The civil wars of the 1990s and early 2000s have spawned a new genre of scholarship that analyzes the causes and manifestations of conflict, the patterns of termination, and the challenges of postwar reconciliation. These two books each contribute to this scholarship, albeit in starkly different ways, and together they underscore that no single theoretical paradigm or research method can solve the many puzzles that contemporary civil wars pose for political scientists.

Anthony Oberschall's book is a political sociology of divided societies—with principal case studies of Bosnia, Israel and Palestine, and Northern Ireland—that seeks to address the quintessential question of ethnic conflict studies, namely, “What determines whether the relations between these groups will be hostile rather than cooperative?” (p. 1). Oberschall analyzes the dynamics of violent conflict and evaluates their implications for building peace efforts. Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hodie focus their attention on the aftermath of violent conflict, analyzing the conditions under which power-sharing institutions and agreements lead to durable settlements of war. These books apply very different methods and research designs to their respective topics. While framed around broad questions of ethnic conflict, approaches to counterinsurgency, and the challenges of postconflict reconciliation, Oberschall's book centers on careful analysis of three cases, employing descriptive-analytic methods and qualitative field research. Hartsell and Hodie, in contrast, work with aggregate data on civil wars (drawn from the Correlates of War project) from 1945 to 1999 (n = 108) and investigate through quantitative analysis the extent to which those that end in negotiated settlements (n = 55) institutionalize power-sharing outcomes and whether these outcomes are in fact durable over time. This large-n analysis is augmented by brief case studies of civil wars in Angola and the Philippines.

The principal benefit of Conflict and Peace Building in Divided Societies is its careful attention to a range of large issues—the definition of ethnic conflict, the relationships between group belonging and religion, the connections between ethnic mobilization and political economy, the legacies of colonialism, the evolution of collective myths, and the generation of group hostilities that, in the worst cases, cause mass violence and civil war. Oberschall argues that there exists a “conflict and conciliation dynamic” whereby the escalation and evolution of deadly ethnic conflict itself creates conditions that make settlement and “peace building” elusive. As he asserts, “What at the start was a conflict over core issues becomes entwined during the peace process with further issues: derivative issues, procedures, recognition, security, implementation, and legitimation” (p. 31). One example is the “coercion paradox”—while “coercion [by the state] is intended to suppress opposition … it also stimulates more of it (p. 32).

In general, Oberschall views deadly ethnic conflict as a complex, self-reinforcing feedback loop. This approach is related to other research that closely ties conflict dynamics with postsettlement prospects for peace (seen in John Darby's edited volume, Post-Settlement Violence, 2007). Unfortunately, however, Oberschall fails to provide a sufficiently structured analysis of the relation between his theory and his case-based findings. Instead, he takes a distracting detour into the literature on counterinsurgency and discusses tangential topics, such as the U.S. approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and the nature of terrorism and torture in a post-1948 era of universal human rights. And his chapter on humanitarian intervention (quizzically termed “peace intervention,” which is at odds with current scholarly and policy-oriented nomenclature), while interesting, seems disconnected from the book's principal research question, and ends with an uncertain, somewhat confusing conclusion about the future of the United Nations and the use of force in pursuing peace.

Oberschall's case studies insightfully discuss the complexities of each case and the evolution of the conflict through war and haltingly toward peace in Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and Israel-Palestine. But the reader is too often left to make his and her own inferences about precisely how the claims about conflict and conciliation laid out in the book's theory chapters actually play out in these cases. In a final chapter, Obserschall evaluates the elements of postconflict peace building and the prospects for enduring peace. He usefully concludes that what is “feasible and acceptable” to the parties—often security or ethnic identity guarantees—is often at odds with the need to reunify badly divided societies in ways that cross-cuts identity lines. In the end, however, Conflict and Peace Building reads more like a collection of loosely connected essays on disparate themes than a strongly argued and well-integrated scholarly analysis. This is unfortunate, because Oberschall has much insight to share.

Crafting Peace, on the other hand, centers on delineating and testing an unambiguous theoretical hypothesis: “We contend that the most extensively institutionalized settlements—in other words, those that call for the construction of a variety of power-sharing and power-divided institutions across the four dimensions of state power [political, military, economic, and territorial]—should have the greatest potential to produce a stable peace” (p. 15). Behind this argument is the idea that civil wars are strategic bargaining situations and that the principal challenge of civil war termination is overcoming internal dilemmas of security and good faith. With this thesis in mind, the edited volume carefully analyzes patterns of settlement and their duration in civil wars, demonstrating that that the aggregate number of power-sharing and power-dividing institutions specified in a settlement is the most consistent predictor of postwar stability.

Institutional approaches to civil war settlement have tended to focus primarily on the question of postwar power sharing and the mostly political incentives that may or may not lead to ongoing, iterated bargaining among the protagonists. Debates among scholars employing this perspective principally center around the relative advantages of consociational formulae versus more integrative or cross-cutting solutions of the kind that Oberschall finds most compelling (for an overview, see Philip Roeder and Donald Rothchild, eds., Sustainable Peace, 2005). Hartzell and Hodie take these debates a step further, and engagingly expand the definition of power sharing into the military and economic dimensions, including “power-dividing” institutional arrangements (typically, territorial autonomy or decentralization; however, a precise differentiation of the differences between power sharing and power dividing is not provided in the book).

Carefully constructed hypotheses are tested to determine the extent to which protagonists in wars have adopted in settlement bargains these various elements of power sharing; and by means of a quantitative analysis of 49 cases, the authors correlate the extent to which various independent variables (nature of conflict, duration of conflict, stakes of conflict, intensity, conflict environment, and the presence of peacekeeping troops) affects the content of settlements. Like others, they find that the duration of conflict is a key predictor of the likelihood of power outcomes and that the presence of international peacekeepers helps to create the conditions under which parties will agree to negotiated, power-sharing outcomes in civil war.

They then turn their attention to the question of institutionalization and the durability of agreements, finding that the development of institutions that share power or divide territorial control “enhance the prospects for an enduring peace among adversaries” (p. 65). Moreover, they find that in successful or durable settlement pacts, the protagonists have indicated to another “an interest in peace by virtue of their willingness to forgo priorities that seemed non-negotiable at the initiation of hostilities” (p. 144). In their view, power sharing, and not either military victory or partition, best sets the stage for durable peace after civil wars.

While overall both the research design and the findings of Crafting Peace are impressive, there are reasons to be skeptical about the wholesale adoption of its findings and its policy recommendations. First, Hartzell and Hodie do not disaggregate the post–World War II data set into Cold War and post–Cold War periods, and thus the effects of seismic shifts in the international system are not well accounted for. Indeed, in their own analysis, the proportion of negotiated settlements, as opposed to other war termination outcomes, changed dramatically after 1989 (more settlements, fewer victories), and the nature of international mediation—a variable they discard, unfortunately—changed dramatically during this period. Thus, there may well be problems with their inferences apropos the present climate. Second, the coding of some variables as dichotomous (ethnic or ideological; presence or absence of peacekeepers) oversimplifies reality and may well miss the complexity of the conflict contexts (in the case of the first set of variables) or the much more highly contingent nature of outcomes (in the case of peacekeeping). Finally, in evaluating the durability of agreements, there is no robust measure in the analysis beyond the absence of violence to account for the durability of peace; thus, conflicts that are “frozen” or susceptible to crises and political violence (like Lebanon) are not well explained in this account.

In sum, much remains to be done in constructing a more integrated theory of contemporary civil wars. The political sociological perspective gets at the contingencies of conflict dynamics, but it does not provide sufficiently integrative, cross-national comparative findings. The institutionalist approach is persuasive that power sharing is essential for durable war termination, but it does not do well in providing enough contingency for answering critical questions concerning “under what conditions.” Thus, political science has a long way to go before any one perspective or methodology can explain coherently the contemporary challenges of civil war.