Despite extensive research on negotiated peace settlements there is one important area in which we have developed relatively little knowledge: the question of how and why anti-state militant groups bring an end to their armed campaigns. This paper argues that our understanding of these processes has been obscured by the tendency in the literature to elide the role of rebel agency in the achievement of negotiated peace settlements.
Negotiation is a co-operative process and explaining the successful negotiation of peace settlements requires understanding the roles played by all major parties. Much of the work on the negotiated termination of conflict however minimizes the agency of anti-state militants in producing negotiated settlements. While these actors are credited with agency in the waging of war and the sustaining of conflict, when it comes to peacemaking they are almost invariably portrayed as the objects of state agency, pushed or pulled into peace, compelled or enticed to ‘abandon violence’.
This paper draws on recent work on social movement agency and strategy to provide a new analysis of the strategic decision-making of the Provisional Republican movement in relation to the negotiated settlement of conflict in Northern Ireland. Contrary to the existing literature, it argues that the agreement of republicans to a compromise peace settlement can be explained not primarily as the product of state action but as the outcome of strategic action by both the state and Republicans and of the interaction between both. Peace settlements require strategic decision-making and active choices by anti-state groups as well as by states, and peace settlements are, in part, the product of the active pursuit of organizational goals by militant anti-state actors. The paper concludes by laying out an agenda for future research on the role of strategic decision-making by anti-state actors in the negotiation of peace settlements.
