This chapter lays out the background of the current conflict in Colombia, explaining why, despite the peace agreement in 2016, Colombia is far from a “post-conflict” country. This chapter discusses the disputes around the peace agreement, the history of previous peace agreements and attempted disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs in Colombia, and the ongoing problems with ex-combatant unemployment, reintegration, and recidivism into violence and illegal activities. The chapter also discusses how hierarchies of victimhood have become a flashpoint in the Colombian peace process, especially regarding the government’s resistance to including victims of state violence in reparations process.

Though constitutional drafting is a national affair, it is not isolated from the international legal setting in which it is embedded. Sometimes, the process of drafting itself may be directly governed by international law (for example, a United Nations mandate). On other occasions, constitutional design may be influenced by incentives generated by international law (such as EU membership). Either way, the creation of a new constitution invariably requires reflection upon the status and role of international law in the normative hierarchy of a country. Using Sudan as a case study, this chapter explores the significant role played by international law in the drafting of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the Interim National Constitution of 2005.

Chapter 3 lays out the methods and the logic of case selection that underpin the book. This book is a theory-building and theory-probing undertaking—I build a theory of how the alternative benefits of bargaining lead combatants to seek out UN peacekeeper while probing how the credible commitment theory of war termination drives the desire for peace operations—and process tracing using a most-similar cases approach is one way to do this.In this chapter, I outline first the method by which I selected cases, building a catalogue of the UN’s peacekeeping successes and failures, and a timeline of what peacekeeping successes and failures combatants would have seen around the world as they were negotiating, in order to do so, and then discuss the evidence and tools I use to process-trace the Rwandan and Guatemalan peace processes. Readers who are interested primarily in the substance of the text and not in methodological discussion, or a discussion of multiple archives, can proceed to the subsequent three chapters without reading Chapter 3.

This chapter evaluates the UN’s engagement in Guatemalan negotiations from 1989-1996. It asks how the Government of Guatemala (the GoG) and the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG), the coalition of rebel groups fighting and negotiating with the GoG, assessed the UN’s performance as the guarantor of agreements elsewhere, especially the concurrent peacekeeping success in neighboring El Salvador and the simultaneous failure in the Balkans, and how these assessments influenced the course of negotiations and the final agreement that emerged from their peace process. Drawing on archival material and oral histories, I find that participants looked nearly exclusively at El Salvador to assess the contours and possibilities of UN intervention—but they perceived the Salvadoran example as a negative one: both sides believed their Salvadoran counterparts had given too much away during their negotiations, and advocated for a smaller UN mission.This is surprising—influential credible commitment theories of peacekeeping predict that the UN’s success in El Salvador would enhance the Guatemalan parties’ confidence in the UN as guarantor. Instead, the UN’s banner success in El Salvador first prolonged the war in Guatemala and then produced a weaker agreement and a degraded capacity to enforce the peace.

Chapter 4 examines the conflict resolution processes surrounding the 1990-1994 civil war in Rwanda; what effect the UN’s past performance had on the Rwandan peace process; how peacekeeping failures in Somalia and Burundi may have shaped the conflict in the crucial months between the Arusha Accords and the genocide; and what led the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) to invite a second UN peace operation into Rwanda following the first mission’s cataclysmic failure. Drawing on archival material and interviews, I argue the negotiating table at Arusha was populated by desperate negotiators who had to settle because they could no longer fight; by hardliners who used the negotiation process to pursue tactical, distributional, and symbolic goals other than peace; and by spoilers who ultimately strove to break the peace. In this context, the international community’s unique abilities to assist in demobilization and refugee resettlement, and their ability to confer legitimacy upon political groups, were important dimensions of negotiations. In the turbulent aftermath of genocide, amidst massive population transfers and the RPF’s consolidation of power, the RPF’s desire to be viewed as legitimately pursuing post-conflict peace, rather than exacting retribution on political opponents, was a key reason to seek out UN assistance.

This chapter examines the settlement of the separatist conflict fought in Aceh, Indonesia. It demonstrates that after the loss of East Timor, Indonesia toughened its approach to separatist claims and reaffirmed its acceptance of impunity and belief in the relative importance of state survival over human rights. The chapter argues that this and the UN’s absence from the peace process, meant that the inclusion of an unrestricted amnesty in the final peace agreement was unsurprising. However, the chapter also details the evolution of the separatists’ ideas about the relationship between peace and justice and the importance of ending impunity for human rights violations in Aceh. It demonstrates that although the protection of human rights and the pursuit of accountability for past violations was a key pillar of the separatists’ claim, as the conflict and negotiations wore on, the possibility of Acehnese independence faded, and a political future for its key protagonists became probable, they accepted the pragmatic view that amnesties may help end conflict, allow some measure of self-determination and, perhaps ironically, facilitate the protection of human rights.

This chapter examines the peace process undertaken by the Government of Nepal and the Community Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M). Nepal’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), negotiated in the presence of United Nations officials and signed in 2006, does not include an amnesty provision but a commitment to accountability for human rights violations and an agreement to end impunity for such crimes. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, agreement to include anti-impunity measures in the CPA was driven, not by a commitment to end impunity for human rights violations, but by a desire to avoid criticism from the international actors present during the negotiations. This lack of intention to comply with the human rights terms of the CPA was evident in the negotiating process and has been born out in the post-conflict period, with several successive governments attempting to legislate in favour of introducing amnesty laws. At the same time, a lack of capacity within those local institutions committed to ending impunity for human rights violations, exacerbated by the withdrawal of UN support for their processes, has hampered efforts to combat these impunity measures.