Violence after War: Explaining Instability in Post-Conflict States

Violence After War: Explaining Instability in Post-Conflict States By Michael J. Boyle Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014 448 pages $69.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Michael J. Boyle's new book offers a welcome look at post-conflict violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Rwanda, East Timor, and Iraq. Despite its tide, the book sensitizes readers more generally to the fallacy of assuming that countries have graduated to post-conflict status with the ostensible end in fighting. Conflict can persist when parties seek to "renegotiate" the terms of a peace through violence, new parties arise to stake their claim to power, or coalitions dissolve in disputes over the division of the spoils. The book focuses accordingly on "strategic violence" which is "designed to transform the balance of power and resources in a state" (8). Such violence is most obvious when one or more of the contending parties seeks to challenge the terms of a settlement having agreed to them, perhaps, under duress or false pretenses. But strategic violence sometimes has a more complex explanation with ambiguous evidentiary support. It can occur when groups fragment to pursue their own (unclear) agendas by capitalizing on ethnic, religious, or political conflict and engaging in criminal activities by employing criminal gangs to mobilize resources and target opponents for "strategic" purposes. "Not only can such violence be unconnected or only indirectly related to the cause of the war itself, but it can also provide a space for opportunists to pursue a variety of personal or criminal vendettas, some of which will be detached from the fighting that preceded it." In consequence, "the violence of the post-conflict period will often appear as an inchoate mix of personal attacks, criminal violence, and political-strategic violence significantly different from violence in the war that preceded it" (5). In Boyle's terminology, strategic violence mixes with "expressive violence," an emotional response to loss or suffering, and "instrumental violence," undertaken for criminal or personal gain. The analytical challenge is met, as Boyle recognizes, by ascertaining the collective (not individual) motives behind the violence, as discerned from tell-tale, aggregate patterns. For that effort, Boyle marshals revealing quantitative and qualitative evidence to portray trends over time in the various conflicts. According to Boyle, the key to understanding the role of strategic violence in post-conflict countries is appreciating the distinction between the "direct pathway" to violence in which the parties, targets, and issues in contestation remain relatively constant (from the conflict through the post-conflict periods) and the "indirect pathway" in which groups splinter and violence is a function of "multiple and overlapping bargaining games between new and emergent claimants for power and resources" (12). In discussing these pathways, Boyle's central argument reduces to four hypotheses that derive from a "2-by-2" table, structured around two binary variables. These variables are: a) whether the original parties have accepted a settlement and b) how much control these parties exercise over their membership. Simply put, strategic violence emerges through the direct pathway when a party refuses to accept a settlement and through the indirect pathway when the level of control is low. Consequently, strategic violence can occur simultaneously through the direct and indirect pathway when a party refuses a settlement and when the level of control is low. In positing these hypotheses and testing them against the case evidence, Boyle moves beyond the largely descriptive focus of the early theoretical chapters to explain the occurrence of strategic violence. In its illuminating detail, the case-study analysis provides support for Boyle's provocative arguments. Yet it also serves to highlight the book's limitations, which are as follows: First, the utility of Boyle's approach rests on the viability of a 2-by-2 table that assumes implicitly that the loss of control and nonacceptance of a settlement by any side produces the same outcome. …