Rebel Education Services and the Crafting of Peace Accords:Reconceptualizing Constructive Ambiguity

Studies on rebel governance have largely overlooked how the services offered by insurgent groups may affect the design of peace accords. With an increasingly prevalence of de facto states and rebel enclaves in the world, this puzzle has significant theoretical and policy implications. To address it, we focus on education as an example of essential public service and ask: How do rebel education services impact peace agreements? <br/>We theorize that when rebels provide education services, education becomes more salient to the conflict, and conflict parties develop mutually irreconcilable aspirations for its control in the post-agreement phase. In this context, during the bargaining process at the heart of peace negotiations (and accords), conflict parties are likely to exercise constructive ambiguity, here reconceptualized to encompass the deliberate exclusion of a sensitive issue from a peace agreement in the attempt to secure its conclusion. As a consequence, peace accords are less likely to explicitly address education. <br/>We test our hypothesis through a mixed-methods nested analysis based on statistical analysis of a comprehensive dataset of intra-state conflicts (1989-2012), and qualitative analysis of archival, media, and biographical material from Bosnia and Herzegovina.<br/>