This chapter concentrates on changing provision for retirement over time. In the first years of the republic when funds were scarce and civil wars constant, reform was repeatedly thwarted by recurring conflict both internal and external. Lack of funds further aggravated the State’s inability to provide. Acute instability, commonly known as ‘the anarchy’ followed, making attempts to reform the retirement system futile. In the mid 1840s the Peruvian State was able to provide pensions thanks to the advent of money linked to the sale of the bird-dung fertilizer called guano. President Ramón Castilla was able to pass new legislation and pay more. And it was at this point that institutionalization started to really gather pace. During the fourth period the State continued to provide generous pensions, but this was not enough to ensure stability and at mid-century civil war returned, impacting retirement policies. Finally, the fifth period is concerned with the policies implemented after mid-century when the military court, the fuero was dismantled. State capacity grew and more attention was given to following regulation and ensuring entitlements had been legally acquired.

This chapter explores the rise of inter-ethnic tensions and violence in large parts of Europe in the wake of the First World War through to Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor. Although tensions between aspiring nationalist movements and their imperial overlords had been on the rise from the latter third of the nineteenth century onwards, it was the Great War, the implosion of Europe’s land empires and the proliferation of revolutionary movements of the left and right that created the spaces in which violence became possible. Surveying the situation in different European countries – from Russia in the east to Ireland in the west – the chapter analyzes different patterns and logics of violence that emerged long before the Nazis were a serious political force. Without wanting to exaggerate the role of pre−1933 violence as a precursor to the Holocaust, it is clear that the Nazis’ ever-radicalizing policies against the Jews and other minorities did not come out of nowhere. The Great War had raised, but not solved, many of the issues that allowed Nazism to become a dominant force in German politics in the first place.

Chapter 9 concludes the book by highlighting implications that are relevant for academic researchers as well as policymakers. The book’s findings suggest at least three areas for future research. First, a more comprehensive analysis of the sources of perceptions of bias in conflict settings would productively inform scholarship and practice. Second, future work should investigate the conditions under which communal peace aggregates up to the national level. Third, scholars should examine whether governments and their partners succeed in leveraging gains from localized peace enforcement into states with robust institutions. The book also has two important implications for the practice of peacekeeping. First, given the importance of perceptions, policymakers must ensure that peacekeepers remain impartial. International actors perceived by local populations as relatively impartial are much more effective at promoting intergroup cooperation and facilitating the peaceful resolution of communal disputes. Second, given that communal peace in the analysis relies so heavily on the presence of UN peacekeepers, the international community must consider how to design peaceful transitions out of PKOs.

This introductory chapter explains the book’s motivating puzzles and outlines its theoretical and empirical strategies. The book focuses on local-level peacekeeping operations designed explicitly to prevent communal violence. It argues that deploying UN peacekeepers to fragile settings fundamentally changes the structural incentives facing communities in conflict. Scholars typically pinpoint the UN’s success at the negotiating table: peacekeepers help armed group leaders make lasting agreements that stabilize conflict settings from the top down. Yet such negotiations seem unable to prevent communal violence in places as diverse as South Sudan in East Africa, Mali in West Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa. This book shifts the analytical lens to the local level to investigate the conditions under which peacekeepers successfully build peace from the bottom up. The book’s main argument is that UN peacekeepers succeed when local populations perceive them to be relatively impartial enforcers who are unconnected to the country of deployment, the conflict, and the parties to the dispute. Impartial peacekeepers convince all parties that they will punish those who escalate communal disputes regardless of their identity, which increases communities’ willingness to cooperate without the fear of violence.

Did the threat of war trigger the extraction-coercion cycle? In this chapter I use a panel of Latin America from 1830 to 1913 to test the effects of looming international threats on domestic taxation and internal conflict. It is believed that due to the availability of foreign loans and taxable imports, states in the region did not have to engage in extraction from the local population, nor did they have to coerce individuals to comply with such policies. I summarize this argument in the form of testable hypotheses and point to factors—naval blockades and sovereign debt defaults—that might have hindered access to such external resources. I then focus on militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and how they affected revenues, tariff levels, foreign loans, civil wars, coups, etc. My analyses show MIDs had a negative effect on tariffs and revenue and diminished the likelihood of a new loan—all results that contest the established conventional wisdom. Conversely, MIDs are associated to currency depreciation—a domestic-oriented inflationary tax—and domestic conflict—in particular, civil wars and coups. The chapter shows war did trigger the extraction-coercion cycle.

This chapter examines the causes, prosecution, outcomes, and consequences of civil wars. It defines the concept of civil war, distinguishes between nationalist and secessionist civil wars, and presents several factors thought to drive civil war onset, including grievance, relative deprivation, identity, lootable resources, and state capacity. It then examines factors that might affect the likelihood of ending civil wars once started, including whether the issues under dispute are seen to be indivisible and the severity of commitment problems. It describes the consequences when rebel groups fighting a civil war are fragmented, and relatedly when there are several actors fighting in a civil war. The chapter then lays out possible solutions for ending civil wars and creating lasting peace, including third-party guarantors, power-sharing, and creating integrated police and security forces. It then discusses some of the devastating human consequences of civil wars The chapter applies many of the concepts in the chapter to a quantitative study on whether peacekeepers help prevent civil wars from recurring, and a case study of the Syrian Civil War.

This section focuses on a set of occupied countries whose internal conflicts during and/or immediately after occupation rose to a level of violence that can be described as civil war. Although each of these clashes featured particular characteristics arising from local conditions, participants were usually acutely aware of their connection to the continental and global theaters of warfare as well as to analogous internal conflicts in other occupied countries. One can therefore speak of a sort of archipelago of loosely analogous, temporally overlapping (though not necessarily synchronous), and at least indirectly interconnected civil wars fought across a wide array of lands amidst the overarching global conflict. Indeed, this archipelago extended well beyond Europe, as will be seen in the discussion of the Chinese case.

Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly difficult for major powers to translate battlefield victories into favourable political outcomes. As a result, US military engagements in the Middle East, Russian engagements in its “near abroad” and in Syria, French engagements in sub-Saharan Africa, and the African Union’s war in Somalia have turned into protracted missions with little prospect of decisive victory. This chapter examines the phenomenon of “endless war,” asking why it has become so difficult to bring wars to an end and what can be done about it. It shows that the problem is global, rooted in the changing nature, purposes, and attitudes of war. As wars become less about resolving disputes between states and more about the internal composition of states, and as those contests become ever more internationalized, the capacity of actors to sustain war have increased while incentives to pursue peace have declined. The first part examines the “endless war” thesis that grounds the problem in US liberal hegemony. The second part offers a brief explanation of factors that extend a war’s duration and inhibit peace. The third discusses how these issues might be addressed.

This Chapter examines the scope of this book and a number of essential definitions: rebellions and civil wars, ‘insurrectional movements’ and rebels, conduct (including wrongful acts) of rebels and governments, whether the outcome is the establishment of a new government or the creation of a new State, and the important distinction between Matters of ‘Attribution’ and ‘Responsibility’. This Chapter examines the structure of this book.