The Imperative to Explore the Impact of Disarmament on Peacemaking Efforts and Conflict Recurrence

Levin Jamie () and Miodownik Dan
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Levin Jamie: The Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Alfred Davis Building Mount Scopus, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel
Miodownik Dan: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Faculty of Social Sciences, Political Science, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel

Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, 2016, vol. 22, issue 4, 347-356

Abstract: There is today a well-established consensus that belligerents must be disarmed in order to reconstruct shattered states and establish a robust and durable peace in the wake of internal armed conflict. Indeed, nearly every UN peacekeeping intervention since the end of the Cold War has included disarmament provisions in its mandate. Disarmament is guided by the arrestingly simple premise that weapons cause conflict and, therefore, must be eradicated for a civil conflict to end. If the means by which combatants fight are eliminated, it is thought, actors will have little choice but to commit to peace. Disarmament is, therefore, considered a necessary condition for establishing the lasting conditions for peace. To date, however, no systematic quantitative analysis has been undertaken of the practice of disarmament and the causal mechanisms remain underspecified. This paper is a preliminary attempt to fill that gap. In it we outline a series of hypotheses with which to run future statistical analyses on the effects of disarmament programs. The success of negotiations and the durability of peace are, perhaps, the single most salient issues concerning those engaged in conflict termination efforts. We therefore focus the bulk of this paper on a review of the supposed effects of disarmament on negotiating outcomes and war recurrence.

Keywords: disarmament; demobilization; conflict resolution; peace agreements (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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DOI: 10.1515/peps-2016-0032

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