‘Peace without Impunity’: Values in the Settlement of Civil Wars

Juan Fernando Tellez

Duke University

Abstract:

Even among people who are on the ”same side” of a civil war, there is often heated disagreement about how the war should be fought and how it should end. A growing body of evidence shows that, when it comes to foreign wars and military interventions, core values and dispositions help explain why otherwise similar individuals form divergent preferences. Yet we know much less about how values structure policy attitudes in civil wars, where citizens face a starkly different context from that found in international affairs. Drawing on an original survey fielded during the Colombian peace process and research in political psychology, I show that the values that guide people’s everyday lives have implications for how they think about conflict-termination. I find that individuals ranking high on authoritarianism were much less likely to vote in favor of the peace accord in the public referendum, and that little of this effect is mediated by political partisanship. Further, a conjoint experiment that manipulates the content of peace agreements suggests authoritarian intransigence to peace is rooted in a heightened demand for punishment of insurgents. The study sheds light on the psychological underpinnings of polarization in societies at war.

Discussants:

Jason Quin (University of Notre Dame)

Helga Malmin Binningsbø (Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO))

Stephen Gent (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

OPSC Coordinator:

Emily Hencken Ritter (Vanderbilt University)

Graduate Assistant:

Heesun Yoo (Vanderbilt University)