In 1999 the United Nations performed a significant about-face in its policy concerning the use of amnesties in peace negotiations. Where once it had condoned and even supported the use of amnesties, including those that immunise perpetrators of human rights violations against prosecutions and punishment, the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, now issued a statement prohibiting UN peace negotiators from offering amnesties for human rights violations, even when the signing of a peace agreement was at stake. This chapter introduces the United Nations’ anti-amnesty policy, provides an overview of its theoretical underpinnings, development, establishment as a policy norm, and considers its implications for peace negotiators.

This chapter explains the global-historical context in which rebel leaders make decisions about how to govern. The chapter argues that although rebel groups have undertaken governance for centuries, they have frequently saved costly and potentially burdensome governance projects until after war ends. Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), however, knowingly and repeatedly introduced burdensome and occasionally perilous governance during war, in addition to some more popular projects. By the 1930s, the CCP had begun propagating this governance strategy globally as a model for later rebel groups. The CCP’s eventual victory provided a larger platform to disseminate information about its experience and governance strategy, including introducing a training program for would-be and active rebel leaders. As a result of the CCP’s efforts, the international system was saturated with information about the CCP’s approach to governance. The CCP’s efforts made a strategy for relatively more burdensome wartime governance cognitively available to later rebel leaders, and it is within this international informational structure that rebel leaders make decisions about governance.

Chapter 1 lays out our motivation, puzzle, and research questions. Borders are one of the defining institutions of international relations. Borders establish the sovereign domain of the territorial state, within which actors have the right to govern, tax, conscript, and exploit resources. Stable borders facilitate bilateral trade, tourism, and threat reduction, the latter of which allows states to spend a larger percentage of finite resources on domestic infrastructure and social programs rather than defense. Some neighbors, however, experience failed settlement, producing some of the most violent and enduring conflict between states in modern international relations history. Despite the importance of borders, we know little about what causes failed delineation; nor have we adequately explored the consequences of that failure. Our book addresses this puzzle by answering three interconnected questions. What factors increase and decrease the likelihood of successful delineation of territorial borders, what effect does failed settlement have on rivalry formation, and how do rivals eventually settle their disputed borders and terminate these enduring competition?

Chapter 5 presents a theory of borders and rivalry onset. When a border region contains attributes capable of affecting state power, a commitment problem is more likely to develop.The commitment problem undermines the settlement process by threatening the stability of any settlement agreement that might be signed, and therefore, encourages the involved states to eschew reaching an agreement in the first place, leaving borders unsettled and disputed. States then invest in foreign policy tools to compete over the insecure border, in the hopes of gaining a future bargaining advantage that will allow them to overcome the commitment problem and achieve a favorable and durable settlement.The competition produces a rivalry relationship between the states. We derive three hypotheses connecting unsettled borders, power endowments, and rivalry relations.In order to address alternative theoretical explanations, four additional hypotheses are presented relating rivalry initiation to regime type, power relations, alliances, and ethnic identify claims.

Drawing on a new peace agreements dataset, this chapter maps general trends in the use of amnesties in peace agreements from 1980 to 2015 and situates Asian peacemaking practice within them. Focusing on a range of conflict-related, economic and political variables, as well as the engagement of the United Nations (UN) in peace negotiations, it provides a set of preliminary explanations for the continued persistence of amnesties in Asian peace processes. The chapter highlights the existence of an unusually strong relationship between separatist conflict and the rejection of the UN’s anti-amnesty policy in Asia, demonstrates that, in contrast to the global sample, Asian democracies are no more or less likely to allow amnesties for human rights violations than authoritarian regimes, and shows that the relative lack of engagement by the UN in Asian peace negotiations is a significant factor in the continued use of amnesties for human rights violations in the region.

This chapter examines the Bangsamoro peace process to end civil conflict on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. With the Philippines boasting a long history of granting amnesties for human rights violations in the context of separatist and other conflicts, and the United Nations excluded from the negotiations, this appears to be a straightforward case in which an amnesty is used to address an intractable separatist conflict. Yet, as this chapter argues, the post-settlement period reveals that the fight against impunity for human rights violations in the Philippines is far from over. Rather, the Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Commission has taken a strong, but pragmatic anti-impunity stance, argued that impunity for human rights violations is not a means of achieving peace but a cause of conflict in Mindanao, and proposed measures to institutionalise the eradication of amnesties for human rights violations in the Philippines. Directly influenced by United Nations’ policies, it has sought not only to promote accountability and anti-amnesty norms but to refute the most commonly used justification for the use of amnesties in the Philippines and, indeed, region.

Chapter 4 evaluates the hypotheses introduced in Chapter 3. First, we provide descriptions of our variables and justifies a key sampling choice to focus only on contiguous dyads. Second, we implement our research design, presenting the evidence for evaluating the hypotheses. Patterns in the data suggest border settlement is less likely when power endowments are present in the border region, consistent with the expectations of the commitment problem framework. We find mixed support for the information problem hypotheses. Democratic neighbors are more likely than nondemocratic neighbors to settle their borders, allied states are more likely to settle borders than non-allied states, and power relations do not appear to affect settlement. When bargaining over territory that lacks power endowments, conflict management efforts foster border settlement.When power endowments are present, states are significantly less likely to settle their borders, and conflict management proves ineffective. The exception is legal methods, which generally increase the likelihood of settlement when power endowments are present.