Who and what builds peace in countries facing civil war? This seemingly simple question has spawned decades of scholarship. In this review, I explore the answers offered by two recent books: Governance for Peace by David Cortright, Conor Seyle, and Kristen Wall and Incentivizing Peace by Jaroslav Tir and Johannes Karreth. These books significantly advance our understanding of the determinants of peace in conflict-affected countries. The Cortright, Seyle, and Wall book does so by synthesizing the vast scholarship on the relationship between governance and peace, demonstrating that inclusive, participatory, and accountable governance is most likely to sustain peace within a state. Tir and Karreth argue that existing research has been narrowly focused on the role of UN peacekeepers in civil war termination, overlooking the important conflict prevention role played by other intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Together, these two books reveal the state of knowledge on international intervention in civil war and point to important new research agendas.

In Governance for Peace, Cortright, Seyle, and Wall masterfully synthesize the vast international relations and comparative politics scholarship on the relationship between civil war, governance, and peace within a state. They define peace as the absence of armed conflict (p. 5), although their conceptualization of the factors required to sustain peace—inclusive, participatory, and accountable institutions of state and society—aligns with more maximalist conceptualizations such as positive peace (see Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research, 6, 1969). They argue that governance systems are likely to advance “the prospects for peace” when they are inclusive of the rights of the entire population, participatory in the sense that they provide opportunities for active participation in public and economic life, and accountable to the population via the rule of law, representative political institutions, and inclusive civic engagement (p. 6). This vision of the ideal postconflict state aligns with most conflict prevention and peace-building policy frameworks, demonstrating, at the very least, that these policy approaches are grounded in broad social science research (World Bank Group, “Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict,” 2018).

The strength of Governance for Peace—its clear vision of the dimensions of ideal-type governance grounded in an impressive depth and breadth of scholarly literature—also points to a pervasive weakness in scholarship on war-to-peace transitions. Existing scholarship is largely silent on the different governance trajectories of postconflict countries, including those that lead them back to war (see Susanna P. Campbell, Michael G. Findley, and Kyosuke Kikuta, “An Ontology of Peace: Landscapes of Conflict and Cooperation with Application to Colombia,” International Studies Review, 19, 2017). Even though there is strong evidence that countries transitioning from autocracy to democracy—“anocracies”—are more volatile than pure democracies or autocracies, most scholarship on intervention in civil war largely overlooks the implications of these findings (Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Pathways to War in Democratic Transitions,” International Organization, 63, 2009). Is intervention in conflict-affected countries worth the cost if postconflict countries simply slide back into political and criminal violence, corruption, and exclusion (Rachel Kleinfeld, A Savage Order: How the World's Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security, 2019)?

The questions that Cortright, Seyle, and Wall’s book inevitably raises, then, pertain to the gap between a theoretical Weberian ideal-type of governance and a wide variety of cases in which it does not easily apply. What happens, for example, in postconflict countries that are not able or willing to create inclusive, participatory, and accountable governance? Does a scholarly adoption of this ideal, which also reflects Mann’s vision of a modern state, sideline empirical investigation of actual postwar transitions (Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760, 2012)? If international intervenors, such as the United Nations or World Bank, view success only as the presence of a liberal democracy grounded in the rule of law and a market-based economy, then will countries without these ideal-type institutions be viewed as failures (see Susanna Campbell, David Chandler, and Meera Sabaratnam, eds., A Liberal Peace? The Problems and Practices of Peacebuilding, 2011)? Given that many countries affected by civil war and large-scale political violence followed historical state formation trajectories different from those taken in Europe or North America, are they not also likely to result in different types of governance (see Pierre Englebert and Denis M. Tull, “Postconflict Reconstruction in Africa: Flawed Ideas about Failed States,” International Security, 32, 2008)?

One primary critique of international intervention in civil war is that IGOs, bilateral donors, and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) attempt to transform a war-torn state into a modern state in their own image, ignoring how institutions in the war-torn state actually function (Astri Suhrke, “Reconstruction as Modernization: The ‘Post-Conflict’ Project in Afghanistan,” Third World Quarterly, 28, 2007). Because many intervening organizations are themselves neither inclusive, participatory, nor accountable to the conflict-affected populations, their peace-building efforts may unintentionally entrench, rather than upend, violent, discriminatory governments (Susanna P. Campbell, Global Governance and Local Peace: Accountability and Performance in International Peacebuilding, 2018). The question confronting Cortright, Seyle, and Wall is thus: Are there alternative pathways toward sustainable peace apart from the version of governance they endorse? In spite of almost three decades of research on conflict prevention, peacekeeping, peace-building, and state-building, few comparative studies of actual war-to-peace transitions have emerged to take up this question (Michael Barnett, “Building a Republican Peace: Stabilizing States after War,” International Security, 30, 2006).

Both books under review praise the literature on UN peacekeeping. The peacekeeping literature finds that it reduces the recurrence of civil war (see Barbara F. Walter, Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars, 2002; Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace Operations, 2006; Virginia P. Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work? Shaping Belligerents' Choices after Civil War, 2008) and levels of violence during civil war (Lisa Hultman, Jacob Kathman, and Megan Shannon, “United Nations Peacekeeping and Civilian Protection in Civil War,” American Journal of Political Science, 57, 2013), even if it disagrees on the mechanisms that lead to these violence-reduction outcomes (Lise M. Howard, Power in Peacekeeping, 2019).

Tir and Karreth astutely demonstrate, nonetheless, that peacekeepers are not the only intervening actor with conflict-mitigating potential. They argue that other IGOs can also incentivize warring parties to credibly commit to peace. Of particular interest is their finding that multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank or the African Development Bank, can prevent the escalation of violence by providing a peace dividend that rewards warring parties for not escalating their conflict into civil war. Multilateral development banks may not be mandated to maintain international peace and security, Tir and Karreth argue, but they have the financial leverage necessary to incentivize potential conflict actors to sustain their commitments to peace.

Tir and Karreth’s findings validate the core assumption of conflict-prevention policy frameworks, such as the report of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (1998), that argue that international financial institutions (IFIs) and regional organizations have an important role to play in preventing violent conflict. Multilateral development banks have, nonetheless, been reluctant to embrace a political role in conflict mitigation or postconflict recovery, despite their commitment to increased engagement in fragile and conflict-affected countries (“Eliminating Extreme Poverty Requires Urgent Focus on Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries,” World Bank, 2020). Incentivizing Peace may provide additional empirical support for further strengthening IFIs’ conflict-mitigation potential.

Tir and Karreth’s findings also introduce questions about the conflict-mitigating effects of the rest of the UN system, bilateral donors, INGOs, and private contractors, all of which intervene before, during, and after the outbreak of civil war but have been largely ignored in existing scholarship. Scholarship on international aid, which Cortright, Seyle, and Wall expertly review, has identified a positive relationship between development and conflict reduction but has not investigated the influence of different types of donors on conflict and peace outcomes (M. G. Findley, “Does Foreign Aid Build Peace?” Annual Review of Political Science, 21, 2018). The democratization literature has focused on the crucial role of civil society in ensuring democracy, but few scholars have investigated the role of INGOs in supporting a robust civil society (see Sarah S. Bush, The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion Does Not Confront Dictators, 2015). As Tir and Karreth observe, regional IGOs are likely to matter for peace-related outcomes but have been largely excluded from the analysis of international peacekeeping and peace-building efforts. As Cortright, Seyle, and Wall point out, in addition to the breadth of IGO, INGO, and state-led interventions in war-torn countries, private development and security contractors are also increasingly active but have not been addressed in much of the civil war literature (Deborah D. Avant, “Pragmatic Networks and Transnational Governance of Private Military and Security Services,” International Studies Quarterly, 60, 2016; Abbey Steele and Jacob N. Shapiro, “Subcontracting State-Building,” Small Wars & Insurgencies, 28, 2017).

Given the large number of international and regional actors that intervene in conflict-affected countries and the wide range of factors that affect peace, as described by Cortright, Seyle, and Wall, it is unlikely that conflict- or peace-related outcomes are the result of any single peacekeeping mission, aid donor, IGO, INGO, or private contractor. Furthermore, intervening organizations rarely operate in isolation but instead participate in the same coordination meetings, implement activities in the same locations, interact in the same public and private spaces, establish contracts with one another to co-implement a range of activities, and collaborate and coordinate with the same governmental and nongovernmental actors. How does the heterogeneity of intervening actors, their networks, and their patterns of collective action affect conflict- and peace-related outcomes (see Jessica Braithwaite and Susanna Campbell, “Networks of Influence and Support in Civil War and Peace,” Working Paper, 2020)?

Without capturing the effect of the wide range of intervening actors, how can we understand who or what builds peace in the aftermath of civil war? Without observing the different ways in which this diverse group of intervening actors actually engage with the people, politicians, and nonstate armed groups in conflict-affected countries, how can we identify the causal mechanisms that incentivize cooperative behaviors?

Just as these two books clarify the impressive state of knowledge about international intervention in conflict-affected countries, they also point to important new directions for empirical research on the heterogeneity of actors intervening in these dynamic contexts and the different ways in which countries transition toward peace, in all of its diverse conceptualizations.