Countries emerging from civil war face substantial challenges in establishing lasting peace after periods of intense violence. If the root causes of conflict are not effectively addressed, civil wars often reignite, leading to devastating consequences. Academic research has traditionally treated armed actors as the decisive agents in civil war peace processes. However, conflict resolution practitioners from major NGOs frequently emphasize the role of unarmed, organized actors in building sustainable peace and cases such as Colombia in 2016 demonstrate the potential of civil resistance movements to advance peace processes.
This disconnect between scholarship and practice has ultimately constrained our ability to explain and prevent the growing recurrence of civil wars. At present, we do not know how, and to what extent civil resistance movements help initiate peace negotiations, shape comprehensive peace agreements, and contribute to durable peace. Indeed, there is also concerning evidence that these movements can complicate conflict resolution under some circumstances.
CIV-PEACE re-conceptualizes civil resistance movements as central actors in civil war peace processes through a novel interdisciplinary framework. It will do so as follows:
• Developing a set of practitioner-based hypotheses through interviews with 100 wartime activists and negotiators from Colombia and Sudan, grounding my theory and mechanisms in lived experience.
• Creating a database to track variations on civil resistance movements’ tactics and characteristics in 143 conflicts worldwide between 1990 and 2021.
• Using the database to analyse refined hypotheses testing the effect of movements’ tactics, organizational characteristics on core peace process outcomes.
CIV-PEACE transforms the scientific scholarship on peace processes by revealing how civil resistance movements achieve their core goals and laying the groundwork for broader insights into their role in conflict resolution.