “Separation or Unity? A Model for Solving Ethnic Conflicts,” Politics and the Life Sciences, Vol. 16, No. 2 (September 1997), pp. 237-248; John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Van Evera, “When Peace Means War: The Partition that Dare Not Speak its Name,” New Republic, December 18, 1995, pp. 16-21; John J. Mearsheimer and Robert A. Pape, “The Answer: A Partition Plan for Bosnia,” New Republic, June 14, 1993, pp. 22-28; and Peter W. Galbraith The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).
[13] Nicholas Sambanis, “Partition as a Solution to Ethnic War: An Empirical Critique of the Theoretical Literature,” World Politics, Vol. 52, No. 4 (July 2000), pp. 437-483, at p.479.
[14] Sambanis, “Partition as a Solution to Ethnic War,”, at p.479.
[15] Alexander Downes notes this flaw in the Sambanis analysis in “The Holy Land Divided.”
Sovereignty, Demography, and Ethnic Civil Wars
Carter Johnson
cjohnson@gvpt.umd.edu
Department of Government and Politics
University of Maryland, College Park
Abstract:
Partition is proposed as a solution to ethnic civil war. Partition theorists advocate a demographic separation of ethnic groups into two states, arguing that this is the best chance for an enduring peace. Opponents argue that partition is costly for human lives and that its advocates have yet to demonstrate its effectiveness beyond a limited number of self-selected case studies. This analysis systematically examines the outcome of partition, highlighting the centrality of demography by introducing an index that measures the degree to which a partition separates ethnic groups. This index is applied to all civil wars ending in partition from 1945 to 2004. Those partitions that completely separated the warring groups do not experience a recurrence of war and low-level violence for at least five years, outperforming both partitions that do not separate ethnic groups and other ethnic war outcomes. These results challenge other studies that examine partition as a war outcome. The results also have direct implications for Iraq’s civil war, post-independence Kosovo, and other ethnic civil wars.
Short CV
CARTER JOHNSON
University of Maryland
Department of Government and Politics
cjohnson@gvpt.umd.edu
Education
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Maryland, College Park, U.S.A. (2003-Present)
Contentious Politics, Civil War, Ethnopolitical Conflict
MSc Comparative Politics, London School of Economics, U.K. (1998-1999)
Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict Regulation; Central and Eastern Europe
Hon.BA, Political Science (Dean's Honor List), McMaster University, Canada (1993-1997)
Ethnic Conflict, Northern Ireland, European Union
Exchange Program: Politics Department, University of Leeds, U.K. (1995-1996)
Work Experience
o Lecturer: University of Maryland, College Park
Civil Wars: Onset, Dynamics, and Termination (2007, 2008); Introduction to Comparative Politics (2004)
o Project Coordinator: Minorities at Risk Project (2005-2006)
o Research Assistant: Minorities at Risk Project (2004-2008)
o Visiting Fellow and Academic Coordinator: Civic Education Project (CEP)
Moldova State Pedagogical University (2002-2003); National University of Uzbekistan (2000-2001)
Refereed Journal Articles
“Partitioning to Peace: Sovereignty, Demography, and Ethnic Civil Wars,” International Security, Vol.32, No.4 (Spring, 2008), pp.140-170.
“The Use and Abuse of Minority Rights: Assessing Past and Future EU policies towards Accession Countries of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe,” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, Vol.13 No.1 (2006), pp.27-51.
“Ten Years of Democratic Transition in the Balkans: A Comparative Analysis of Romania’s Hungarian and Bulgaria’s Turkish Minority (1989-1999)” in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Vol.8 No.2, (2002), pp.1-28.
Book Chapters
“Ethnopolitical Violence and Terrorism in the Middle East” with Victor Asal and Jonathan Wilkenfeld in Hewitt, Joseph, Wilkenfeld, Jonathan, and Gurr, Ted Robert (eds.), Peace and Conflict 2008 (USA: Paradigm Publishers, 2007).
“Future policy of the Euro-Atlantic structures toward minorities in the new neighboring countries of the enlarged EU” in Euroregions: a potential for inter-ethnic harmonization. (Chernivtsi: Bukrek Publishers, 2004). pp. 113-127. In Ukrainian.
‘Semipalatinsk Movement (Kazakhstan)’, Levinson, David and Karen Christensen, et al., (eds.) Encyclopedia of Modern Asia (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002).
Country Report Moldova 2000 (London: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2000).
Introduction
(pentru versiunea completă a textului, vă rog să contactaţi autorul sau Forum Plural)
Since the early 1950s, civil wars have been longer lasting and more frequent than international wars, producing high levels of death and disability.[1] Ethnic wars have been especially common, comprising anywhere from 55 percent (70) to 72 percent (91) of all civil wars between 1945 and 1999.[2] Moreover, cross-national evidence suggests that ethnic wars last longer than nonethnic wars.[3] These numbers are even more troubling given that, during the 1990s, more than 200 ethnic minorities and subordinate majorities throughout the world were contesting their political status.[4] In addition to the challenge of ending civil wars, one of the vexing problems has been their high recidivism rate, with postconflict countries facing up to a 50 percent chance of experiencing renewed war within the first five years of establishing peace.[5]
Since the mid-1990s, one solution to preventing the recurrence of ethnic civil war that has gained international policy and scholarly attention has been partition.[6] The debate surrounding partition emerged at the end of the Cold War as ethnic conflicts came to the forefront of Western policymakers’ attention and international boundaries were once again open to large-scale change. Still, Western governments have demonstrated ambivalence toward partition, opposing the recognition of several de facto partitions, such as Nagorno Karabakh in Azerbaijan, and yet promoting the incorporation of partitions into the peace plans of Sudan and Papua New Guinea.[7] The negotiations surrounding Kosovo’s final status further reflect ambivalence, with proposals to separate Kosovo from Serbia being fiercely contested within the European Union; there is also the possibility of a further partition of Kosovo into majority Albanian and Serbian regions.[8] In addition, policymakers have increasingly proposed partition as one way to solve Iraq’s civil war.[9]
Scholarly debate about the relative merits of partition is not new.[10] Since the end of the Cold War, however, the debate over partition has primarily emphasized humanitarian issues. When scholars and policymakers have proposed partition, it has been as a last resort, to end ethnic wars when widespread massacres and forced population transfers have already begun to occur and where long-term military commitments by the international community are either not forthcoming or are unable to establish peace.[11] Under these conditions, advocates of partition argue, partitioning groups into separate states where they can protect themselves militarily, provides the best chance for ending ethnic wars and establishing an enduring peace. Partition advocates do not, however, support the blanket application of new borders to solve ethnic civil wars. Rather they argue for the need to separate warring populations – with population transfers where necessary – in an effort to create relatively homogeneous units where ethnic groups’ security fears are reduced and prospects of demobilization and reconstruction can begin without the need for long-term commitments of international troops.
Studies contributing to this debate have largely remained theoretical or focused on case studies and policy-prescriptions.[12] Evidence has pointed to some successes, such as the 1974 partition of Cyprus, which led to decades of peace, and some failures, such as the partition of British India, which led to widespread death and subsequent war. This article offers a systematic, cross-national test of all partitions that have followed ethnic civil wars between 1945 and 2004. It finds that partition is a uniformly effective tool in preventing a recurrence of war and low-level-violence but only if it includes the physical separation of ethnic groups. This finding challenges that of Nicholas Sambanis, who, in 2000, produced the first empirical study of partition using a large-n, cross-national database.[13] Based on his results, Sambanis concluded that “partition does not significantly prevent war recurrence [which] suggests, at the very least, that separating ethnic groups does not resolve the problem of violent ethnic antagonism.”[14]
Sambanis’s analysis helped to further scholarly understanding of partition’s relationship to conflict recurrence but it did not test the core theoretical argument of partition advocates. The Sambanis analysis suffers from a methodological error because it identified new borders (i.e., sovereignty) as the critical independent variable to represent partition, and not the demographic separation of warring ethnic groups. Testing the relationship between sovereignty and conflict recurrence does not capture – and therefore cannot refute – the position of partition advocates.[15] This article, in contrast, introduces an index to calculate the amount of unmixing of ethnic groups that occurs with partition, therefore capturing partition advocates’ core argument.
The article is divided into five sections. First, I review the theoretical and empirical literature on partition. Second, I examine partition’s empirical record and raise critical questions about Sambanis’s main conclusion that partition is not particularly effective at preventing war recurrence. Third, I propose an alternative variable – the Postpartition Ethnic Homogeneity Index – for testing whether partition is a viable solution for ending ethnic wars. Fourth, I demonstrate that, where the index shows warring ethnic groups were in fact separated, neither war nor low-level violence reoccurred for at least five years, suggesting that partition advocates are correct. Fifth, I discuss some of the policy implications that follow from the analysis, focusing on the final status of Kosovo and proposals to partition Iraq.
References:
[1] James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin write, “Between 1945 and 1999, about 3.33 million battle deaths occurred in the 25 interstate wars that killed at least 1,000 and had at least 100 dead on each side. These wars involved just 25 states that suffered casualties of at least 1,000 and had a median duration of not quite 3 months. In contrast, in the same period there were roughly 127 civil wars that killed at least 1,000, 25 of which were ongoing in 1999. A conservative estimate of the total dead as a direct result of these conflicts is 16.2 million, five times the interstate toll. These civil wars occurred in 73 states—more than a third of the United Nations system—and had a median duration of roughly six years.” Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1 (February 2003), pp. 75-90, at p. 75. The number of ongoing civil wars has declined since its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it remains high (ranging between 20 and 30 wars over the past 15 years), and recent data show a second upward trend beginning in 2004. See Joseph Hewitt, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, and Ted Robert Gurr, Peace and Conflict, 2008 (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2007). For a discussion of the toll of civil wars on civilians, see Hazem Adam Ghobarah, Paul Huth, and Bruce Russett, “Civil Wars Kill and Maim People—Long after the Shooting Stops,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 2 (May 2003), pp. 189-202. See also Paul Collier, Lani Elliott, Havard Hegre, Anke Hoeffler, Marta Reynal-Querol, and Nicholas Sambanis, Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003).
[2] In his study of civil war duration, James Fearon codes his cases as “ethnic,” “nonethnic,” and “ambiguous.” Ethnic wars made 55 percent of all civil wars between 1945 and 1999, and ambiguous wars 17 percent. See James D. Fearon, “Why Do Some Civil Wars Last So Much Longer Than Others?” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 3 (May 2004), pp. 275-301.
[3] Roy Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945-1993,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 3 (September 1995), pp. 681-690.
[4] Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute for Peace, 1993); and John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, “Introduction: The Macro-Political Regulation of Ethnic Conflict,” in McGarry and O’Leary, eds., The Politics of Ethnic Conflict Regulation (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.1-40.
[5] See Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, and Mans Soderbom, “On the Duration of Civil War,” Policy Research Working Paper, No. 2681, (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, September 2001); Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis, “Understanding Civil War: A New Agenda,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 46, No. 1 (February 2002), pp. 3–12; and Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars.” For other recurrence statistics, see Barbara F. Walter, “Does Conflict Beget Conflict? Explaining Recurring Civil War,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 3 (May 2004), pp. 371-388.
[6] John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary present a taxonomy of macro-political forms of ethnic conflict regulation identifying partition as one of eight. See McGarry and O’Leary, “Introduction”; and Nicholas Mansergh, The Prelude to Partition: Concepts and Aims in Ireland and India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
[7] Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the war between the Khartoum government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army included provision for a referendum on independence for the South. See International Crisis Group, “The Khartoum-SPLM Agreement: Sudan’s Uncertain Peace,” Crisis Group Africa Report, No. 96 July 25, 2005. Similarly, the 2001 peace agreement between Papua New Guinea’s government and the separatists in Bougainville included a referendum on independence. See the Bougainville Peace Agreement at the Conciliation Resources website:
http://www.c-r.org/our-work/accord/png-bougainville/key-texts37.php.
[8] The Dutch foreign minister, Maxime Verhagen, became the first European foreign minister to state that partition of Kosovo into majority Albanian and Serb political territories would be an acceptable outcome on August 28, 2007. This was followed by a similar comment by Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, on August 31, 2007. See Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Dutch Minister Says Partition of Kosova Acceptable” RFE/RL Newsline, Vol. 11, No. 160, Pt.2, August 29, 2007; and, “Russia Rules Out Crossing ‘Red Line’ on Kosova, but Would Accept Partition” RFE/RL Newsline, Vol. 11, No. 163, Pt. 2, September 4, 2007. As far as I am aware, no state has actively lobbied for a further partition of Kosovo, though some have suggested that such an outcome would be acceptable if Kosovo and Serbian leaders accepted this compromise. For discussion of the debate within the European Union over recognition of Kosovo independence, see “The Waiting Game,” Economist, September 27, 2007, p.33. Russia’s opposition to recognition and the United States’ support are well known.
[9] For suggested partitions for Iraq, see Peter W. Galbraith, “Iraq’s Salvation Lies in Letting It Break Apart,” Sunday Times, July 16, 2006; Chaim Kaufmann, “Separating Iraqis, Saving Iraq,” in “What to Do in Iraq: A Roundtable,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 4 (July/August 2006), pp. 156-160; Leslie H. Gelb, “Last Train from Baghdad,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 4 (July/August 2006), pp. 160-165. One of the earliest proposals on partition came from Leslie H. Gelb, “The Three-State Solution,” New York Times, November 25, 2003. See also the symposium, “Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Partition, and U.S. Foreign Policy” sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, D.C., January 15, 2003. On September 27, 2007, the U.S. Senate passed a non-binding measure calling for Iraq to be divided into federal regions, with the likely outcome of separate Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni states. See Alissa J. Rubin, “In Iraq, Repeated Support for a Unified State,” New York Times, October 1, 2007.
[10] In 1985, Donald Horowitz stated, for example, “Separating the antagonists - partition - is an option increasingly recommended for consideration where groups are territorially concentrated.” Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), at p.588.
[11] Chaim Kaufmann, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Wars,” International Security, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 136-175; Chaim D. Kaufmann, “When All Else Fails: Ethnic Partitions and Population Transfers in the Twentieth Century,” International Security, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Fall 1998), pp. 120-156; Jaroslav Tir has also suggested that peaceful partitions are extremely unlikely to produce war onset. See, Tir, “Keeping the Peace after Secession: Territorial Conflicts between Rump and Secessionist States,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 49, No. 5 (October 2005), pp. 713-741. Although Tir’s addition to the literature is useful, it does not address the problem of how to prevent civil war recurrence.
[12] Alexander Downes, “The Problem with Negotiated Settlements to Ethnic Civil Wars,” Security Studies, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer 2004), pp. 230-279; John J. Mearsheimer, “The Case for Partitioning Kosovo,” in Ted Galen Carpenter, ed., NATO’s Empty Victory: A Postmortem on the Balkan War (Washington, D.C.: CATO Institute, 2000), pp. 133-138; Alexander Downes, “The Holy Land Divided: Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Wars,” Security Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Summer 2001), pp. 58-116; Kaufmann, “When All Else Fails”; Kaufmann, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Wars”; Radha Kumar, Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annals of Partition (New York: Verso, 1997); Radha Kumar, “The Troubled History of Partition,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 1 (January/February 1997), pp. 22-34; Mansergh, Prelude to Partition; Robert Schaeffer, Warpaths: The Politics of Partition (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Jan Tullberg and Brigitta S. Tullberg, “Separation or Unity? A Model for Solving Ethnic Conflicts,” Politics and the Life Sciences, Vol. 16, No. 2 (September 1997), pp. 237-248; John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Van Evera, “When Peace Means War: The Partition that Dare Not Speak its Name,” New Republic, December 18, 1995, pp. 16-21; John J. Mearsheimer and Robert A. Pape, “The Answer: A Partition Plan for Bosnia,” New Republic, June 14, 1993, pp. 22-28; and Peter W. Galbraith The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).
[13] Nicholas Sambanis, “Partition as a Solution to Ethnic War: An Empirical Critique of the Theoretical Literature,” World Politics, Vol. 52, No. 4 (July 2000), pp. 437-483, at p.479.
[14] Sambanis, “Partition as a Solution to Ethnic War,”, at p.479.
[15] Alexander Downes notes this flaw in the Sambanis analysis in “The Holy Land Divided.”
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