Seeds of peace? Land reform and civil war recurrence following negotiated settlements

Published date01 March 2019
Date01 March 2019
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0010836717750201
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836717750201
Cooperation and Conflict
2019, Vol. 54(1) 44 –63
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836717750201
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Seeds of peace? Land reform
and civil war recurrence
following negotiated
settlements
Eric Keels and T David Mason
Abstract
Land reform has been depicted by some as an effective element of counterinsurgency strategy
in nations experiencing peasant-based civil conflict. While some studies have argued that land
reform reduces civilian support for insurgency, other research has demonstrated that these
reforms are often undermined by brutal state repression. The study of land reform has also
been driven largely by qualitative case study research, which has limited what we know about
the cross-national efficacy of these reforms. This study contributes to the current literature by
looking at the efficacy of land reform as part of the post-civil war peace process. Specifically, we
examine whether land reform provisions included in comprehensive peace agreements reduce
the risk of renewed civil war. Measuring the risk of civil war recurrence in all comprehensive
peace agreements from 1989–2012, we find that the inclusion of land reform provisions in the
post-war peace process substantially reduces the risk of renewed fighting.
Keywords
Civil war recurrence, land reform, peace agreements
No social group is more conservative than a landowning peasantry, and none is more
revolutionary than a peasantry that owns too little land or pays too high a rental. (Samuel
Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, p. 375)
Huntington’s quote alerts us to the fact that a number of studies have examined the rela-
tionship between inequitable distribution of land ownership and land tenure patterns and
the onset of rural insurgency (Boix, 2008; Moore et al., 1996; Muller and Seligson, 1987;
Corresponding author:
Eric Keels, Baker Center, University of Tennessee, 1640 Cumberland Ave., Knoxville, TN 37996, USA.
Email: ekeels@utk.edu
750201CAC0010.1177/0010836717750201Cooperation and ConflictKeels and Mason
research-article2018
Article
Keels and Mason 45
Paige, 1975). Huntington preceded the quote above by prescribing land reform as a strat-
egy to inoculate rural populations against the temptation to revolt:
[A] government can … significantly affect the conditions in the countryside so as to reduce the
propensity of peasants to revolt. While reforms may be the catalyst of revolution in the cities,
they may be a substitute for revolution in the countryside. … Where the conditions of land
ownership are equitable and provide a viable living for the peasant, revolution is unlikely.
Where they are inequitable and where the peasant lives in poverty and suffering, revolution is
likely, if not inevitable.
Rural insurgencies fought over land issues often become intractable. Rebels can find
safe havens in rural areas, where they can avoid annihilation by the government’s armed
forces, even if they cannot defeat the government and seize power themselves. They can
cultivate ties with local peasant populations by promising land reform when they take
power. The overwhelming majority of rebel fighters are themselves drawn from the peas-
ant population as well, giving the rebels kinship, community, class, and other local ties
that translate into local knowledge that government forces often lack and cannot easily
cultivate, given this type of state’s reliance on repression as a strategy to preempt peasant
unrest prior to the outbreak of civil war.
Boix (2008) argues that in a nation with an economy that is heavily based on agricul-
ture and where land ownership and land tenure arrangements are highly inequitable, the
land-owning class is likely to resist calls for economic reform (i.e. land reform) or politi-
cal reform (i.e. democratization) because their primary asset—land—is not mobile: they
cannot move their assets to another nation if a democratic regime decides to tax their
wealth at a rate that land owners find unacceptable. Hence, Boix argues, the land-owning
class is willing to fight a civil war rather than allow land redistribution or democratiza-
tion. He then goes on to specify the conditions that determine whether the rebels win or
the government wins the civil war.
What Boix does not consider is the outcome that has become the modal outcome of
civil wars in the post-Cold War era: negotiated settlement. What we address in this article
is not what makes a negotiated settlement more likely than a military victory by either
side. Instead, we focus on the aftermath of conflict termination through negotiated settle-
ment: the duration of the peace established by a peace agreement. In civil wars that end
in negotiated settlements, does the inclusion of land reform provisions in the peace
agreement reduce the risk of relapse into renewed conflict?
Existing research has shown that once a nation brings a civil war to an end, that nation
has a high probability of relapsing into renewed civil war at a later date. In Breaking the
Conflict Trap, Paul Collier and his colleagues noted that about half of the nations that
experience civil war do eventually relapse into renewed conflict within a few years after
the original war ends (Collier et al., 2003: 83). Licklider’s (1995) seminal work on civil
war recurrence cautions us that there are strong reasons to expect that the peace estab-
lished by a negotiated settlement is more fragile than the peace established by a decisive
victory, regardless of whether it is the government or the rebels that prevail. Empirical
evidence on this proposition is mixed, especially for the post-Cold War era. While
Licklider (1995) and Toft (2010) found support for the notion that military victories

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