Domestic Capabilities for Peaceful Conflict Management

This project focuses on the causes of peace. It seeks to investigate which contexts facilitate the existence of domestic capabilities for peaceful conflict management and why. Capabilities for peaceful conflict management may save many countries from the large human and economic costs of war. Research by the applicant has revealed that particular characteristics of civil-military relations, dialogue traditions and adherence to cultural concepts of nonviolence in some cases have constituted such capabiliti es, like in Madagascar. The project investigates how historical conditions; political system and political culture; rapid economic growth and emerging socio-economic inequalities affect civil-military relations and civil society's behavior in political cr isis situations, and thus the potential for domestic capabilities for peaceful conflict management. It includes 1) a literature study; 2) a comparative study of four cases with high political instability that have managed to avoid armed conflict over long time - Ecuador, Madagascar, Tunisia and Venezuela; 3) a quantitative study of peaceful conflict management and prolonged political crisis; and 4) contrastingly, a study of peacebuilding in a culture of violence, in Haiti. In the comparison of the four ca ses, Alexander George's method of structured, focused comparison will be applied, and the focus will be on civil-military relations and the behavior of civil society in situations of political crisis. The analysis of Haiti will draw on the learnings from the comparative study. The purpose of the Haiti study is to investigate how the absence of domestic capabilities for peaceful conflict management influences the efforts on dialogue and peacebuilding.