One Dyadic Peace Leads to Another? Conflict Systems, Terminations, and Net Reduction in Fighting Groups

Governments often fight multiple conflicts simultaneously and each conflict can have multiple groups. Prior research on civil war termination has been conducted at the conflict-level, where all the groups in one civil war have been terminated, or at the dyadic-level, where group terminations are examined separately. In practice conflict-level studies mostly tell us how to preserve peace once a civil war has already ended, while dyadic studies tell us about the durability of specific group terminations within a civil war. Hence our understanding of how ongoing civil wars are ended is limited, particularly, with respect to multiparty conflicts. We put forth a systems-approach that treats dyadic terminations as connected processes where group terminations influence the future behavior of other groups, incentivizing a system towards greater aggregate peace or conflict. Analyzing 264 dyadic terminations, the findings suggest that the most effective strategy for governments to reduce systemic conflict is to demonstrate to other groups that they have the political will and capacity to implement security, political and social reforms as part of a peace process. Viable implementation can be followed by the concomitant use of military victories against remaining groups with great success. However, military victories achieved in isolation are ineffective.