How Wartime Dynamics are Perpetuated, Transformed and Terminated during a Transition from a Civil War to Peace
My thesis is about how organisations that have been engaged in a civil war compete to secure control over territory and people once the violent phase of the war is over and the struggle to “win the peace” begins. What are their objectives, what strategies do they adopt, how do they interact with each other and with civilians, and what are the consequences for the emerging post-war environment? From this starting point, I aim to shed light on broader and deeper questions about the termination and aftermath of civil wars. How and when do civil wars end? Wartime multiple sovereignty – the violently contested division of control of territory between organisations asserting an exclusive right to govern – generates competitive state-building projects and wartime political orders. How do these divisions in control change once armed combat is over, but the competing state-building projects are incomplete? In case studies drawn from state formation wars in the South Caucasus and the Western Balkans, focusing in particular on the conflicts in Abkhazia and Kosovo, I use structured focused comparisons and process tracing to map out and explain the changing distributions of control between conflict actors and track the paths they take and the means they use to shape the political order and settle the question, who rules where and how much when the fighting stops? This approach allows me to build and test a mechanism-based theory that explains how post-war order formation works at the local, national and regional level.