Mediated Peace Agreements in Modern Post-Civil War Societies: Long-Term Success through Subjective Satisfaction?
Intra-state conflict mediation is playing an increasingly important part in peace and conflict transformation. Since the end of World War II, mediators of the United Nations have engaged in peace initiatives on an international level. After the Cold War various regional organizations, individual nations and NGOs have equally undertaken mediation initiatives which have led to peace agreements. According to recent statistics, mediation processes in civil wars have reached a limited level of “success”. According to “Peace Accord Matrix” (PAM) by the Kroc Institute, 34 comprehensive peace agreements were recorded between 1989 and 2012, in which 26 of them were achieved by means of mediation efforts in relation to “Civil War Mediation” (CWM) datasets. However, they are yet in need of improvement. “Success” is a relative concept. There are significant questions to be asked, in particular, what success really means. What factors constitute success? How can success be measured? Measuring “success” due to mediated intra-state conflict outcomes has been viewed differently by scholars in previous studies, and its conceptualization is said to have been very “objective”. In contrast, this study attempts a novel way of conceptualizing “success” by means of perceived long-term “subjective satisfaction” in post-peace agreement societies such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Guatemala, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Indonesia and the Philippines. The degree of perceived satisfaction will be determined by means of mediated peace agreement outcomes in governmental and territorial power-sharing provisions on the basis of public opinion polls. Referring to the above-mentioned eight post-peace agreement societies, the degree of public satisfaction will be measured over a period of 10 years, which will enable us to find out to what extent the mediated peace agreements have been successful or not. In the first chapter of my thesis, previous theories about conceptualizing mediation success in intra-state conflicts will be discussed. In the second and third chapters, selected cases will be analyzed in detail and compared to each other as to their territorial and governmental power-sharing provisions. In the fourth chapter, the results of newly conceptualized success will be evaluated, followed by conclusions and recommendations that result from this study.