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Monica Toft on Civil Wars

Civil wars are the most common form of large-scale organized violence, accounting for nine of ten conflicts and 17-to-33 million deaths since 1940. Monica Duffy Toft, associate professor of public policy and assistant director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard, focuses on civil wars and their resolution and challenges the commonly-accepted idea that negotiated settlements are the best way to end civil wars.

Q: Why is civil war such a constant historically and globally? How do religious and ethnic factors contribute to the perpetuation of civil war?

Toft: Well, in a sense, civil wars aren't really a constant because the international system has changed over time. If you think back to the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, there were a lot of inter-religious wars going on, but we wouldn't think of them as civil wars in the sense that we think of today. It wasn't until the 19th century, when we really started to see the emergence of states, and groups within states started wanting to separate themselves, that modern conceptions of civil wars emerged. Civil wars really took off after World War I when you had Woodrow Wilson advocating self determination for national and ethnic groups. Then, after the end of World War II, when the whole notion of imperial empires fell out of favor, we started seeing what we have come to think of in the modern sense of civil wars.

Q: Some civil wars are followed by healthy reconstruction and political liberalization, while others are followed by years of destruction, corruption, mass abuse of citizenry and autocratic rule. What explains the variation?

Toft: I can tell you some of the factors that I've been looking into in my research that explain the variation. One of the key factors is how a civil war ends. If you look at the different ways a civil war can end, there's military victory, negotiated settlements - that's where the two parties agree to end the war and form a new government - and then stalemates and ceasefires.

Historically speaking, military victories are by far the most common way that most civil wars end, and this seems in most cases to lead to a definitive resolution. But if you look at the policy-making community, they tend to really focus in on negotiated settlements. It's a desirable end point. The problem is that negotiated settlements seem to abort the conflict and seem to abort the balance of power. They don't seem to be as stable a resolution as military victories. So one of the things I'm looking at is, what is it about the military victories that are more stable that we can learn from so that we could possibly have more stable peaces following civil wars? I think it has something to do with the institutions and how institutions are fashioned following civil wars.

Q: Drawing on that, you argue that both negotiated settlements and military victories contain the key elements of a durable peace, but that neither one by itself is sufficient to achieve this important aim. Why is this?

Toft: What negotiated settlements are really good at are providing for mutual benefits so that the parties that sign the agreement are going to have a say in how the government is administered. There's a lot of emphasis placed on the executive branch, the judiciary, and those sorts of institutions, but what I'm finding is that there isn't as much stress put on the security forces. So you hear a lot about demobilization and demilitarization following civil wars, but we don't see a focus on rebuilding the security forces and professionalizing them. So what happens with a negotiated settlement five years out is that there's an election, a party wins, and they start implementing their policies. But, as time goes on, a minority group or a not-strong majority group starts to feel resentful, and because you don't have a professional military structure in place, you start seeing bidding by elites to curry favor with military officers and soldiers and it ends up leading to a breakdown which is why you get greater instability.

With military victory, regardless of whether the rebels or the insurgents win or the government wins, they just defeated another side, so the military tends to be a pretty robust institution. Now, in those instances, there are problems with democratization, governance, and those sorts of issues, and I'm looking into that as well, but it seems to me that you have to have both in order to administer benefits within the society. The state has to have the ability to have a monopoly over the use of force to ensure that that state stays intact and that you don't have this buying-off of the military and the professional security forces within that state.

Q: In terms of a current situation of concern, what policy prescriptions do you believe could help avoid civil war in Iraq?

Toft: Well, Iraq is a tough case. At this point, from my research, I fear it may be too late. And the reason is that you do have these deep-seated schisms which were there before the civil war really started about 18 months ago. And most scholars and most policy analysts do accept that it is a civil war today. The U.S. and the Iraqi partnership are trying to rebuild the security forces in order to have more effective policing, but they need to also control the borders and control the arms that are flowing in and it doesn't seem that we're able to do that. Unless we can, you're going to have these militias and these schisms that are going to continue to grow. Also, we need to keep rebuilding the security forces as quickly as we can. That's pretty much the only way we're going to avert further crisis in Iraq.

It's going to take a long time. I don't think that this administration ever prepared the public for the possibility that we're going to be there for 20 years. When you think about Bosnia, we were supposed to get in there for a year, and then it was extended - we're going to be there for generations. When you think about Cyprus, we've already been there for decades. We have to face the truth and accept that we're going to need to be in Iraq for at least a generation because the Iraqi population is not going to be able to police itself effectively. The United States is going to have to be there to help them.

Q: Is there something we could have done differently in the beginning in Iraq that would have proven more effective?

Toft: I think one thing that could have been done would have been to deal with the security forces right away. One of the things that we did was we demobilized the military, which is the professional arm. So if you had any affiliation with the Baathist party, you were dismissed. Baathists tended to be Sunnis, which are in a minority. So now if you look at the fight, it's Sunnis verses Shia, but there is some intra-Shia fighting. But of course the Kurds are sitting in the north. On the good side, there was pressure at one point to demilitarize the Kurds, which would be a mistake. Most of these ethnic groups want to be able to defend themselves; they fear each other at this point.

So I think the coalition partners did make a mistake by demobilizing the military. They should have been much more scrupulous about looking at the mid-level people in the military who weren't as heavily implicated in the Baathist party. They could have pulled out people who could have helped us refashion the military structure quicker. The problem now is we lost a lot of time and gave the insurgents and some of the elites the opportunity to mobilize their groups and we weren't able to respond effectively.