CIVIL WAR RESOLUTION DATA SET CODEBOOK
Barbara Walter, University of California - San Diego
Mail Code 0519
La Jolla, CA 92093(858) 822-0775
bfwalter@ucsd.edu
This data set includes all 72 civil wars initiated between 1940 and 1992. These cases
were selected based on the coding criteria proposed by the University of Michigan’s
Correlates of War (COW) project. To be included as a civil war a conflict had to (1)occur within a generally recognized state, (2) produce at least one thousand deaths per
year1, (3) involve the national government as an active participant2, and (4) experience
effective resistance from both the rebels and the government.3
Variables were coded using multiple sources, the most common of which were Keesing’s
Contemporary Archives, the CIA World Factbook, The International Review of Peace
Initiatives: Accord, SIPRI Yearbooks, Ruth R. Sivard’s World Military and Social
Expenditures; Guy Arnold’s Wars in the Third World Since 1945, The Central
Intelligence Agency’s, World Factbook; Patrick Brogan, The Fighting Never Stopped: A
Comprehensive Guide to World Conflict Since 1945, Hugh Miall, The Peacemakers:
Peaceful Settlement of Disputes since 1945; the United Nations Department of PublicInformation, and the Economist Intelligence Unit. In addition, the coding of each variable
was checked against multiple historical accounts. When existing literature was unclear or
specific information was unavailable, country experts were consulted.
For a more detailed account of the methods used to code each of the following variables
as well as a bibliography see Walter, Barbara. Committing to Peace: The Successful
Settlement of Civil Wars. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
1

This includes civilian as well as military deaths.
This rule was relaxed in those cases where no national government existed at the time war broke out, as
was the case in Angola in 1975 after the Portuguese withdrew from its colonies, and Algeria in 1962 afterthat country gained independence from France.
3
Two modifications were made to the list of civil wars recorded in the Correlates of War dataset. First,
COW codes a civil war as having terminated once the number of deaths per year falls below 1,000 in any
twelve-month period. If fighting resumed on the thirteenth month and produced a thousand war deaths in
the next twelve-month period, COW coded this as a new civil war. The civil war in Laos, for example,
experienced a nine-month lull in the fighting between June 1962 and March 1963, dropping the number ofpeople killed below 1,000. When fighting resumed in 1963, COW recorded this as a new and separate civil
war. I did not continue this coding practice in order to avoid biasing the data with multiple observations oflong-standing stop-and-go wars. Instead, the Civil War Resolution Dataset records recurrent civil wars
(such as the war in Laos) as a single, continuous case. Six out of the seventy-two civil wars were coded
this way (China, Colombia, Laos, Guatemala, Angola, and Liberia). Second, COW coded Nigeria as
experiencing a civil war between 1980 and 1981. I could find no information on this conflict in any of thegeneral reference books on civil wars, and only an occasional mention of it in detailed histories on Nigeria.
This made it impossible to obtain sufficient information for coding, and was the reason I did not include
this case in the analysis.
2

________________________________________________________________________PEACEPROCESS: A single categorical variable that included four outcomes: nonegotiation, active formal negotiation, a signed bargain, and a successfully implemented
settlement. Detailed descriptions of how each of these categories was coded are as
follows:
No Negotiation versus a Formal Attempt to Negotiate
Civil wars were first distinguished based on whether combatants werewilling to initiate formal negotiations to end their war. A war was coded
as having experienced negotiations if three criteria were met: (1) theleaders or representatives of each of the main fighting factions met in faceto-face talks, (2) these individuals were willing to discuss both a ceasefire
and a political solution to the war, and (3) their respective factions had thecapabilities to continue the war if talks broke down.4
I chose these three criteria in order to distinguish real negotiations
designed to end a war and rebuild a country from the many negotiations
that often occur during civil wars but have little to do with seeking asolution to a conflict. The first criterion ensures that leaders themselves
were interested in peace and were willing to publicly pursue such an end.
The second criterion eliminates meetings where no substantive issues werediscussed, where delegates refused to talk to each other, or were onlyinterested in discussing the terms of a ceasefire. The third criterion
separates negotiations that were real attempts to cooperate between
relative equals who still had the strength to return to war, from one-sided
talks designed to dictate the terms of surrender. These latter negotiations
are more aptly classified as capitulations or surrenders. Wars that did notmeet these requirements were coded as having experienced “nonegotiation”.
Signed Bargain
A third category was constructed to determine under what conditions civil
war combatants are willing to reach and sign a mutually-agreeablebargain. A case was coded as having reached a “signed bargain” if two
criteria were met. First, the combatants were able to agree on acomprehensive peace plan that included a political as well as a military
solution to the conflict. The Riyahd agreement signed in October 1976
between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Lebanese
government, for example, was not coded as a signed bargain since it dealt
only with the military aspects of the civil war and made no reference to the4

Data on negotiation attempts were obtained from Keesing’s Contemporary Archives, Arnold (1995),
Goldstein, 1992; Miall, 1992, Brogan, 1990 and individual case histories.

political and religious issues that incited the war. Similarly, signed
agreements that only included terms for a ceasefire (even if combatants
were willing to discuss larger political issues during negotiations) were notincluded since these were intended only as temporary measures to stop thefighting and not serious attempts to resolve the underlying differences that
had ignited the war. The fourteen-point ceasefire agreement signed
between King Hussein of Jordan and the PLO in September 1970 is an
example of a treaty not included in this category because it failed toaddress any of the political issues that instigated the war. Finally, treatiesthat only mandated the withdrawal of foreign troops, or offered amnesty
for soldiers were also not coded as signed bargains since their objective
was to allow foreign states to exit gracefully, or present a coup de grace tolosing parties. In this way, I distinguished comprehensive peace
settlements designed to end a war from treaties that offered no long-term
solution to the conflict. Not all signed treaties, therefore, that might bereferred to as “peace agreements,” “peace plans,” or “peace accords” inhistorical accounts of a war were coded as such.
Second, a peace treaty had to be signed by all combatants actively fighting
a war not just a subset of actors.5 If one of the main warring factions
refused to sign a treaty or was prevented from signing by other actors, thistreaty could not be considered a genuine step toward peace and it was notrecognized as a signed bargain. The settlement signed between Rhodesian
President Ian Smith and Bishop Abel Muzorewa in 1978, for example,
ushered in the country’s first black-led government but excluded thePatriotic Front, the main rebel faction, from the plan. This was not coded
as a signed bargain. Similarly, the 1973 peace agreement signed between
the North Vietnamese and the United States was also not coded this way
because it excluded both the South Vietnamese Government and the
National Liberation Front from the talks.6
Successfully Implemented Settlement
Finally, a civil war was coded as ending in “a successfully implemented
settlement” if the signed bargain ended violence for at least five years, andif the combatants made good faith efforts to execute the terms of theagreement during this time. A five-year time frame is the standard
measure of treaty success used in the literature. If a formal peace treaty
broke down within five years of being signed, it was considered a failed
attempt and the outcome in these cases was coded on the basis of the5

An exception was made in two cases (Yemen 1970, and Lebanon 1958) where no written agreement
existed. In these rare cases, warring factions bargained for and agreed to very specific political and militaryarrangements without inscribing a written document.
6This treaty also did not meet the first criteria of a “signed bargain” since it was mainly an agreement about
the withdrawal of U.S. forces and not a comprehensive peace plan.

eventual military results. 7 Although peace treaties were signed in China,
Laos, Philippines, Angola, Afghanistan, Chad, Uganda, Somalia, Liberia,
and Rwanda, the terms were either never implemented or only partially
implemented and almost all broke down into renewed civil war within ayear. This five-year cut-off gives combatants a reasonable amount of time
to attempt to implement the terms of their agreement.
A five-year measure, however, does not fully capture the progress
combatants are making towards peace or whether they are willing to takethe hard steps necessary to rebuild the country and bring lasting peace. It
tells us whether the government and rebels were willing to stop fighting,but not whether they were willing to take the much more difficult step ofdisassembling their partisan armies and opening up the government inways dictated by the peace treaty. This is the more difficult type ofcooperation I hope to understand.
In order to distinguish between those cases where the combatants arewilling to implement a wide range of terms from civil wars where they arewilling to stop fighting but nothing more, I added a second criterion forsuccess. This second criterion, whether the combatants made good faithefforts to implement the terms of the settlement, was slightly more
ambiguous to code. There are many civil wars where the combatants
implement the terms long after the scheduled timetable for implementationor never completely implement the terms of settlement. In El Salvador
and Nicaragua, for example, the FMLN and contra forces did not fully
adhere to the demobilization timetable. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge
signed the Paris Peace agreement but then boycotted the 1993 elections
and returned to war leaving the remaining factions implement the treaty.
The minimum requirement necessary to be classified as a “good faitheffort” was the installation of one part of the political agreement (either
the installation of the transitional government or the formation of a newnational government) and at least partial demobilization. In most cases
the combatants either made no attempt to implement any of the terms(China, Laos, Afghanistan, Uganda, Somalia, Liberia) or at best
implemented only parts of the military or political terms, but not both(Philippines, Chad, Rwanda, Angola).
Based on these criteria, thirty five civil wars never experienced any negotiation attempts(49 percent), fourteen civil wars had formal negotiations but the combatants failed toreach an agreement (19 percent), ten reached a signed bargain but were then neverimplemented (14 percent), and thirteen made it all the way through to a successfully
implemented settlement (18 percent). Cases that did not end in successful

7

Violence was considered to have ended if fewer than 1,000 war deaths occurred each year for a period offive consecutive years.

implementation were coded based on highest stage the combatants had attained in thefour-stage peace process.
DURATION: The Duration of war was measured as a continuous variable and ranged
from a low of one week (.25 months) to a high of 396 months. (Source: Correlates of
War Data Set through 1992, and updated through December 1999 using sources listed
above.)
BD1000: The number of war-related deaths was measured as a continuous variable that
ranged from a low of one thousand deaths in Indonesia in 1953 to a high of more than amillion and a quarter deaths during the Chinese civil war. 8 (Source: Correlates of War
Data Set through 1992, and updated through December 1999 using sources listed above.)
Dependable information on the number of deaths after 1992 could not be found for sevenwars (Burma, Colombia, Georgia, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Turkey). In thesecases, I used an average of the deaths recorded by the Correlates of War throughDecember 1992 to estimate the number of deaths that were likely to have occurred
thereafter.
________________________________________________________________________STALDUM: A dummy variable indicating whether a military stalemate existed at any
point during a war. To determine whether a military stalemate existed, I sifted throughreports and historical accounts of each of the wars noting each time the battlefieldsituation was described as “stalemated” or at an “impasse”. Although this measure issomewhat subjective, in most cases a consensus did exist among historians as to whether
the fighting had ground to a halt. One source, for example, described the militarysituation in Paraguay this way: “Until the beginning of April (1947) the position waslargely one of stalemate, with the insurgents holding the north of Paraguay and theGovernment retaining control in Asuncion and the south.”9
A balance of power was coded in the following manner:
1 =
0 =

8

the presence of a military stalemate at any time during the war
no military stalemate

It should be emphasized that accurate counts of war-related deaths are notoriously difficult to obtain.
Many deaths go unreported, while others are either under or over-reported for strategic reasons. For adetailed discussion of how the COW project attempted to correct this problem, see Small and Singer pp.
70-77.
9
Keesing’s Contemporary Archives, Vol. 6. June 28, 1947 - June 30, 1948. P. 8841.

REGIMETY: An overall democracy-autocracy scale commonly used in the literature.10
It assigns two scores (0-10) to every country: one based on a government’s autocratic
features, and one based on its democratic features.11 The incumbent government’s
autocracy score is then subtracted from its democracy score to produce a net democracy
number that ranges in value from very autocratic (-10) to very democratic (+10). Costa
Rica received the highest net democracy score of plus ten during its 1948 war, while Iranreceived the lowest possible democracy score of minus ten during its 1978-1979 war.
Most cases fell somewhere in between with an average score of 2.3. (Source: Policy III
Data Set)
XCONST: A second measure of democracy was used to isolate the effect of executive
constraints on a leader’s decision to negotiate or fight. The coding for executive
constraints was based on the degree of operational independence the chief executive of acountry enjoyed during the civil war and was also taken from the POLITY III dataset:12
1 = unlimited authority
2 = intermediate category
3 = slight to moderate limitations
4 = intermediate category
5 = substantial limitations
6 = intermediate category
7 = executive parity or subordination
A leader was classified as having “unlimited authority” if he or she could easily ignore
constitutional restrictions on decision making, revise or suspend the constitution, if nolegislative assembly existed or could be called and dismissed at the executive’s whim, if
the legislature could not initiate legislation or veto or suspend acts made by the executive,
if the executive could appoint and remove a majority of members of any accountability
group at will, and if he or she repeatedly ruled by decree.13
ETHNIC: A dummy variable indicating whether a clear ethnic division existed between
the combatants. If the combatants broke down along ethnic lines, or that faction defined
itself as a separate ethnic group, its war was coded as an ethnic civil war. All other wars
10

See for example, David L. Rousseau, Christopher Gelpi, Dan Reiter, and Paul K. Huth, “Assessing the
Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace, 1918-1988, American Political Science Review, Vol., 90,(September 1996), pp. 512-533; and Kenneth A. Schultz, “Do Democratic Institutions Constrain or Inform?
Contrasting Two Institutional Perspectives on Democracy and War,” International Organization. Vol. 53,
No. 2 (Spring 1999) pp. 233-266.
11
If there were a number of regime changes during the war, the case was coded based on the mostdemocratic year, assuming that this would have been the moment at which combatants were most likely tosettle.
12
If the amount of constraints changed during the war, I recorded the highest level of constraints. I once
again assumed that a leader was most likely to negotiate a settlement at this point in the war.
13
For a more detailed description of the coding criteria see the Polity II codebook (limited revised edition,
December 1997).

were coded as non-ethnic. The civil war between the Ibos and the Nigerian government(composed mostly of individuals from the Hausa and Yoruba tribes), the civil wars
between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Burundi and Rwanda, and Iraq’s war against theKurds are examples of ethnic civil wars. The civil war between the Communists and the
Greek government, the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang, and theConservatives and Liberals in Colombia are clear examples of non-ethnic civil wars.14
Wars were coded in the following manner:
0 =1 =non-ethnic civil war
ethnic civil war

TOTALGOALS: If the rebels initiated the war to obtain anything less than total control
over the government (i.e., political reform, regional autonomy, or territorial secession),
the war was coded as involving non-total goals.15 These conflicts were expected to havea higher rate of negotiated settlement than those fought in pursuit of more absolute goals
since the rebels did not outwardly aim to eliminate their enemy. The Sandinistas demandfor political reform in Nicaragua in 1978, and the JVP’s demand that all Indian troops bewithdrawn from Sri Lanka in the late 1980’s are examples of civil wars fought for nontotal aims. All other wars were coded as having “total goals.” 16 Mao Tse-tung’s
communist revolution in China, Greece’s revolution in the 1940s, and Uganda’s civil war
where the rebels aimed to overthrow President Obote’s government are examples of total
conflicts.
A word of justification is in order for why I selected the stated goals of the rebels as theprimary basis for coding war aims. One could argue that the critical issue for divisibility
is not the goals the rebels choose to pursue, but how these goals are perceived by thegovernment under attack. If incumbent elites believe that democratic reform will remove
them from power, they will behave as if this were a total goal regardless of how I code it.
This is especially likely in cases where the rebels are aiming for majority rule and thegovernment in power has only minority support. While this is a valid concern, I resisted
coding goals this way for two reasons. First, in all but the most extreme cases (such as
Zimbabwe where the white minority government represented only 3 percent of the14

Some cases, however, were difficult to classify since combatants frequently broke down along ethniclines even if ethnic identity did not appear to be a salient issue of the war. Moreover, ethnic differences arealmost always tied to broader political or economic grievances. The Angolan rebels, for example, drew
their main support from the Ovimbundu ethnic group but defined themselves as fiercely anti-Communist, atleast in the early stages of the war. Likewise, the civil war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 was fought
between groups who many observers claim exhibited no clear ethnic differences. Although I was cautious
not to overplay the ethnic component in any given case, Angola and Bosnia were both classified as ethnic
civil wars since they fit the coding criteria described above.
15
Cases were coded based on the stated aims of the rebels at the beginning of the conflict rather than thestated goals of the government since it is the rebels who almost always initiate a war and are therefore
likely to define its parameters.
16
I relied on an historical consensus rather than an operational criteria for this coding. See individual casesources in the appendix.

population), the incumbent government could still compete for political power and have areasonable chance for success even if political reform deposed them in the short-term.
This is clearly not a situation where one side aimed to eradicate the other even if it was an
outcome the incumbent government would have preferred to avoid. Second, it is far
more difficult to reliably assess and code “perceptions” than it is to code statements madeby rebel groups on what they aim to achieve.
I did, however, make an exception in four cases. Rebels in four of the seventy-two cases(6 percent) aimed for political reform that clearly threatened to throw the ruling party
permanently out of power: in Paraguay, the army demanded elections that promised todepose President Higinio Morinigo, in Zimbabwe, black majority rule would have ended
white dominance in government, in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas demanded the resignationof President Somoza, and in Tajikistan, opposition groups called for the dissolution of theSupreme soviet and the resignation of President Nabiyev. In these cases it is almost
certainly true that the government perceived the rebel aims and total and they were codedthat way.
The extent of rebel goals was coded in the following manner:
0 = Non-total goals
1 = Total goals
TERRITORY: A dummy variable indicating whether a war was fought for territorial or
non-territorial objectives. Wars in which the rebels aimed to secede from the originalterritory or demanded territorial autonomy were coded as “territorial wars”. The
widespread rebellions in Sumatra, Java, and the Moluccans in 1953 over home rule, andsecession movements in Nigeria, Sudan, Congo, Pakistan, and the former Yugoslavia are
examples of territorial wars. If the factions demanded control over the existing
government rather than a share of territory, the conflict was coded as “non-territorial”.
Whether a war was fought for territorial or non-territorial objectives was denotedin the following manner:
0 = non-territorial wars
1 = territorial wars
DIV: I constructed a somewhat rough measure of "divisibility" based on how easy it
would be to divide the population and resources within a given state.17 The logic here isthat in cases where territorial separation has already occurred and does not represent alarge material loss to the government, it should be easier to settle a conflict. Division wasconsidered "easy" if the fighting factions occupied distinct regions of the country and theassets and resources of the country were not concentrated wholly in one region or theother. The war between East and West Pakistan in 1971 and the rebellions in the17Distribution of the population and resources was based on an analysis of CIA maps drawn at the time ofwar.

Indonesian islands in the 1950's were wars where the stakes could have been easily
divided. Divisibility was coded as "moderately difficult" but not impossible if the rebels
were concentrated into a distinct region but that region also possessed importantresources such as oil or minerals that the central government was unlikely to easily
relinquish. The Katanga province’s attempted secession from the Congo in the 1960s is acase where the stakes would have been moderately difficult to divide. Division wasconsidered "difficult" if the populations fighting the war were intermixed throughout thecountry and did not occupy clear regions. Greece, Colombia, Nicaragua, Argentina,
Cambodia and Laos were some of the cases included in this group. Wars where thepopulation and resources was considered easy to divide were expected to be more likely
to end in negotiated settlement than those coded as difficult.
Divisibility was thus coded in the following manner:
1 = Easy
2 = Moderately difficult
3 = Difficult
MEDIATION: A dummy variable indicating whether an intermediary was present
during negotiations in each war.
0 = no mediator during negotiations
1 = mediator
POLPACT: Dummy variable indicating whether a settlement offered the combatants
guaranteed positions in the new government at the level of cabinet or above, or a specificquota of political power in at least one of the main branches of government, that case wascoded as having a “political pact.” Zimbabwe’s Lancaster House Agreement
guaranteeing twenty percent of the seats in the lower house of parliament to minority
whites is an example of such a pact. A settlement that included only provisions for multiparty elections (as was the case in Angola in 1991), extended political participation to alarger share of the population (as was the case in El Salvador in 1992), or mandated
political reforms (as occurred in Nicaragua in 1988), was not coded as having a “politicalpact” even if the resulting political changes were quite revolutionary. In such cases,
warring factions would still not know the exact role they would play in the new
government and their fear of political elimination would not be addressed.
Political pacts were coded in the following manner:
0 = no political pact
1 = political pact

MILPACT: A dummy variable indicating whether a peace settlement stipulated a quotaof power in a new army. Sudan’s 1972 Addis Ababa agreement guaranteed southernrebels fifty percent representation in the southern army. Rebel and government leaders in
Mozambique agreed on a new national army composed of 15,000 FRELIMO soldiers and15,000 RENAMO soldiers. Hutu and Tutsi leaders in Rwanda agreed that governmentand rebel forces would merge equally to create a new 20,000 person Rwandan army.
And Bosnia’s Dayton accord allowed each of the three ethnic groups to maintain theirown armies. In contrast, Cambodia’s 1991 Paris peace agreement only mandated mutual
troop and equipment reductions, and El Salvador’s 1992 peace agreement, while itdemanded expansive military reforms and eliminated many of the government’s
repressive internal security forces, did not guarantee the rebels any place in the newnational military. Sudan, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Bosnia were coded as having a
military pact, Cambodia, and El Salvador were not.
Military pacts were coded in the following manner:
0 = no military pact
1 = the presence of a military pact for the main combatants
TERRPACT: A dummy variable indicating whether a peace agreement included a
provision for some form of regional autonomy, as was the case in Sudan in 1972 andBosnia in 1995, if one or both sides was allowed to continue to administer areas under
their control, as the royalist rebels were allowed to do in Yemen after their 1970
agreement, or if specific self-governing zones were established, as was the case in
Nicaragua in 1990.18 All other cases were coded as including no such guarantee.
Territorial pacts were coded in the following manner:
0 = no territorial pact
1 = the presence of a territorial pact for the main combatants
GUARDUM: A dummy variable indicating the presence of a third party security
guarantee. To be classified as a third-party security guarantee, outside offers had to meet
two criteria.19 First, an outside state or international organization such as the United
Nations or NATO had to step in during negotiations with a verbal or written promise to18

In some cases, factions were allowed to retain control over conquered territory only until elections were
held or a new democratic government was formed, as was the case in the peace agreement negotiatedbetween the Communists and Nationalists in China in 1946. Although these territorial provisions were
only temporary, they were coded as “guarantees” since they offered combatants some certainty during thetransition.
19
Since guarantees had to be offered by a third party, promises of amnesty and protection offered by one
combatant to another were not coded as a “security guarantee.” During 1990 negotiations in Nicaragua, forexample, the Sandinista government offered “to guarantee the personal security and civil rights of all
returning rebels." I did not code this offer as a security guarantee because it did nothing to reassure therebels that they would be protected from exploitation.

verify or enforce post-treaty behavior once a settlement was signed.20 This included
promises “to monitor and verify the extension of state administration throughout thecountry and the process of national recovery; to supervise, control and verify thedisengagement of forces,” “to police the agreement,” “to deter any violators of theagreement,” “to facilitate impartially the implementation of the Agreement; to monitor
and verify the ceasefire, the separation and concentration of forces, their demobilizationand the collection, storage and destruction of weapons,” and “to ensure the overall
security of the country.21 Each one of these statements was taken to mean that theoutside state or organization was willing to act as a go-between as the combatants moved
forward to implement their accords.
It is important to note that this criterion does not include outside forces that are sent withthe specific purpose of physically forcing a ceasefire on combatants who otherwise had
no interest in pursuing peace. There were three cases (Lebanon 1976, Iraq 1991, andTajikistan 1990’s) where outsiders imposed a peace using massive force in a situation ofunresolved conflict. Syria’s 60,000 troops forced a truce on Lebanon’s largely Christianand Muslim combatants and proceeded to occupy the country. The United Nations
forced a temporary truce between the Kurds and the Iraqi government by sending 17,000
troops to protect Kurdish camps against attacks by Saddam Hussein. And in Tajikistan,although no peace treaty was ever signed between the Tajik government and the Islamic
Revival Party, a ceasefire continues to be enforced by 25,000 Russian soldiers. Syria, theUnited Nations, and Russia did bring peace to these three countries, but it was an
imposed and artificial peace. To be coded as a “security guarantee” an outside force had
to be offered in cases where the combatants had already decided to pursue a negotiatedsettlement and then only to help implement the terms the combatants themselves
approved. Not all interventions, therefore, that serve to stop the fighting are by definition
security guarantees.
It is also important to note that this first criterion does not include interventions designed
to establish a secure environment for humanitarian assistance or for the safe departure offoreign nationals and military personnel. The UN and the United States’ involvement in
Somalia, for example, cannot be considered a security guarantee because it was designed
to facilitate the safe delivery of humanitarian aid and not to enforce or verify any agreedupon peace treaty. Similarly, the United Nations role in the Congo in 1960 is also not a
security guarantee since it was primarily sent to ensure the safe withdrawal of Belgian
forces.22
The second criterion was more stringent. In order for an offer to be classified as asecurity guarantee, an outside state or international organization had to follow throughwith its promise and provide the expected services. Because both the government and therebels have time to observe whether the third party arrives and how its forces are
20

This information was collected from specific guarantees written into peace treaties, from written
mandates detailing the extent of outside involvement, and from case histories.
21
These phrases were taken from third party promises made, but not necessarily implemented, in Angola,
Lebanon, Mozambique and Rwanda respectively.
22
There was also no peace to keep here since the combatants never signed a peace settlement.

deployed before they choose to demobilize, cases where a third party failed to arrive or
arrived with a significantly reduced mandate were not coded as security guarantees.
Here, both side would know that no third party existed to help enforce or verify
demobilization, and implementation would be affected according.
In five cases, a third party stepped forward during negotiations to offer help with
implementation but failed to provide the promised assistance. None of these promises
were coded as a “third party security guarantee.” In Chad, the Organization of African
Unity (OAU) promised to send an all-African peacekeeping force comprised of soldiersfrom Guinea, Benin and the Congo to enforce a peace settlement signed in 1979, butneither the OAU nor any member state had the money to bankroll such an operation (afact both combatants understood) and no such force was sent.23 In Rwanda, Boutros
Boutros-Ghali responded to a call for help during negotiations in Arusha in 1993 andpromised that the United Nations would “guarantee the overall security in the county”
during the implementation of the Arusha accords. The UN Security Council, however,
did not authorize a mission for Rwanda until two months after the peace agreement had
been signed, and then sent a force with a substantially reduced mandate and with lessthan half the minimum recommended number of peacekeepers. During 1991 negotiations
in Angola, the United Nations promised “to prevent, verify, and investigate possible
violations” of the Estoril accord but then sent only a few hundred observers who did nothave the authority or the mandate to play anything more than a symbolic role in thetransition. In Nagorno-Karabahk, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in
Europe (OSCE) agreed to commit up to 3,000 troops to police a ceasefire, but events in
Bosnia and Chechnya reduced the willingness of members to participate, and Russia andTurkey, disagreed over the force’s composition and command. This offer was not
mentioned in subsequent negotiations. And Egypt’s pledge during Jordan’s 1970 civil
war to lead "punitive action by other Arab countries to whomever violated theagreement" was also not coded as a security guarantee since President Nasser, thedominant figure in the pan-Arab movement, died the following day. His death undercut
the pledge to organize Arab states and eliminated any credibility the promise might have
had.
There are, of course, problems with attempting to code a security guarantee. Perhaps themost serious is this: by coding “security guarantee” based on whether a third party
follows through with its promise, I ignore the effect an offer of assistance might have in
getting combatants to sign a settlement (even if they do not then implement the terms).
The Rwandan government and Tutsi rebels, for example, signed the Arusha accords inpart because the UN had stepped in during negotiations offering to protect them during
implementation. The fact that the UN failed to follow through with this promise does notmean that the offer played no role in the final outcome of the peace process. While it istrue that unfulfilled promises still affect the peace process (especially combatants’decision to sign bargains), such promises will almost certainly have no effect on
combatants willingness to implement any terms since parties will have ample time toobserve whether the third party arrives as promised. Coding empty promises as security
23

Congo eventually sent 600 soldiers to Chad, but they arrived in the capital five months after the peaceaccord was signed, never left their barracks, and withdrew three months later when violence erupted.

guarantees, therefore, would make it almost impossible to determine the effect trueguarantees would have on final implementation.
A third party security guarantee was coded in the following manner:
0 = No guarantee
1 = A commitment to enforce or verify the terms of demobilization
STRENGTH: A categorical variable indicating the strength of a third party’s
commitment to enforcing or verifying the peace process and its display of force.
“Strength” was a function of three factors. First, was the mandate precisely defined, andwas it known to the combatants signing the peace treaty? This was judged based onwhether the third party guarantee was written down in the terms of the treaty itself or as aformal resolution in the guarantor’s home state or organization. The second criterion
involves the type of mandate offered by the third party. Did the third party offer to senda verification mission assigned to observing and monitoring demobilization, or a morerobust enforcement mission? The final criterion concerned the size of the verification or
enforcement force the third party offered. In this case a minimum threshold of 500
observers was necessary for inclusion as a large verification force, and 5,000 armed
soldiers for inclusion as a large peacekeeping force.24 This led to the following
breakdown of cases:
0 =
1 =
2 =
3 =
4 =
5 =

No security guarantee
Promise to protect but mandate and force not defined.
Willingness to deploy a small verification mission of under 500 observers.
Willingness to send a large verification mission of at least 500 observers.
Willingness to send a small peacekeeping force of under 5,000 armed
soldiers.
Willingness to send a large peacekeeping force of at least 5,000 armed
soldiers.25

If the mandate and commitment was vague and ill defined, the third party guarantee wascoded as the least committed of five possible guarantees. Ethiopian emperor Haile
Selassie’s personal guarantee to the Sudanese rebels that they would not be attacked ifthey signed a peace treaty in 1972 is an example of a weak security guarantee since theemperor did not specify the number of troops he would employ nor did he outline their
mission. All remaining guarantees were classified as either verification missions orpeacekeeping missions. If the intervening soldiers did not possess a mandate to use
force, this mission was classified as a verification mission and this type of guarantee was
24

The primary sources consulted in the coding of this variable were United Nations peacekeeping
Operations (Department of Public Information, United Nations) and individual case histories. For excellent
information on UN peacekeeping missions see http://www.un.org/Depts/DPKO/Missions/miponuh.htm.
25
In this case the mandate did not have to be well-defined in order to classify as a large peacekeeping force.
Such a massive commitment of forces was viewed as an unambiguous and indisputable demonstration on
intent.

deemed weaker than a peacekeeping force. Both verification missions and peacekeeping
missions were then divided based on the size of the force promised. Verification
missions were coded as either small (if less than 500 observers were promised) or large(if more than 500 observers were promised). Peacekeeping missions were classified aseither small (if less than 5,000 troops were committed) or large (if over 5,000 troops werecommitted).