The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs welcomes David Siroky, professor of international relations at the University of Florida, for a guest lecture on his work studying international conflict and conflict resolution.Siroky also serves as director of the Violence, Conflict and Security Lab (ViCS Lab) at the University of Florida. 

This talk is part of the Nunn School Research Colloquium Speaker Series, which aims to bring together a vibrant series of academics in the field of political science, international relations, science and technology, and data science to discuss how quantitative methodologies can assist scholars and practitioners in developing new knowledge in the field. 

Abstract

How civil wars end shapes whether peace endures or conflict recurs, yet the literature remains divided over whether military victories or negotiated settlements are more durable. This article argues that this debate has persisted because post-war stability is often treated as a property of termination outcomes rather than as self-reinforcing post-war orders produced by the interaction of post-war legitimacy and organizational capacity. War endings matter insofar as they shape whether renewed violence is both normatively permissible and materially feasible. We develop a conceptual post-war framework in which peace is more likely to persist when at least one stabilizing constraint is present, either actor accept the post-war political order as sufficiently authoritative to forego violence, or they lack the organizational capacity to resume fighting. Recurrence is most likely when either condition holds. Using global data on civil war episodes and a combination of Cox proportional hazards models and machine-learning survival analysis, we show that conflict episodes ending in ceasefires or low-activity outcomes exhibit the highest risk of recurrence. Once these endings are modeled separately, the commonly assumed durability advantage of military victories over negotiated settlements disappears. Instead, victories and settlements generate comparably stable post-war trajectories through distinct pathways, victories by suppressing organizational capacity and settlements by conditionally legitimating the post-war order. By reconceptualizing war termination as a mechanism that structures post-war configurations of authority and capacity, this study clarifies why ceasefires so often precede renewed violence and why the victory-settlement debate has remained unresolved.