The issue of military integration, which concerns who will be involved under what conditions in the integration of a national army, has severe implications. In her book, Securing Peace in Angola and Mozambique, Miranda Melcher argues that, despite its relevance, we know too little about the specifics of military integration processes. Situated in the negotiations and conflict resolution literature, the book claims that peace treaties need to have ‘flexible specificity’ (p. 163) when it comes to matters of military integration. This means that they should either contain specific agreements on these issues, or stipulate mechanisms to reach agreement in the future.
Melcher shows the importance of specificity through a comparative case study of the conflict resolution processes in Angola and Mozambique in the 1990s and early 2000s. She uses a wealth of primary and secondary data, including interviews with key participants and recently declassified UN archives.
The book is structured around these case studies, with a chapter devoted to a review of the literature (chapter 2) and three subsequent chapters studying Angola and Mozambique in parallel as they went through several phases of negotiation and implementation. With this set-up, the book offers a refreshing take by studying peace as a process with various interlocking components, instead of as separate phases. Indeed, the case studies successfully show that the phases of conflict, peace negotiation, and implementation are crucially interconnected and cannot be studied in siloes.
The final chapter (chapter 6) focuses on drawing lessons from these cases, highlighting several important emerging themes. These include the key role of specificity, detailed security provisions, ‘coordinated implementation actors’, as well as the need to ‘prioritiz[e] demobilization and reintegration over comprehensive disarmament’ (p. 140). Importantly, Melcher also shows the relevance of dignity and perceptions of respect as well as procedural equality during the negotiations (pp. 6–7). These factors are illustrated with numerous fascinating anecdotes. For example, she describes how the Italian government funded RENAMO negotiators to buy Italian suits and shoes to enhance the perception of equality with the government negotiators (p. 154).
Indeed, one of the strengths of Securing Peace is the detailed unravelling of the peace processes in Angola and Mozambique. The book shines in the specificity of its arguments and the very concrete recommendations and ideas on how peace agreements can be made more likely to succeed. One of these recommendations is that peace treaties need to be specific in how they address security and maintain realistic timelines as they provide for demobilisation and reintegration. These aspects make the book a valuable contribution to the conflict resolution literature, as well as to the historical literature on the conflicts in Angola and Mozambique.
These strengths aside, there are at least two critiques worth mentioning.
First, I am not convinced that the empirical evidence really shows that ‘specificity’ in peace agreements is as important as the author claims. The case study chapters show that specificity did matter, but also demonstrate that the relative strength of the conflict parties was far more relevant. In Mozambique, where the initial peace agreement saw greater success, the government was never seriously threatened by RENAMO. By contrast, the key reason the peace accords failed in Angola seems to be less about a lack of specificity and more about the relative strength of UNITA. When UNITA was effectively defeated and its leader had died, the 2002 Luena Memorandum, which ended the civil war, essentially imposed a victor's peace on the rebel group. While Melcher does recognise the relevance of power dynamics in passing, she maintains that specificity had the greatest impact. By contrast, I would argue that the cases imply that specificity is indeed relevant, but only after the more critical precondition of an overall power imbalance has been established.
The second point of critique is that the book could have better justified its case selection and reflected more thoroughly on its potential for generalisability. The initial selection of Angola and Mozambique from the broader universe of cases lacks transparency (p. 8), and there is little discussion of how Mozambique and Angola compare to other civil wars. Further, the two case studies are fairly dated. Given that the book is written for a 2024 audience, it is disappointing that Melcher does not really address how the transformations in civil wars over the past decades impact the applicability of the ‘lessons learned’ from two peace processes in the 1990s.
Overall, I would certainly recommend anyone interested in peace and conflict studies to read this book, which is full of fascinating detail and a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of conflict resolution, peace negotiations, and the role of micro-level factors in peace processes.
