Seminar Summary — From Participation to Protection: The Role of Civil Society in Post-Conflict Peace Agreements

Photographs of post-conflict peace negotiations typically feature government officials signing treaties, shaking hands or engaging in other acts of goodwill. Often missing from these images are the nongovernmental actors who may not sign treaties, but nonetheless play important roles in the negotiation process. For example, a single Italian non-governmental organization (NGO) was instrumental in facilitating peace talks that ended the Mozambique Civil War in the 1990s.

The participation of nongovernmental entities in peace- and treaty-making is a relatively new phenomenon, increasing after World War II as more countries transitioned to democracy and more active civil societies. While the inclusion of civil society voices is now a fundamental component of peace processes, little attention has been dedicated to understanding whether civil society actors who participate in peace processes are able to secure provisions aimed at protecting civil society itself.

With the goal of filling this gap in the literature on peace processes, Risa Kitagawa, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Northeastern University, and Sam R. Bell collected data on the level and nature of civil society participation in peace processes for 1,868 internal armed conflicts from 1990-2013.

In the third session of the Human Capital Initiative Fall 2022 Seminar Series on November 9, Kitagawa presented their findings answering the question of if—and under what conditions—having a seat at the negotiation table leads to improved post-conflict rights for civil society actors themselves.

In her presentation, Kitagawa noted that a common assumption in the existing literature is that civil society actors are altruists who lobby solely for principled outcomes such as victim rights or governmental accountability. However, her research indicates that in practice, civil society actors such as NGOs also engage in strategic resource-maximizing behavior, and may have incentives to expend resources on securing post-conflict environments that are favorable for their own survival. In other words, when civil society actors participate in peace negotiations, they are not only looking to help people, but are also looking to preserve themselves.

Self-preservation is a pressing interest for civil society, as government officials driving peace negotiations may feel threatened by civil society actors as they sometimes supply resources to the opposition, spur protests and shape how conflict is covered by the media. Thus, officials may feel compelled to use administrative tools such as treaties and legislation to restrict their power and influence.

Kitagawa and Bell put forth a two-part argument, drawing on analysis of the database of internal armed conflicts. First, they demonstrate that formal participation by civil society in peace negotiations correlates with formal commitments on the post-conflict rights of civil society. Second, they argue that the relationship between participation and commitment is strongest in places with moderate levels of pre-conflict restrictions, meaning that civil society actors must stand to gain from additional freedom to dedicate effort to lobbying for it.

The analysis the researchers conducted to inform their argument involved hand-coding conflicts listed in the University of Edinburgh’s Peace Agreements Database (PA-X) to identify civil society actors listed as third-party participants in peace agreements from the past two decades. The researchers also identified civil society participants not listed in the database through secondary sources on the respective conflicts and verified their findings by looking at digitized versions of the original peace agreement documents.

Next, the researchers categorized civil society participants by policy focus and mode of participation in the peace agreement. For policy focus, they turned to each group’s mandate or mission statement to code them as either a human rights group, women’s rights group, international religion-based group, local institution of faith, labor organization or other civic group. For mode of participation, they considered whether groups served as signatories, guarantors, witnesses, or general participants in the peace agreements.

Of the nearly 2,000 peace agreements considered, Kitagawa and Bell discovered that only nine percent had civil society participation, and only six percent listed civil society actors as signatories. Of the civil society actors that did participate in formulating agreements, religion-based groups and faith leaders made up approximately half, while development, governance and humanitarian groups comprised approximately a quarter.

Kitagawa cautioned that the relationship between formal participation and protection provisions for civil society is merely a correlation at this stage in the research, and further analysis is needed to test whether additional factors could be influencing the relationship. The researchers also plan to dig deeper into which civil society actors are getting a seat at the negotiation table, whether certain types of actors are more likely to lobby for specific types of provisions and whether the high levels of participation from faith-based actors could subsequently shape public perceptions of the resulting peace agreement. Overall, the study provides a window into an under-studied aspect of conflict resolution and offers novel evidence that can inform future strategies to secure increased protections for civil society—a hallmark of democracy—after periods of armed conflict.

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