Identifying Pathways to Peace : How International Support Can Help Prevent Conflict Recurrence

This article provides new evidence on how the international community can effectively foster peace after civil war. It adopts a disaggregated, yet comprehensive view on international peacebuilding efforts, expanding the current literature’s narrow focus on peacekeeping or aggregated aid flows. We distinguish five areas of peacebuilding support (peacekeeping, non-military security support, support for politics and governance, for socio-economic development and for societal conflict transformation) and analyse which types or combinations are particularly effective and if this varies between different country contexts. Applying configurational analysis (QCA) to all 36 peace episodes after civil wars between 1990-2014, we find that 1) peacekeeping is only one important component of effective post-conflict support, 2) the largest share of peaceful cases is explained by support for politics and governance, 3) only combined international efforts across all types of support can address difficult contexts and 4) countries neglected by the international community are prone to experience conflict recurrence. The insights gained by the QCA are complemented with three illustrative case studies, based on 90 qualitative interviews. This article provides new insights on how different types of post-conflict engagement can increase a country’s chance for building peace after civil war. It thereby contributes to the academic debate on the effectiveness of international peacebuilding and at the same time can help inform policy makers engaged in post-conflict situations