THE PRICE OF ELITE PEACE: A DUAL-ARENA THEORY OF POST-CONFLICT VIOLENCE

Why does violence persist and transform rather than terminate after intrastate warsend? This dissertation addresses this question through three essays that examine howpeace interventions—amnesty provisions, government strategies, and counternarcoticsprograms—interact with armed actor incentives to redistribute violence between politicaland societal domains. The central argument holds that peace policies designed to resolveelite-level commitment problems systematically produce unintended consequences in thecommunities where wars were fought, and that the form of these consequences dependson institutional design choices and the organizational character of the actors they target.Essay One develops and tests a Dual-Arena Theory of post-conflict violence usinga cross-national difference-in-differences design applied to 83 post-conflict countries(1980–2023). The study finds that rebel-only amnesties covering human rights violationsproduce an X-shaped divergence—declining political violence alongside rising societalviolence—as organizationally capable actors exploit the accountability environment createdby institutional permissiveness, while mutual amnesties reduce violence in botharenas through comprehensive organizational inclusion that dismantles the structurescapable of exploiting that environment.Essay Two applies a dual arenas framework to Colombia (1980–2023) through a structured,focused comparison of four periods, each representing a distinct combination of government strategy (accommodation vs. coercion) and armed actor type (political vs.hybrid organizations). Of six predictions tested, societal violence trajectories followedpredicted directions across all periods, while political violence predictions and the hydraeffect required qualification by implementation context, resource availability, and actorconcentration.Essay Three examines the subnational mechanisms through which post-accord violenceemerges, introducing the concept of the “economic spoiler”—armed actors motivatedto preserve illicit economies. Using comparative interrupted time series analysis ofColombian municipal data, the study demonstrates that the state’s consent-based counternarcoticsprogram inadvertently created strategic incentives for FARC dissidents touse targeted violence against program participants.Together, the three essays demonstrate that peace interventions redistribute ratherthan reduce total violence, with consequences that vary across scales—international,national, and local—and depend on how institutional design interacts with the strategiccalculus of armed actors operating under different incentive structures.