Research & Initiatives
Research Clusters
Civil War Dynamics
Understanding the causes, processes, and recurrence of conflict and civil wars.
Transitional Societies
Understanding peace, negotiation, demobilization and reintegration.
Peace Durability
Understanding democracy, power-sharing, and federalism in post-conflict societies.
Ongoing Projects
SSHRC-Insight Grant (2021-2026)
Return to Civil War: Insurgent Groups and the Decision to Abandon Peace
Toward understanding the critical factors that ensure durable peace
After declining steadily throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the prevalence of civil war is once again on the rise. Unlike past conflicts, however, most of today's civil wars are recurrent conflicts—not new ones. Why has the incidence of conflict recurrence increased? Why do some peace settlements last, while others fail?
This research programme addresses these critical questions by studying insurgent organizations’ evolution during wartime and the post-war period. It aims to explain why some former combatants become integrated into society’s political, economic, and social sectors, while others remain precluded from participation in the post-war state. It identifies three sets of factors—state interventions, insurgent organizational structures, and wartime legacies—as critical to war-to-peace transitions, as well as the transformation of insurgent political, social, and economic institutions into the post-war period.
Principal investigators: Jacques Bertrand and Noel Anderson