Deals With The Devil? Conflict Amnesties, Civil War, and Sustainable Peace

Deals with the Devil?
Conflict Amnesties, Civil

War, and Sustainable Peace
Geoff Dancy
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Abstract Do legal amnesties for combatants help end civil wars? International policy
experts often take it for granted that amnesties promote negotiated settlements with rebels.
However, a large number of amnesties are followed by continued fighting or a return to
the battlefield. What, then, are the factors that make amnesties effective or ineffective? In
this article I use a disaggregated data set of all amnesties enacted in the context of internal
war since 1946 to evaluate a bargaining theory of amnesties and peace. Testing hypoth-
eses about conflict patterns using models that account for selection, I find that (1) only
amnesties passed following conflict termination help resolve civil wars, (2) amnesties
are more effective when they are embedded in peace agreements, and (3) amnesties
that grant immunity for serious rights violations have no observable pacifying effects.
These policy-relevant findings represent a new breakthrough in an ossified “peace
versus justice” debate pitting security specialists against global human rights advocates.
Long-lasting and recurrent internal wars remain a persistent concern for the inter-
national community.1 One tool often proposed to help end these wars is amnesty, a
legal device that blocks the criminal prosecution of combatants. If rebels know that
they will be protected from trial—either for crimes against the state or the civilian
population—they may be more willing to join negotiations. And in the event a settle-
ment is reached, amnesties can sweeten the deal, promoting peace by assuring rebels
they will not be targeted for indictment. However rational, this logic cannot explain
why rebels often rebuff amnesty offers. For instance, after the Nepalese government
extended an amnesty to Maoist rebels in 2003, insurgent leader Pushpa Kamal
Dahal responded by calling the offer “an extremely ridiculous and shameless
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant Nos. SES-
0961226 and SES-1228519) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Grant Nos. AH/1500030/1
and AH/K502856/1). I thank Catherine Perrone and Ezra Spira-Cohen for their valuable research assist-
ance, as well as members of the Tulane Faculty Workshop, including Chris Fettweis, Celeste Lay, Mark
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000012
Vail, Patrick Egan, Mirya Holman, Menaka Philips, Anna Mahoney, and Izabela Steflja for their generous
assistance. Outside of the Tulane community, I am grateful to Louise Mallinder, Florencia Montal, Chris
Fariss, Valerie Arnould, Kimi King, David Mason, Jim Meernik, Steve Forde, Steve Landis, Rod
Abouharb, Kristin Bakke, Neil Mitchell, Henry Thomson, Ezequiel Gonzales-Ocantos, and Page Fortna
for their individual comments on the paper. I also thank members of the Transitional Justice Working
Group at Harvard University, including Kathryn Sikkink and Phuong Pham; organizers and participants
in the Uppsala University Speaker Series, most notably Kristine Eck, Karen Brounéus, Erik Melander,
and Holly Guthrey; and the George Washington University Virtual Workshop on Intrastate Conflict and
Violence, especially Yon Lupu, for critical advice.
1. Hironaka 2009; Pettersson and Wallensteen 2015; Salehyan and Gleditsch 2006; Von Einsiedel 2014.
International Organization, 2018, page 1 of 35

© The IO Foundation, 2018 doi:10.1017/S0020818318000012
2 International Organization
exercise.”2 If amnesties give rebels what they want, then it is puzzling that rebels
sometimes reject the deals and keep fighting. This raises a bigger question: do amnes-
ties really work to promote peace?
I study this question using original and extensive cross-national evidence on

amnesties in internal wars since 1946. Building on bargaining theories of war, I
develop and support the counterintuitive expectation that amnesties sometimes
inspire rebels and government forces to continue fighting. But I also show that
amnesties promote peace under two main conditions. The first relates to timing.
Amnesties passed amid ongoing intrastate hostilities, before negotiations begin, do
not appear to increase the probability of conflict termination. However, they do
decrease the risk of conflict recurrence when offered during negotiations at the
end of fighting. A second condition relates to design. Amnesties’ post-termination
pacifying effects are strong when they accompany a formal peace agreement, but
absent in instances where the offer exculpates combatants for atrocity crimes and
other serious violations of human rights.3 In short, forgiving actors for serious
rights violations is not a tried and true strategy for ending civil war.
These discoveries are meant to assist in a policy terrain that is highly contested.
Peace negotiators, like those active in Colombia in 2016, often advocate for the pro-
vision of amnesties to end wars and prevent further loss of life.4 However, unlike
other mechanisms in the peacemaker’s playbook, amnesties are the source of great
controversy. Human rights advocates often perceive amnesties as deals with the
devil because they block prosecution for acts like mass killing, torture, and extreme
sexual violence.5 At the 1999 Lomé Accords for Sierra Leone, the UN officially artic-
ulated the position that it could not “condone amnesty for war crimes, crimes against
humanity, or genocide,” given that the Rome Statute for the International Criminal
Court obligates states to prosecute those who commit such acts.6 This position
invites complaints from some in the conflict-resolution community because it effec-
tively means one fewer option when dealing with rebels.
Peacemakers are at odds with human rights advocates over the pursuit of criminal
accountability in civil war states.7 These two camps are engaged in what is known as
2. Jeffery 2014, 106.

3. For the remainder of this article, I use the term “serious violations” as a shorthand. This category is
meant to include genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—as well as other serious violations of
human rights. While it might be preferable to use David Scheffer’s phrase “atrocity crimes,” I avoid this
because it includes only crimes of “severe gravity” that “merit an international response” Scheffer 2012,
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429. Some serious violations might not meet this substantiality test, but remain significant enough to
warrant inclusion or exclusion from an amnesty’s provisions. For other uses of “serious violations,” see
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Case of the Massacres of El Mozote and Nearby Places
v. El Salvador, Merits, Reparations and Costs, Judgment of 25 October 2012, para. 319.
4. Gallón 2016.
5. Bell 2008; Freeman 2009; Mallinder 2008; Roht-Arriaza 1990.
6. Freeman 2009, 89. See also Jeffery 2014, 118.
7. By peacemakers, I mean scholars and practitioners engaged with peacemaking, peace building, con-
flict negotiation, mediation, and conflict resolution. See Scharf and Williams 2003; Sonnenberg and
Cavallaro 2012.
Deals with the Devil? 3
the “peace versus justice” debate. Peacemakers contend that amnesties serve the inter-
est of local populations desperate for order and security. Human rights advocates
worry that amnesties are immoral, interfering with a duty to prosecute crimes
under international law.8 The debate thus turns on a difficult ethical confrontation
between consequentialism and moralism.9 In this debate, consequentialists have an
advantage. If amnesties help end the destruction of war, and save lives, they are
worth the blow to justice.10
The purpose of this research is to bring more evidence to this debate. The conse-
quentialist argument has surprisingly little empirical support. It remains unclear
whether amnesties are effective. For every amnesty that is associated with peace,
as in 1992 Mozambique or 1994 South Africa,11 there is another that did not stop vio-
lence, such as the 2009 amnesty granted to the National Congress for the Defence of
the People (CNDP) rebel group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.12 Few
studies conduct systematic comparative studies of amnesty performance. As
experts Kieran McEvoy and Louise Mallinder write, “we are unaware of any meta-
analysis on reoffending rates for those who have been granted an amnesty. While
there are sporadic local studies which are encouraging, we do not believe that
there is sufficient robust data to say that amnesties either ‘work’ or do not ‘work’
in simple recidivism terms.”13 Here, I conduct a meta-analysis of rebel group re-
offense, with the hope of providing some useful lessons for practitioners working
to end wars.
The first contribution of this article is descriptive. I present a new dyad-level data
set on “conflict amnesties” that I assembled using multiple sources. The summary sta-
tistics on this data set reveal an interesting fact: amnesties that forgive armed combat-
ants for atrocity crimes and other serious violations—and fuel the “peace versus
justice” debate—are in the minority. As such, this particular set of amnesties
should not be the sole focus of discussion. The article’s second contribution is to
suggest that scholarship has not done enough theoretically to specify what mecha-
nisms link amnesties to peace. On this basis, I develop a bargaining model of amnes-
ties rooted in the assumption that civil wars continually recur because of information
problems and lack of credible commitments. This theory predicts that amnesties will
work best (1) when they follow conflict termination, (2) when they are embedded in
peace agreements, and (3) when they do not include immunities for serious viola-
tions. I test these predictions with models that account for issues of selection and
find that they are supported by empirical evidence.
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8. Freeman and Pensky 2012; McEvoy and Mallinder 2012; Turnbull IV 2007.
9. Pensky 2008; Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003/4.
10. Freeman 2009.
11. Cobban 2007.
12. The CNDP fought in the Kivu region of DRC. In 2012, former CNDP troops broke ranks and estab-
lished a new “M23 rebellion” led by Bosco Ntaganda.
13. McEvoy and Mallinder 2012, 434.
Amnesties
An amnesty is an “extraordinary legal measure whose primary function is to remove

the prospect and consequences of criminal liability for designated individuals or

classes of persons in respect of designated types of offenses.”14 Amnesties can
serve a variety of purposes: state leaders use them to exonerate military deserters,
to exculpate those who avoid conscription, to forgive coup planners, to show magna-
nimity to opponents of the regime, or to release political prisoners languishing in
jail.15 Leaders can also use amnesty laws to protect themselves from future criminal
prosecution amid democratic transition, or to forgive rebel forces for their crimes
against the state and civilian populations during civil war.16
Those who debate the peace dividend of amnesties are focused on ones that indem-
nify combatants in situations of internal armed conflict. These “conflict amnesties”
have a rich and storied history.17 Some, like Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Proclamation
of Amnesty and Reconstruction, are passed unilaterally amid fighting to incentivize
rebels to lay down arms.18 Other, like Charles II’s 1660 Act of Indemnity and
Oblivion, are meant to inspire long-term peace following a period of violent hostility.19
Although conflict amnesties are fairly common throughout history, they have
enjoyed a recent surge in attention because their legal status is now unsure following
developments in international criminal and human rights law. In the last decade,
researchers have analyzed patterns in amnesties across time and space.20 Most recently,
the Transitional Justice Research Collaborative (TJRC) constructed a comprehensive
list of 822 amnesty laws and offers between 1946 and 2010.21 Two hundred and
ninety-seven of these are conflict amnesties. To determine which amnesties fit this cat-
egory, a team of researchers and I matched information on groups targeted for amnesty
with information on warring state-rebel group pairings (dyads) collected by the Uppsala
Conflict Data Program (UCDP).22 Laws or offers qualify as conflict amnesties if they
protected members of rebel groups from prosecution related to crimes committed
during an armed internal conflict.23 In addition to matching these amnesties to the appro-
priate armed group (or groups) to which they applied, our team collected information on
other attributes of conflict amnesties, including their context, timing, and design.
The first scholar to construct an extensive data set on amnesties, Louise Mallinder,
contends that the worldwide “justice cascade” for atrocity crimes led to an increase in
14. Freeman 2009, 13.

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15. This latter type was Peter Benenson’s original source of inspiration for the name Amnesty
International.
16. For the best summary of types of amnesty, see Mallinder 2008.
17. See, for example, Jon Elster’s 2004 discussion of amnesty in the context of ancient Greece.
18. Freedmen and Southern Society Project 2016
19. British History Online 2016. See also Elster 2004.
20. Binningsbø et al. 2012; Mallinder 2008; Olsen, Payne, and Reiter 2010.
21. The TJRC data are available at <www.transitionaljusticedata.com>.
22. Kreutz 2010; Themnér and Wallensteen 2014.
23. We define armed conflict following UCDP’s definition.
the use of amnesties over time because leaders use them to avoid accountability.24
Indeed, amnesties are quite common for contemporary states in conflict. Since the
end of World War II, an average of over four conflict amnesties were passed per
year. The number of amnesties spiked after 1975, averaging over seven per year.
Figure 1 depicts trends in the use of conflict amnesties as a percentage of ongoing
wars. The number of amnesties increased with the number of states fighting civil
wars toward the end of the mid-twentieth century.25 Though this trend is noisy, its
highest peak was in 2006, when 30 percent of civil wars featured amnesties. The
use of amnesties increased with time, and was diffuse across contexts: 78 of 104 coun-
tries (75%) that experienced civil war enacted at least one conflict amnesty during or
after the fighting. Thirty countries passed only one amnesty, and forty-eight passed
more than one. In general, the spreading popularity of amnesties may speak to a
global normative shift in favor of legal solutions to problems of political violence.26
Do all of these amnesties actually matter? Two camps offer answers. The first
equates the passage of exceptional amnesty laws to the cynical avoidance of account-
ability for atrocity crimes. “The harmful effects of impunity,” writes Diane
Orentlicher, “are compounded when prosecutions are foreclosed by an amnesty
law enacted by, or to appease, the military or other autonomous sectors.”27 This state-
ment reflects the human rights model, which predicts a relationship between amnes-
ties and future repression and war.28 For proponents of this model, amnesties erect a
roadblock to criminal justice, which should be a goal of post-authoritarian and post-
conflict societies facing a legacy of systematic rights violations.
This is the official position of the UN. In 1998, Secretary General Kofi Annan
requested that UN mediators refrain from supporting amnesties for war crimes,
crimes against humanity, and genocide.29 In 2004, he expanded this to cover gross
human rights violations as well.30 Today, human rights proponents remain very sus-
picious of amnesties because they are open to political manipulation. For example, in
2012, Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh agreed to end his thirty-three-year rule
in exchange for an amnesty for himself and his family for a violent crackdown com-
mitted during the Arab Spring.31 The amnesty was passed despite protest and con-
demnation from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.32 Only two years
24. Mallinder 2012; Slye 2002. For the justice cascade, see Sikkink 2011.
25. Hironaka 2009.
26. Bell 2008.
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27. Orentlicher 1995, 377.

28. Vivanco 2016.
29. “Guidelines for United Nations Representatives on Certain Aspects of Negotiations for Conflict
Resolution” (1999 memo from Secretary General) in United Nations Juridical Yearbook 2006, 496–97.
See also Seils 2014.
30. The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-conflict Societies. Report of the
Secretary General. S/2004/616, para 10.
31. “Yemen Cabinet Approves President Saleh Amnesty Law” BBC News, 8 January 2012.
32. Situation of Human Rights in Yemen. Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human
Rights. A/HRC/21/37.
later, investigators discovered that Saleh was organizing terror attacks and fomenting
a rebellion against his successor.33 Saleh’s amnesty represents the worst fear for pro-
ponents of the human rights model: if perpetrators are allowed to walk free, conflict
will resume in the near future.34
FIGURE 1. Conflict amnesties over time
A second camp are proponents of the peacemaker model. They maintain that the
human rights model is too hopeful about criminal punishment. One variant of the
peacemaker model promotes amnesties as a form of restorative justice. According
to Mallinder and McEvoy, “properly constituted, amnesties bring law to a previously
lawless domain in the exercise of post-conflict mercy.”35 Following this logic,
amnesties create social transactions where former combatants are offered forgiveness
for confessions of the truth, promises to demobilize, or efforts to rebuild society.
Examples include Mozambique’s blanket amnesty (1992) combined with ritualized,
public forgetting; South Africa’s conditional amnesty (1995) process that attached
legal immunity to the truth-telling process outlined by the Truth and Reconciliation
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Commission; or Uganda’s amnesty (2000) that offered rebel soldiers amnesty in

exchange for their participation in local ceremonies of social reintegration.36
33. “Even Out of Office, a Wielder of Great Power in Yemen,” New York Times, 31 January 2014.
34. On the dangers of impunity, see Bass 2016.
35. McEvoy and Mallinder 2012, 440.
36. Cobban 2007; Mallinder 2009.
Other peacemakers root their ideas about amnesties not in reconciliation but in
political bargaining. They admit that amnesties are deals with the devil, but contend
that they are necessary to strengthen the prospects for human rights in the long
term. Snyder and Vinjamuri argue that “when the bargaining situation demands it
… granting a formal amnesty may sometimes be necessary.”37 Amnesties are

needed most in contexts like postindependence East Timor, where weak institutions
are overburdened by the prospect of prosecution,38 or in other situations where so-
called spoilers remain powerful. Spoilers are “leaders and parties who believe that
peace emerging from negotiations threatens their power, worldview, and interests,
and use violence to undermine attempts to achieve it,” and if they succeed in
ruining peacemaking efforts, they can generate a long and intense episode of
renewed fighting.39 To explain, Snyder and Vinjamuri appeal to bargaining,
arguing that amnesties represent a deal wherein spoilers surrender power in exchange
for immunity or a share in government control.40 The authors point to examples like El
Salvador (1992) and Sierra Leone (1999), which both involved embedding amnesty
laws within peace accords containing power-sharing stipulations. By neutralizing
opposition threats, rather than angering them, these amnesty deals paved the way
for fragile but durable periods of peace.
The peace-versus-justice debate between the human rights and peacemaker camps
remains unresolved. One reason is a lack of empirical studies examining whether
amnesties do in fact have a pacifying effect. A World Bank working paper finds a
small, positive effect for amnesties on civil war recurrence (meaning that amnesties
are associated with more violence).41 Another working paper by Eric Melander dis-
covers that amnesties are effective in decreasing violence, but only when they are
enacted by institutionally powerful governments.42 While valuable, these studies
are based on a limited number of conflict amnesties. Snyder and Vinjamuri’s work
is still the most systematic of published studies on amnesties, based on a qualitative
comparative engagement with thirty-two postauthoritarian and postconflict cases.
However, the authors discuss only a few high-profile cases in any detail, and their
conclusions are debatable.43
A second reason for deadlock is that each of the theoretical perspectives make
hidden empirical assumptions about the scope, timing, and target of conflict
37. Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003/4, 14.

38. Jeffery 2014, 122–27. East Timorese leaders, in coordination with Indonesian officials, offered a
broad amnesty in Article 14(c)(1) of a law establishing a joint truth commission called the Commission
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for Truth and Friendship (CTF). Citing this amnesty, the UN boycotted the CTF.
39. Stedman 1997, 5.
40. Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003/4.
41. Lie, Binningsbø, and Gates 2007, 41.
42. Melander 2009.
43. They argue that amnesties are crucial to “shore up peace and an improved human rights situation.”
See Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003/4, 33. Evidence from Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, and El Salvador appears
to contradict this claim in some ways; amnesties in each country attracted widespread disaffection with the
peace deals and continued government abuse. See, for example, William Reno, “When Peace is Worse
Than War,” New York Times, 11 May 2000.
amnesties. The human rights model tends to treat amnesties as if their main purpose is
to ignore questions of justice by providing blanket cover for atrocity criminals.
However, this does not stand up to the historical record. My data set codes conflict
amnesties based on whether they forgive combatants for serious violations of

human rights or humanitarian law. A precondition for such an amnesty is the presence
of widespread acts of violence against civilians, like mass killing, torture, disappear-
ance, or sexual violence.44 An amnesty is then coded as having immunities for serious
violations if (1) it explicitly provided immunity for any of the acts listed here; (2) the
amnesty provided a blanket immunity for all crimes committed during conflict; (3)
the amnesty did not contain an exception for acts considered to be in violation of
international law;45 or (4) the amnesty was worded in a legally ambivalent way
that allowed groups to escape criminal prosecution for serious violations. (See the
appendix for a more extended explanation of these categories.) Of the 297 conflict
amnesties since 1946, only seventy-seven (26%) fit these criteria. Far more amnesties
release political prisoners of conscience, forgive rebels for crimes against the state, or
aim to repatriate displaced individuals. A minority of amnesties explicitly provide
immunities for serious violations (SV).
Where the human rights model overestimates the number of blanket amnesties, the
peacemaker model focuses exclusively on a limited number of amnesties passed after
conflict termination, or in peace agreements. These too are a minority. Amnesties
passed after conflict termination make up only 116 of 297 (39.2%). The remaining
181 conflict amnesties were extended while the fighting was ongoing. Fifty-nine
of the 116 amnesties passed after termination were not embedded within peace agree-
ments, but passed unilaterally by the government. That leaves only 57 of 297 amnes-
ties (19.2%) that were offered in peace agreements following conflict. Like the
human rights approach, peacemakers tend to examine only one-quarter of amnesties
in their research. It is clear that, to move forward, theory must be more nuanced, and
data on amnesties must be disaggregated.
A third and final reason the peace-versus-justice debate remains unresolved is that
while the human rights and peacemaker models generate expectations about the
ability of amnesty laws to aggravate or end conflict, neither does much to engage
the extensive body of knowledge in political science on civil war termination and
recurrence. The two models instead rely on hard-to-measure psycho-social notions
like grievance or deterrence. And while some jurists and political scientists speak
to the importance of amnesties in bargaining,46 none actually uses bargaining
theory to develop or test expectations. For instance, what are the various ways that
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44. The official legal categorization of each of these acts varies by context, as well as the the particulars
of the situation. For this reason, I first examine whether it might reasonably be expected that violations of
international criminal law, international humanitarian law, or international human rights law occurred—
even if the matter was never legally adjudicated.
45. This type can be referred to as “qualified amnesties” because they forgive most crimes, except for
serious violations of international legal protections. See Laplante 2009.
46. Freeman 2009; Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003/4.
rebels might react to amnesty offers that come from their state adversaries? Will they
have some reason to suspect weakness or insincerity on the part of the offering gov-
ernment, and does this affect the likelihood of peace? I draw on the bargaining
approach to conflict to answer these questions, and to generate expectations about

the peace-promoting potential of conflict amnesties.
A Bargaining Theory of Conflict Amnesties

The Conflict Process
Most civil wars being fought today are not new, but rather new offshoots of previous
wars.47 For this reason, studying how to generate stable and lasting peace agreements
between actors already fighting is of paramount importance.48 An elegant approach to
this problem draws on bargaining theory, which considers how parties interact and
“search for advantage through accommodation.”49 Bargaining theory has long
been used to investigate interstate wars,50 but only more recently has it been
adapted to intrastate conflicts.51 A principal contribution of this tradition is to
model the perpetuation of war as a series of bargaining failures: governments and
opposition groups simply have a very difficult time communicating preferences,
reaching agreements, and trusting in the other side to keep its promises when agree-
ments are reached.52 Bargaining theory assumes that conflict over ideas and resources
is inevitable. It also expects that conflicts escalate to war and fail to end because of
two major complications: (1) information asymmetry, which is a lack of reliable esti-
mates of the opponent’s military capacity or fighting resolve; and (2) commitment
problems, which encapsulate the general “inability of parties to commit to deals.”53
Early work on bargaining in war focused mostly on the information asymmetry
problem. It assumed that wars are a “costly lottery” fought by sides that underestimate
their opponents because of incomplete or bad intelligence.54 In a situation of perfect
information, neither rebels nor state forces would start a disastrous civil war because
the outcome would be evident prior to fighting. When war is a real possibility,
however, both sides have an incentive to hide information regarding their military
capacity and their willingness to fight. The costly lottery model is fairly good at
explaining why wars start. However, it does not fully explain why certain wars
become intractable, nor why some wars consistently recur.55 In theory, the impulse
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47. Walter 2014.

48. Hartzell and Hoddie 2003; Hartzell, Hoddie, and Rothchild 2001.
49. Lebow 1996, 9.
50. Fearon 1995; Filson and Werner 2002; Powell 2002, 2006; Reiter 2003; Schelling 1960, 1966.
51. Fearon 2004; Walter 1997, 2004, 2009, 2014.
52. The theory brackets the debate over whether conflict actors are primarily motivated by greed or griev-
ance. See, for example, Collier and Hoeffler 2004.
53. Blattman and Miguel 2010.
54. Brito and Intriligator 1985; Wagner 2000.
55. Fearon 2004, 290.
to fight should subside with time, as opponents obtain reliable intelligence through
iterated conflict interactions, but this is often not the case.
A second “conflict process” model adapts early work on bargaining to account for
the persistence of internal armed conflict. In wars of long duration, it is not solely lack
of information, uncertainty, or miscalculation that is responsible for continued fight-
ing. Instead, as Robert Powell writes, “fighting ensues when the resolution of uncer-
tainty indicates that a state is facing an adversary it would rather fight than
accommodate.”56 In short, the decision to continue fighting is not an accident.
Self-interested fighting groups strategically toggle back and forth between coopera-
tion and coercion to gain leverage and maximize gains in a peace contract. In this
sense, “conflict [is a] part of the bargaining process rather than the end of the bargain-
ing process.”57
This bargaining process between civil war parties can be separated into two main
phases: the prenegotiation and negotiation periods. The prenegotiation phase, which
is prior to the initiation of formal talks, occurs while fighting is still ongoing. During
prenegotiation, combatants must send signals that they are interested in conducting
formal talks, or at least in temporarily ceasing hostilities. Sending these signals can
be very difficult because of regular breakdowns in communication. True signals
are “dismissed as noise, noise is mistaken for signals, and signals are recognized
for what they are but misinterpreted.”58 The real task for combatants is to sort out
whether gestures made by the other side are genuine or spurious. Negotiators often
shroud their own intentions during this period. “Phony bargaining,” where one or
both sides insincerely pursue accommodation, is a persistent concern.59 The result
is a constant risk of defection before periods of negotiation even commence.
The negotiation period, which encompasses formal talks and sometimes ends with
an official agreement, is subject less to signaling problems and more to problems of
commitment. Parties to talks can attempt to deceive their opponents about their will-
ingness to abide by various provisions, and they use periods of sustained negotiation
to regroup and re-arm. If negotiations are to succeed, parties must make promises that
the other side can trust. But how do combatants signal to opponents their desire to
seek a genuine resolution to conflict? They must make credible commitments that
can foster compliance and implementation. A credible commitment is a believable
assurance to Side X that Side Y will not threaten or use force to revise the terms
of any peace deal. Concerns over credible commitments are particularly acute for
rebel groups, who possess no means for enforcing the terms of the deal and who
are often asked to demobilize in exchange for power sharing or other terms of the set-
tlement. Already weaker in most cases, rebel groups are very reluctant to lay down
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arms. In the event that the government gains in strength and then decides to renege
56. Powell 2006, 176.

57. Smith and Stam 2004, 783.
58. Lebow 1996, 168.
59. Ibid., 12.
on the deal, the rebels will have no way to fight back. These commitment problems
are exacerbated in situations where political institutions are weak,60 no third parties
are present,61 and conflict actors are divided into large ethnic or religious blocs.62
Evidence suggests that the bargaining environment, as well as the terms of the deal,
are important for establishing credible commitments and ultimately securing a long-
lasting peace. For example, settlements that are mediated by third parties have had
some success in prolonging peace, though the scope of their success is uncertain.63
Those settlements with power-sharing provisions, which typically incorporate rebel
leaders into government or military positions, are also correlated with less conflict
recurrence.64 Mediation and power sharing are both pacifying because they
provide a better settlement design and improve monitoring of rebel and state
forces’ continued commitment.
Conflict Amnesties
In the literature, amnesties are often treated as an additional, and sometimes integral,
tool for making credible commitments to larger peace offers.65 As official acts of the
state, amnesties are binding contracts that can demonstrate the government’s willing-
ness to sue for peace.66 By publicly announcing an offer or legislating an amnesty, the
government is removing its own legal prerogative to hold challengers to state sover-
eignty criminally accountable. The move can also tie the government’s hands: by
legally foreclosing forms of punishment, the government makes it tougher to
renege on its own commitments to integrate the rebels into the political system.
At first blush, this logic seems clear enough. But the ability of amnesties to help
end armed conflict is not so straightforward, for two reasons. First, the link
between amnesties and credible commitments requires fleshing out. It is likely the
case that amnesties’ effects will depend on the conditions of their enactment, along
with their specific provisions. Second, theorists have not done enough to separate
between amnesties enacted in the prenegotiation conflict phase and those that
result from conflict-ending negotiations. As one observer argues, “there is a need
to differentiate between amnesties’ effects on conflict cessation (‘negative peace’)
and peace sustainability (‘positive peace’).”67 The next two sections take up this chal-
lenge. First, I consider whether amnesties will lead to conflict termination when they
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60. Campbell and Connolly 2012; Walter 1997, 2009, 2014.

61. Doyle and Sambanis 2002; Fortna 2008; Mattes and Savun 2010.
62. Walter 2006.
63. Quinn et al. 2013.
64. Hartzell and Hoddie 2007; Walter 2002.
65. Cobban 2007; Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003/4.
66. For the purposes of this paper, if a rebel groups wins a conflict, it becomes the state. Therefore, if a
victorious rebel group extends an amnesty to former government actors, I consider this an amnesty issued
by the state to an opposition group.
67. Arnould 2016, 7.
are passed during ongoing conflict. Second, I address how amnesties passed follow-
ing conflict termination can decrease the risk of conflict recurrence.
Amnesties and Conflict Termination
The state is the issuer of amnesties. The question for rebel groups engaged in conflict
is whether to accept the state’s amnesty-supported bargaining offer or to continue
fighting. If the rebel group accepts the offer, then the state has the option of honoring
the offer or reneging. If the rebel group accepts, and the state honors the amnesty
offer, then the conflict can move from a fighting phase to a negotiation phase,
which could eventually lead to conflict termination.
However, amnesties issued during the prenegotiation period, amid rounds of fight-
ing, hold only a false hope of conflict termination. The reason is adverse selection. In
microeconomic theory, adverse selection is caused by the presence of “asymmetric
information prior to the contract period.”68 Before formal talks have begun, and fight-
ing is ongoing, amnesties cannot overcome the problem of adverse selection. They
are noisy signals that will either be misused by the government or misinterpreted
by rebels.
Consider that in most civil wars, rebel fighters rely on low-cost, high-reward guer-
rilla and terror tactics.69 Weaker than state forces, rebels rely on a long-term, piece-
meal strategy of slowly gaining control in the country’s peripheries, while state forces
must engage in expensive counter-insurgency campaigns.70 In this context, rebels
search hard for evidence that the government is growing weary of fighting, and gov-
ernments attempt to lure rebels into deals that require demobilization. In this environ-
ment, amnesties will be an instrument of asymmetric information, not a solution to
the problem of asymmetric information. To see the logic, we must consider why gov-
ernments make amnesty offers in the first place.
There are two scenarios in which governments offer amnesties to rebels amid fight-
ing. In the blackmail scenario, the rebel group moves first. It make demands and the
government responds. One tactic rebels often pursue is to insist on amnesty as a pre-
condition to a ceasefire and the commencement of formal talks. In this scenario,
amnesties have the potential to backfire on the government.71 If the government
gives in to rebel demands and makes the amnesty offer, then rebels interpret the
signal as evidence that the government is weakening, or that its fighting resolve is
waning. In response, the rebel leadership declines the offer and continues pursuing
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its strategy of slow military gains. Qualitative evidence suggests the possibility of
rebel misinterpretation is a constant worry for state leaders. Based on interviews in
68. Rauchhaus 2009, 881.

69. Kalyvas and Balcells 2010.
70. Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan 2009.
71. For blackmail, see Jeffery 2014, 103.
the Democratic Republic of Congo, Valerie Arnould finds that “the government was
concerned that granting amnesties to its opponents would be interpreted as a sign of
weakness.”72 Whether or not the gesture is truly conciliatory, rebels in the blackmail
scenario will take amnesty offers as evidence that they are in a superior position. A
rational move in this circumstance is to continue fighting in hopes of a victory rather
than agreeing to negotiate further.
In the second, phony bargaining scenario, governments initiate amnesty offers
without requests from rebels. In this scenario, amnesties are still unlikely to overcome
problems of adverse selection. Uncertain about the government’s preferences, rebels
read the signal with cynicism, and interpret the amnesty as the state’s attempt to trick
them into a bad deal. This is the second reason amnesties are not productive in the
prenegotiation period: rebels question whether the government is actually willing
to abide by its offer. For example, in May 1982, at the height of a grisly civil war
between the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (GRNU) and right-wing gov-
ernment death squads, General Efrain Ríos Montt issued Decreto Ley 33–82. This
amnesty forgave guerrillas for “past political and related offences to persons who
applied for it to appropriate civilian and military authorities within thirty days.”73
To qualify, guerrillas had to surrender to authorities. This amnesty followed a
bloody, five-month counter-insurgency campaign and a March coup that installed
Ríos Montt. Ultimately, the rebels did not accept because they suspected that Ríos
Montt’s offer was insincere, and that he was engaged in phony bargaining. The
1982 amnesty did nothing to curb the violence, nor did five additional amnesties
that were passed between 1983 and 1988.
Problems of adverse selection can tank the prospects that amnesties will inspire a
bargained solution to armed conflict.74 Without complete information, combatants
fret over the other sides’ true preferences, and they also worry that they are being
suckered.
These adverse selection problems are only exacerbated when immunities for
serious violations are proposed in the amnesty offer. Serious violation (SV) amnesties
are especially unpopular with the winning coalitions that support state leadership, and
with civilian populations that have been victimized during war. For example, Sierra
Leoneans complained in global media outlets that amnesty, if it were awarded to the
RUF, would put “mass murderers” in political office.75 In the blackmail scenario,
where rebels demand amnesty, government promises to include SV provisions is a
signal that communicates extreme government weakness to rebels. If the government
is willing to promise that opposition fighters will not be held accountable for terrible
crimes against civilians, then it is a sign that the government is so desperate for an end
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72. Arnould 2016, 17.

73. Amnesty Law Database, available at <http://www.incore.ulst.ac.uk/cgi-bin/Amnesty/agree.pl?
full=272%22>.
74. This may be a problem with concessions of any kind because they confirm preconceptions that the
government lacks resolve. See Sndyer and Diesing 1978.
75. Mufson 1999.
to the conflict that it will accept a tremendous blow to its own legitimacy. In the
phony bargaining scenario, where governments lead with the idea of an SV immunity,
the rebels will doubt that the deal is genuine. Giving an SV amnesty requires that the
government pay a high price with its winning coalition, who despise the rebel oppo-
sition and do not want it completely absolved of wrongdoing. It is thus hard to
believe that the government is willing to act with such munificence on its own volition.
Therefore, SV amnesties should only enhance the adverse selection problems that
amnesties present in the first place. Based on this reasoning, I propose the following
hypotheses:
H1a: Amnesties offered during periods of fighting will be associated with a lowered
probability of conflict termination.
H1b: Amnesties with SV immunity provisions offered during periods of fighting will
be associated with a lowered probability of conflict termination.
Amnesties and Duration of Peace
According to bargaining logic, amnesties issued in the prenegotiation phase will not
result in the end of fighting because of adverse selection issues. In this context of
great uncertainty over the enemies’ preferences, amnesties are nosiy signals.
However, the function of amnesties changes as fighting terminates.76 After sides
fight to a stalemate, they will use amnesties less as a source of information
because the postconflict environment is already rich in intelligence about fighting
capacity and resolve. After all, combatants decide to stop fighting in the first place
based on what they learn through iterated battlefield interactions. The goal for the
government using conflict amnesties during negotiations is not to send signals of
its willingness to bargain, but to send signals of commitment that will compel the
rebels to reach a deal. Thus, in the context of negotiation, adverse selection problems
give way to credible commitment problems.
Long-term peace requires credible commitments to disarmament and demobiliza-
tion. Rebels are not comfortable surrendering arms and disbanding if they do not
believe that the government will refrain from attacking again in the future. The
task for negotiators is to reach a peace settlement even though both sides recognize
that future exogenous factors, like a sudden change in the balance of forces, may later
generate incentives to renege on the deal.
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Amnesties can send signals of commitment in the negotiation phase. First, they are
part of a longer and iterated process of postconflict interactions, rather than a one-
shot, unilateral offer extended during fighting. Second, in strong states, amnesties
are enforceable laws often associated with the establishment of a refreshed postwar
76. Kreutz 2010. Civil war terminations are marked by (1) victories by one side; (2) peace agreements or
ceasefires between warring parties; or (3) low fighting activity for more than a year.
legal order.77 Instead of getting lost in the noise of wartime signaling, amnesties after
termination can help governments establish a fresh new set of institutions to reinforce
peace, and to bring the remnants of the former rebellion into the political fold.78
Third, in weak or highly fragmented states, amnesties might also make tenuous
peace more agreeable by insulating former combatants against reprisal in the event
that the distribution of power between former opponents shifts. Surrounding 1997
peace accords in Tajikistan, for instance, head of state Emomali Rakhmon offered
amnesty to dozens of warlords to bring them into the ruling coalition and neutralize
the threat against his government.79 Whether the state is institutionally strong or
weak, negotiated amnesties can be part of a long-lasting end-game, rather than fleet-
ing wartime overtures toward the opposition. On the basis of this reasoning, I propose
the following hypothesis:
H2a: Amnesties issued following conflict termination will be associated with a

decreased probability of conflict recurrence.
Hypothesis 2a is subject to important conditions related to reputation and commit-

ment. The commitment problem in the negotiation period is caused by “asymmetric
information during the contract period” and aggravated by uncertainty “stemming
from the inability to monitor” other actors after a deal is reached.80 Commitment
failure occurs when one side decides not to abide by the agreement. In one such
instance, governments are the defectors. State leaders often have an incentive to chal-
lenge an agreement’s terms, or threaten coercion, following negotiation. The reason is
that governments are loss averse, and peace agreements nearly always entail some
kind of unpalatable concessions of authority to rebels.81 An amnesty is one such con-
cession. It requires forfeiting legal authority over criminal prosecutions to inspire
rebels to agree to peace.
However, amnesty could simultaneously make it difficult for the government to
comply because leaders worry that amnesties will damage the state’s reputation.
Governments seek to develop a reputation for being tough, which wards off future
insurrection.82 A conciliatory gesture, amnesties are perceived by governments as
creating an opposite reputation for weakness. States that want to avoid this perception
will be inclined to renege on amnesties or later impose more onerous conditions.
Newer research suggests that reputation effects make conciliatory gestures danger-
ous but that a peace agreement can mitigate this danger.83 Peace agreements are
useful not necessarily because they keep rebels from defecting but because they
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77. Campbell and Connolly 2012.

78. See Mallinder 2012.
79. Driscoll 2012, 140.
80. Rauchhaus 2009, 881.
81. DeRouen and Chowdhury 2018.
82. Walter 2006.
83. Joshi and Quinn 2016.
serve as a legally binding framework that can check against government noncompli-
ance.84 Agreements normally result from many rounds of bargaining and they often
include provisions that allow for extensive monitoring during implementation. If gov-
ernments take steps to implement, their commitments become more reliable and less
obviously based on moment-to-moment power political calculations. When amnes-
ties are a part of this broader effort, they will be associated with longer peace.
Amnesties should thus be more likely to stick when they are embedded within
formal peace agreements.
Once again, the Guatemala example is instructive. An amnesty was passed in
December 1996 following a comprehensive peace settlement between rebels and
the government. This amnesty was far more likely to stick. The peace agreement
framework resulted from a six-year process of negotiation involving members of
former opposition groups, civil society, European negotiators, and the UN. The pres-
ence of these actors not only helped the sides make commitments but also made them
more credible. The 1996 amnesty in Guatemala did not overburden the former rebels
in relation to the government, as some of the other amnesties did. Whereas previous
amnesties required that rebels lay down arms with little assurance that the govern-
ment would abide by its commitments, this agreement stipulated that the state and
rebels would have to follow procedures reviewable by the judiciary. This amnesty,
embedded within a larger brokered peace deal between opponents in a vicious
civil war, is associated with a peace spell that is now twenty years old. This
example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to issue an amnesty until fighting
has slowed, and the negotiation phase is well under way.
The Guatemalan amnesty was also prudent because, knowingly or unknowingly,
it avoided a second cause of commitment failure: immunities for serious rights
violations. Agreed upon within the 1996 Peace Accord and subsequent National
Reconciliation Law, the amnesty forgave combatants for common, political, and secur-
ity crimes. However, it stopped short of granting immunity for offenses to international
human rights and humanitarian law, which the Guatemalan government was duty
bound to enforce. This meant that combatants could still be held accountable in the
future for genocide and crimes against humanity.85
I predict that serious violations amnesties—which unlike the Guatemalan amnesty
foreclose the possibility of prosecution—will not promote peace, even if they are
passed following conflict termination. The reason is that they will encourage defec-
tion by both sides. This is counter-intuitive. These amnesties give rebels everything
they want, which should make them more devoted to any settlement. However, SV
amnesties create a reputation for governments as highly conciliatory, which rebels
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will exploit in the future. They send a message to the rebels that violent tactics, no
matter how indiscriminately applied, will be noncostly. Having previously gotten
away with egregious violence with no penalty, amnestied rebel groups will in the
84. Bell 2008.

85. Burt 2014.
future see no reason to avoid breaking the bargain and reigniting conflict when the
opportunity again presents itself. As Barbara Walter writes, “Negotiated settlements
[can] provide information about a government’s willingess to compromise with rebel
groups, signaling to potential challengers that rebellion is likely to be rewarded.”86

Rebels who benefit from amnesty protections know that should they choose to
resume the war, fighting hard against the government and using atrocity-level violence
against civilians may again be excused. Not only that, it may even result in gains.
SV amnesties may compound the difficulties that the government has in imple-
menting the terms of peace. Domestic victims of violence in civil war do not want
their tormentors to walk free, and outside audiences generally deem SV amnesties
to be a violation of international norms. The ruling coalition in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC), to quote experts, “strongly opposed granting any
immunity to the rebels, finding it politically unacceptable. The government position
on amnesty was generally even stricter than prevailing international standards.”87
The stigma against large-scale rights violations and war crimes is so strong that
some rebel leaders, like Laurent Nkunda of the rebel CNDP in DR Congo, do not
negotiate hard for such immunities because it would mean confessing to terrible
acts.88 Because SV amnesties are so unpopular, the government will also find it
more difficult to follow through with any deal that involves legal immunity. It
would prefer a return to coercion. This was the case in 2016 Colombia, where
Álvaro Uribe and his supporters protested against the state’s initial peace deal with
FARC because it provided too much leniency with regard to justice for atrocity
crimes (though it did not offer an outright immunity).89 If these demands become
too costly for governments, they may seek a revision to the deal, which could lead
to breakdown and the resumption of war. The irony of the commitment problem,
exacerbated by concern for reputation, is this: if amnesties offers are too favorable
to rebels, it may weaken their overall ability to make peace.
H2b: Amnesties embedded in peace agreements will be associated with a decreased
risk of conflict recurrence.
H2c: Amnesties with SV immunities will be associated with an increased risk of
conflict recurrence.
Research Design
My theory of conflict amnesties focuses on the motivations of state and rebel groups
that are bargaining to end armed conflict. The theory offers predictions about whether
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000012
amnesties help to bring about conflict termination, and if so, how amnesties affect the
duration of the post-termination peace. Thus, there are two dependent variables for
86. Walter 2009, 257.

87. Davis and Hayner 2009, 16.
88. Ibid., 19.
89. “FARC ‘Amnesty’: Colombian Marchers Reject ‘Impunity,”’ BBC News, 13 December 2014.
this analysis. One is whether a conflict ends in the first place (termination), and the
other is whether and how long a conflict takes to resume after fighting has stopped
(recurrence). While many studies separate these into two different questions, the
theory demands a consideration of both because it makes predictions concerning

the pre- and post-termination effects of amnesties.90 Testing the hypotheses thus
requires the analysis to proceed in two steps. In the first step, I test whether amnesties
are associated with conflict termination when offered during fighting. In a second
step, I analyze whether postconflict amnesties are associated with longer periods of
peace before recurrence.
Level of Analysis: Fighting Dyads
All of the models in this article use the dyad as the level of analysis so that the rela-
tionship between states and specific rebel groups can be examined. I use data sets pro-
duced by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, which include a separate panel for all
intrastate conflict pairings involving the state and a single rebel group between 1946
and 2014.91 The data set includes every year that a dyadic conflict was ongoing up
until the year that a particular episode terminated, defined as at least one year of
non-activity.92 In the event of a termination, two variables are included: one measures
the length of time in days that the post-termination peace spell lasted, and another reg-
isters whether the conflict recurs. If a dyadic conflict recurred, then a new panel of
ongoing conflict years is added, starting in the first year of fighting and ending in
the year of termination. Of the 619 conflict episodes that began before 2010—the
last year for which reliable data on amnesties are available—588 terminated. Of
those, 182 experienced conflict recurrence. This is a baseline recurrence rate of 31
percent among all intrastate armed conflicts.
The independent variables of interest in the models are amnesties. An amnesty that
is offered or passed during ongoing conflict is assigned a 1 for the appropriate dyad-
year. Post-termination amnesties are coded as 1 in the dyad-year of termination if they
were offered or passed within two years of the end of fighting. Amnesties were coded
as having happened prior to a termination if their passage date preceded the date of
conflict termination recorded by UCDP. They were coded as post-termination amnes-
ties if they were passed on a date following termination. If the date of the amnesty was
the same as the final date of conflict—which happens when amnesties are embedded
in peace settlements—then the amnesties were coded as occurring post-termination.
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90. Plus, as noted in Licklider 1995, questions of conflict termination really amount to questions about
nonrecurrence.
91. Harbom, Melander, and Wallensteen 2008; Pettersson and Wallensteen 2015. UCDP defines conflict
as “a contested incompatibility that concerns government and/or territory where the use of armed force
between two parties [a conflict dyad], of which at least one is the government of a state, results in at
least twenty-five battle-related deaths.” Gleditsch et al. 2002, 618–19.
92. Kreutz 2010.
The dyadic panel data set includes 163 conflicts that ended in victory by either gov-
ernment or rebel sides. These must be excluded from the models analyzing postcon-
flict duration of peace. The theory predicts that amnesties are poor prenegotiation
signals, but are good signals of commitment in the negotiation phase. Conflicts
that end in victory might still involve prenegotiation signals at some point over the
course of the war, so I choose to retain these conflicts in the analyses considering con-
flict termination. In this context, amnesties could be phony bargaining tools that give
one side an advantage. However, conflicts that terminate with a victory do not feature
rounds of negotiation. Victors impose their will on their vanquished opponents, rather
than bargaining. For this reason, victories are excluded from the set of analyses mod-
eling conflict recurrence. Following a civil war victory, we should neither expect
amnesties to be extended to rebels nor to be used as a bargaining chip. When victories
are excluded, the postconflict termination cases are pared down from 588 to 425 ter-
minations, with 161 recurrences. Because conflicts that end in victory are less likely
to recur, when these cases victories are excluded, the baseline recurrence rate for ter-
minated conflicts increases to 37.9 percent.
Selection
My argument is that amnesties are partially endogenous to the conflict process but
that, under certain conditions, amnesties might still assist in overcoming bargaining
problems. Assessing this argument statistically requires a modeling design that
accounts for selection issues. It could be that some civil war factors both inspire
the passage of amnesty laws and affect the overall likelihood of conflict termination
or recurrence. If this is the case, then selection bias will be present. Resulting from
strategic choices, amnesty “treatments” are assigned nonrandomly to conflict
groups. Because the data are drawn from the observed world, it is not possible to
solve this problem by manipulation, randomly assigning amnesty laws to some
dyads and not others.93
Given these issues, I use coarsened exact matching (CEM) techniques in both
stages of the analysis to address issues of selection.94 In an ideal set of observed
data, treatment and control groups are “balanced,” meaning that the groups possess
the same mean values of all covariates. In a situation of perfect balance, one can
simply perform a difference in means test to assess the effects of treatment.
However, in most observational data, perfect balance of this kind rarely exists.
CEM can be used to create more balance between groups by (1) generating
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matched strata that share the same levels of different pretreatment characteristics (2)
“pruning” observations that are not matched and (3) using the number of treated
and untreated observations in each stratum to create weights for further analysis.95
93. Lupu 2013.

94. Iacus, King, and Porro 2012.
95. Ibid.
For this study, matching has two advantages over selection models, like a two-
stage least squared regression. The first is theoretical. To perform a two-stage
model, one must have a clear theory of what factors inform the treatment assignment
process.96 Yet no established theory of conflict-amnesty provision exists. Little

research addresses this issue, and the theory developed here cannot answer certain
crucial questions. For instance, in the prenegotiation phase of conflict, if state
leaders know that rebels may interpret amnesties as a sign of weakness, why
would they issue them in the first place? Because we know very little about these
decisions, we can only theoretically speculate about the assignment process. This
means that a selection model would be difficult to justify. A second advantage of
matching is methodological. Two-stage models introduce a number of identification
issues related to the use of instrumental variables,97 as well a host of restrictive and
potentially unwarranted statistical assumptions.98 For these reasons, matching
methods are the better choice.
Results
Conflict Termination
I begin by testing Hypotheses 1a and 1b, which make predictions about the effects of
amnesties on the prospects of conflict termination. Terminations could follow well
after amnesties are offered but still be causally related. Therefore, the main
amnesty variables are coded as 1 in the year if an amnesty was offered in timet or
in timet−1. This allows us to test whether a termination followed at any point in the
year of the amnesty, or the year following, thus avoiding bias against findings in
support of amnesties. Of the 181 amnesties extended to rebels amid fighting
(AMNESTY), 32 (17.7%) were followed by conflict termination within two years.
Twenty-nine amnesties forgive rebels for human rights abuses (HR AMNESTY). Only
five (17.2%) of those were followed by a termination within two years.
To perform a matching analysis, we must first speculate about what pretreatment
factors might make the government more likely to offer an amnesty in a prenegotia-
tion phase of conflict. These factors are separated into three categories: political con-
ditions, general conflict dynamics, and conditions related to the bargaining
environment. The first category includes political conditions that might make amnes-
ties more or less likely. Variables in this category are:
1. A binary measure of whether the conflict was ongoing after 1998 (AFTER 1998),
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given that the international community has since officially advocated against
more expansive amnesties.99
96. Heckman 1976.

97. Because amnesties are such a specific phenomenon, a good instrument may not exist.
98. Simmons and Hopkins 2005.
99. Jeffery 2014.
2. A binary measure of whether the country is transitioning to democracy (DEMO

TRANS), since amnesties are often passed during regime change in response to
demands for “transitional justice.”100
3. A normalized 0–1 measure of judicial independence (JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE).101

This indicator, which correlates highly with binary measures of democracy
(0.77), controls for the possibility that amnesties will be more necessary in situ-
ations where rebels have a reasonable expectation of prosecution by domestic
courts.
A second category of control variables involves general conflict dynamics.

Amnesties are likely a function of how intractable a conflict is. The following vari-
ables, taken from the UCDP Armed Conflict Data Set, attempt to account for
intractability:
1. An interval indicator of how many years the civil war lasts (YEARS AT WAR)
2. A binary measure of whether the fight is over territory (TERRITORY)
3. A binary measure of whether the conflict reached 1,000 battle deaths (INTENSITY
LEVEL)
4. A binary measure of whether the conflict had an ethnicized dimension (ETHNIC)
5. A continuous indicator of how many other rebel groups are fighting in the con-
flict (DYADS). If rebel groups are jointly participating in conflict, or attempting to
negotiate with the government, this variable could also influence the bargaining
environment.
A third and final category of control variables involves conditions that influence
the bargaining environment between a rebel group and the government. These
include:
1. A continuous indicator counting how many previous amnesties have been

offered to the rebel group (PREVIOUS AMNESTIES). Some governments may
simply be more willing to offer amnesties, or it could be the case that govern-
ments design deals in iterations, using trial and error and making improvements
until rebels agree to negotiate.102
2. An ordinal indicator (−2 to 2) measuring how strong rebel forces are in compar-
ison to the government (REBEL STRENGTH). It could be that governments are less
likely to offer amnesties to rebel groups that are much weaker because state
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forces will hold out hope that the rebels can be defeated. Negative scores indicate
weaker rebel forces.103
100. Data on democratic transition taken from Polity IV. See Marshall, Jaggers, and Gurr 2013.
101. Linzer and Staton 2015.
103. Taken from the Non-state Actor Data Set. See Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan 2009.
3. An ordinal indicator (0–2) measuring whether the fighting capacity of the rebels
is low, moderate, or high (FIGHTING CAPACITY).104 This measure is different than
rebel strength because it captures the ability of the rebels to mobilize and strike
state targets. The higher a rebel group’s fighting capacity, the stronger its bar-
gaining position, which should make the government more willing to accommo-
date. Inversely, a group that cannot easily return to the battlefield is unlikely to
convince governments to provide an amnesty.
4. A binary indicating whether both state and rebel forces were guilty of atrocity-
level crimes during the civil war (BLOODY HANDS). This variable is drawn from
UCDP’s One-Sided Violence data, which registers massacres committed by
various groups.105 The logic here is that if both sides to the conflict were
guilty of serious violations, then they will be more likely to agree to a deal
involving reciprocal immunity.
5. A binary variable measuring whether a UN Peacekeeping operation was present
(UNPKO).106 By monitoring, peacekeeping forces might help facilitate early bar-
gaining between conflict actors.
All of these factors might feasibly affect both the choice to extend an amnesty to
rebels, and ultimately, the chance that a conflict will terminate. Therefore, I start by con-
ducting a pre-matching analysis to observe which variables correlate with amnesties and
with conflict termination. This pre-analysis consists of a Logit predicting the occurrence
of an amnesty, using all of the mentioned variables as covariates, followed by other
Logits predicting conflict termination using the same covariates. Five variables are sig-
nificantly correlated with amnesties: DEMO TRANS, JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE, TERRITORY,
INTENSITY LEVEL, and PREVIOUS AMNESTIES. These variables also appear to be correlated
with conflict termination, suggesting a concern over selection (see appendix for
Table A2 of findings and explanation). Therefore, these variables are used to match
observations. The CEM matching procedure works well. Based on these five variables,
the data are grouped into fifty-one strata, thirty-nine of which are matched. Only thirty-
nine of 2,256 observations are unmatched (see appendix Table A3).
Perfect balance is not achieved, however, so it is necessary to include all of the
covariates at their original values in the models correlating amnesties with conflict
termination, along with matching weights to reflect the different size of the
matched strata. This, along with two additional predictors—state-level controls for
logged population (POPULATION) and whether the country is low-income (LOW
INCOME)107—helps account for remaining variation. The final Logit models are
reported in Table 1. Since multiple rebel groups might fight in the same conflict,
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robust standard errors are clustered by a conflict ID produced by UCDP.
104. Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan 2009.

105. Eck and Hultman 2007.
106. Coded from the list available at <http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/documents/operationslist.pdf>.
107. World Bank Country and Lending Groups data available at <https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/
knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups>.
M1 is a basic model with only the AMNESTY and YEARS AT WAR variables, and no
additional controls. The model shows a statistically and substantively negative rela-
tionship (β = −1.048) between amnesty and conflict termination, as predicted in
Hypothesis 1a. According to M1, even when matching observations and controlling
for selection, the probability that a conflict will terminate following any amnesty is
13.8 percent less than conflicts without amnesties.108 M2 tests Hypothesis 1b,
adding a variable that registers whether serious violations immunities are incorp-
orated into the amnesty law. Amnesties that forgive serious violations are a subset
of all amnesties offered to rebels, so in this specification the SV AMNESTY variable
should be treated as an additive term wherein the coefficient will indicate the differ-
ence between all amnesties and those amnesties with human rights provisions. The
interaction is statistically and substantively insignificant, indicating that no improve-
ment comes when rebels are amnestied for serious violations.
Figure 2 plots the marginal effect of all amnesties on the prospects of conflict ter-
mination at different values of YEARS AT WAR. In the left panel, one can see that amnes-
ties passed in the first twenty-five years of conflict are negatively associated with
conflict termination. This effect becomes indistinguishable from zero at the thirty-
year mark. This makes sense based on bargaining theory. As wars carry on, and
sides gather more information, amnesties are less deceiving signals. They are not
as likely to be misused or misinterpreted. The right panel of this chart shows the mar-
ginal effect that adding a serious violations immunity has, in comparison to all
amnesties. The confidence interval never passes the zero line, demonstrating that
amnesties with SV provisions do not have an effect that is appreciably different
than amnesties in the aggregate. This too is predicted by the theory.
M3 uses the same operationalization of the amnesty variables but includes all of the
additional covariates at their original levels. The findings still support Hypothesis 1a and
the substantive negative effect of the amnesty variable increases in magnitude. Some of
the control variables are also significant: conflicts occurring in transitional democracies
have a much higher probability of termination, as do those where rebel fighting capacity
is much higher. Conflicts are less likely to end if they reached a high level of intensity
because they become more intractable as each side escalates. Greater rebel fighting
capacity is also correlated with a higher probability of termination, probably because
the government will not seek to escalate against a side that is able to mobilize quickly.
M2 and M3 use an interaction variable to measure SV provisions. But what if the
mean effect of all SV amnesties is compared only to the mean effect of those amnes-
ties without SV immunities? To analyze this, M4 alters the way that the main amnesty
variables are operationalized. Rather than including indicators of all amnesties and an
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000012
additional term measuring SV immunities, M4 splits amnesties into two types: those
with SV provisions (SV AMNESTY) and those without (NO SV AMNESTY). The difference
between these types sharpens into view. The coefficient on the SV AMNESTY variable is
negative, statistically significant, and larger than the coefficient for NO SV AMNESTY.
108. This calculation is generated using STATA’s margins package.

TABLE 1. Amnesties and conflict termination
M1 M2 M3 M4
b/se b/se b/se b/se
AMNESTY −1.048*** −1.027*** −1.053***

(0.183) (0.222) (0.221)
SV AMNESTY −0.127 −0.535 −1.588***
(0.536) (0.615) (0.517)
NO SV AMNESTY −1.053***
(0.221)
AFTER 1998 0.0123 0.0123
(0.255) (0.255)
DEMO TRANS 0.631* 0.631*
(0.382) (0.382)
JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE −0.581* −0.581*
(0.342) (0.342)
YEARS AT WAR −0.092*** −0.092*** −0.065** −0.065**
(0.020) (0.020) (0.026) (0.026)
ETHNIC DISPUTE 0.0243 0.0243
(0.263) (0.263)
TERRITORY 0.255 0.255
(0.197) (0.197)
INTENSITY LEVEL −0.931*** −0.931***
(0.253) (0.253)
DYADS −0.093 −0.093
(0.084) (0.084)
PREVIOUS AMNESTIES 0.016 0.016
(0.091) (0.091)
REBEL STRENGTH −0.129 −0.129
(0.164) (0.164)
REBEL CAPACITY 0.818*** 0.818***
(0.234) (0.234)
BLOODY HANDS −0.052 −0.052
(0.182) (0.182)
UNPKO 0.604* 0.604*
(0.351) (0.351)
LOW INCOME −0.301* −0.301*
(0.156) (0.156)
POPULATION(LN) −0.154** −0.154**
(0.074) (0.074)
Constant −0.506*** −0.506*** 1.901*** 1.901***
(0.138) (0.138) (0.725) (0.725)
Observations 2256 2256 2159 2159
Pseudo-R2 0.064 0.064 0.122 0.122
Log-likelihood −1157.3 −1157.3 −1027.7 −1027.7
Note: Baseline category for each model are conflicts with no amnesty at all. Errors clustered by conflict. *p < .10; **p <
.05; ***p < .01.
The difference in amnesties is not merely a statistically significant factor, but

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000012
also substantively significant. Figure 3 plots the marginal effects of each variable
from M4, and compares them to M3. One can see that the overall effect of amnesties,
depicted in the left panel, is to decrease the probability of termination by 12.6 percent.
But when these amnesties are disaggregated in the right panel, it becomes clear that
those with SV immunities are associated with an even lower probability of termina-
tion, as predicted in the theory. NO SV AMNESTY is associated with a −.124 change in
expected probability of termination. For SV AMNESTY, the change is −.148. Conflicts
with serious violations amnesties are 2.4 percent less likely to end than those with
regular amnesties.
FIGURE 2. Marginal effect of amnesties
Overall, results from Models 1 to 4 create a clear picture of amnesties offered amid
violent conflict. Amnesties as a whole are negatively associated with the probability
of conflict termination, and those with SV provisions are even less likely to contribute
to the end of fighting than those without. These findings support the hypotheses gen-
erated by the bargaining theory. Amnesties serve as noisy signals while armed con-
flict is ongoing. In response to amnesties offered in the prenegotiation phase during
fighting, rebels will most likely continue hostilities.
Conflict Recurrence
The second piece of the empirical puzzle is the relationship between conflict amnes-
ties and the sustainability of peace (Hypotheses 2a–2c). I construct events history
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000012
models to test the relationship between amnesties and duration of peace before con-
flict recurrence. Weibull regressions are used to estimate the probability of conflict
recurrence given the survival of a peace spell to timet, measured in days.109
109. Weibull models are favored over Cox models because the data exhibit temporal dependence. The
ancillary parameter p is .58, meaning that the probability of recurrence decreases substantially the longer
the postconflict peace lasts.
FIGURE 3. Marginal effect of amnesties
In these models of conflict recurrence, some of the variables change slightly. First,
amnesty is scored as 1 if it is passed in the same year as the date of termination, or
within two years following. Amnesties passed in the same year but prior to termina-
tion are included to allow for uncertainty over conflict termination dates, and to
account for the possibility that amnesties passed prior to the absolute end of hostilities
are still part of a larger postconflict bargaining process. The two-year lag following
termination is built into the measure because amnesties are often passed over one year
following the official date of termination registered in UCDP’s dyadic conflict data
set. Amnesties passed within this window of fighting’s conclusion are commonly
an extension of the negotiated settlement. Second, these models include measures
of whether the conflict amnesty was embedded in a peace agreement (PAG) to test
directly Hypothesis 2b. I coded this based on information present in the
Transitional Justice Research Collaborative Data. And third, the YEARS AT WAR vari-
able is changed to measure the number of years the previous fighting episode lasted
prior to termination.110
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000012
Multivariate events history models must also use matching methods to account for
selection. It could be that factors affecting the conflict or bargaining dynamic are
associated both with the decision to pass a postconflict amnesty, and with the
110. Evidence suggests that short wars are likely to recur because both sides have too little information.
See Doyle and Sambanis 2002; Walter 2004.
likelihood of an extended peace. To handle this issue, I follow the same procedure as
before. I first conduct a pre-matching analysis (reported in the appendix). This analy-
sis suggests that four variables are associated with the passage of a postconflict
amnesty: AFTER 1998, TERRITORY, DYADS, and REBEL STRENGTH. Each of these variables
is also associated with the stability or instability of peace, so they are the ones
used to create matched strata.
The matching procedure, which again performs well, generates sixteen strata,
fifteen of which are matched (see appendix Table A5). Only five observations are
unmatched and pruned from the analysis. The imbalance between the strata is
reduced to a near-zero value. To incorporate this information into the Weibull
models, I include strata identifiers as a frailty parameter. This allows observations
within each matched stratum to share a baseline hazard rate, much like using
random effects in a regression analysis. In essence, the statistical tests are allowing
groups with different combinations of pre-amnesty conditions to share the same
risk of conflict recurrence. This controls for the fact that cases in various strata
might be more failure prone than others. We can thus assess the effect of treatment
while accounting for heterogeneous risk factors, along with additional control vari-
ables to account for remaining variation.
Table 2 reports the results of four Weibull models. The first, M5, is a basic bivari-
ate model. In support of Hypothesis 2, the coefficient is negative, suggesting a cor-
relation between amnesty and a decreased likelihood of conflict recurrence.
However, the coefficient is not statistically significant. Its p-value is 0.096. M6
includes additive terms for HR AMNESTY and PEACE AGREEMENT (PAG) AMNESTY,
similar to the construction of M2 and M3 in the previous section. Amnesty has a neg-
ative coefficient, as does PAG AMNESTY. HR AMNESTY is positive, indicating that these
amnesties are associated with an increased risk of recurrence when compared to all
amnesties, yet the coefficient is not significant. None are. M7 demonstrates that
these results stay the same when all confounding variables are included.
Taken together, Models 5 to 7 lend only weak support to Hypothesis 2a. Amnesties
passed after fighting are associated with a lengthened peace on average, but not at con-
ventional levels of statistical significance. Furthermore, peace agreement and SV
amnesties show no significant difference from the average effects of all amnesties.
It remains possible that the weakness of Models 5 to 7 is attributable to the fact that
the average effect of amnesties is not uniform, and that different amnesties should be
modeled separately. Models 8 and 9 split amnesties into two groups, rather than oper-
ationalizing the specific properties of amnesties as additive terms. In these models,
one can find support for Hypotheses 2b and 2c. M8 shows that amnesties included
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000012
within peace agreements are associated with less risk of conflict recurrence, in statisti-
cally significant fashion. The coefficient for NO PAG AMNESTY is in the same direction,
but it does not achieve statistical significance. The effect of amnesties outside of
peace agreements is not statistically distinguishable from zero when compared to
duration of peace in non-amnesty contexts. However, amnesties embedded within
larger peace agreement frameworks are associated with long periods of peace, com-
pared to the average conflict that lacks such an amnesty.
TABLE 2. Amnesties and conflict recurrence
M5 M6 M7 M8 M9
b/se b/se b/se b/se b/se
AMNESTY −0.371* −0.123 −0.449

(0.223) (0.294) (0.298)
SV AMNESTY 0.390 0.466 −0.603
(0.470) (0.497) (0.403)
NO SV AMNESTY −0.748***
(0.266)
PAG AMNESTY −0.679 −0.773* −1.021***
(0.420) (0.441) (0.324)
NO PAG AMNESTY −0.462
(0.303)
AFTER 1998 0.075 0.083 0.093
(0.242) (0.242) (0.242)
DEMO TRANS −0.293 −0.183 −0.324
(0.444) (0.436) (0.440)
JUDICIAL IND −0.392 −0.379 −0.456
(0.381) (0.380) (0.381)
YEARS AT WAR −0.018 −0.018 −0.017
(0.018) (0.018) (0.018)
ETHNIC DISPUTE −1.409*** −1.414*** −1.422***
(0.520) (0.520) (0.519)
TERRITORY 0.353* 0.354* 0.331*
(0.199) (0.198) (0.197)
INTENSITY LEVEL −0.236 −0.249 −0.265
(0.332) (0.332) (0.332)
DYADS −0.331*** −0.336*** −0.327***
(0.108) (0.108) (0.108)
PREVIOUS AMNESTIES 0.256*** 0.266*** 0.249***
(0.077) (0.076) (0.076)
REBEL STRENGTH −0.311 −0.303 −0.334*
(0.192) (0.191) (0.192)
REBEL CAPACITY −0.143 −0.142 −0.185
(0.314) (0.314) (0.314)
BLOODY HANDS 0.212 0.218 0.192
(0.219) (0.219) (0.219)
UNPKO 0.689** 0.661** 0.544*
(0.326) (0.325) (0.321)
LOW INCOME −0.576*** −0.569** −0.578**
(0.223) (0.223) (0.225)
POPULATION(LN) 0.091 0.086 0.089
(0.063) (0.062) (0.063)
Constant −5.792*** −5.797*** −6.878*** −6.806*** −6.793***
(0.401) (0.401) (0.930) (0.927) (0.931)
Observations 386 386 386 386 386
Days at Risk 2204919 2204919 2204919 2204919 2204919
Recurrences 146 146 146 146 146
Log-likelihood −481.4 −480.0 −446.4 −446.6 −448.0
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000012
Notes: Baseline category for each model are terminations with no amnesty at all. We have full information on amnesties in
420 matched postconflict periods. However, N = 386 in these models due to missingness on covariates in M7–M9.
Observations with missing values are thus dropped in M5 and M6 for valid comparison between all models. The results
are unaltered. *p < .10; **p < .05; ***p < .01.
A similar pattern is evident in M9, which separates amnesties with SV immunities

from those without. The coefficient for NO SV AMNESTY is statistically and substan-
tively significant, whereas the coefficient for SV AMNESTY is not. What this indicates
is that, among armed conflicts that end in bargained outcomes, amnesties forgiving
combatants for extreme violence against civilians are not pacifying: they are not asso-
ciated with peace spells that are significantly longer than the average duration of
peace in non-amnesty contexts. However, moderate amnesties that forgive combat-

ants for crimes against the state but stop short of full indemnity are associated with
longer peace spells, on average.
FIGURE 4. Different types of amnesties and conflict recurrence
Figure 4 shows that these are substantively significant findings. Dyadic conflicts
that terminate with PAG amnesties are 64 percent less likely to return to fighting.
NO PAG AMNESTIES is correlated with a 37 percent decrease in the risk of recurrence,
but the confidence interval on the coefficient cross the zero line, meaning that the
null hypothesis cannot be rejected. NO SV AMNESTIES is associated with a 53 percent
reduction in the probability of conflict recurrence. This effect is not present when
human rights provisions are included in amnesties. The coefficient on SV AMNESTY
is indistinguishable from zero.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000012
Figure 4 depicts another finding of interest for conflict scholars. While it is con-
vincingly argued that iterated negotiations involving multiple ceasefires often
produce a lasting peace agreement,111 it does not seem to be the case that repeated
amnesties lead to a better outcome. The more amnesties a dyadic conflict has featured

over time, the more prone it is to conflict recurrence. This is logical based on the
theory. Amnesties are laws that must be supported by commitments on each side.
If previous amnesties have failed, it will decrease trust in future offers.
This research rests on the assumption that studying averages and analyzing base-
lines can help us evaluate influential theories about amnesties, and shape expectations
in future negotiations. But averages do not tell us everything. Aggregate research
should be supported by more studies of deviant cases, and in-depth studies that
closely examine amnesties in the conflict process. This will help to further isolate
the causal mechanisms at play, and to address issues like endogeneity. The matching
methods used here can partially address this problem, modeling how certain charac-
teristics of a conflict are correlated both with the choice to offer amnesties, and the
outcome of interest: peace. Worth noting, though, is that the presented results do
not depend on the application of Coarsened Exact Matching techniques, and are
robust to alternative specifications.112
Together, these tests demonstrate that, ceteris paribus, amnesties are not particu-
larly effective when offered in the prebargaining phase, especially early in the war.
Across the board, amnesties passed amid active fighting are correlated with a
lower probability of conflict termination. Crucially, though, the statistical evidence
also shows that amnesties are pacifying in situations where combatants must bargain
at the end of hostilities. When amnesties result from rounds of negotiation, and are sit-
uated within larger peace deals, they are correlated with longer spells of peace. This
effect is not overpowering but it is clear. Also, while it is sometimes argued that
immunities for serious rights violations will make peace agreements more successful,
the evidence here suggests the contrary. In all of the models, SV amnesties are never
associated with a measurable, statistically significant effect on peace.
Conclusion
One task for those working to end civil wars is preventing old violent antagonisms
from returning. I find that offers of legal amnesty can be used to halt intrastate con-
flicts, but this is subject to three ancillary rules. The first rule is that amnesties work
better if they are enacted in the negotiation phase. During conflict, amid the prenego-
tiation phase, both sides face problems of adverse selection, or lack of information on
their opponent’s preferences for peace. In this context, amnesties serve as a noisy
signal. They convey either government weakness or cunning to rebels. For this
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000012
reason, negotiators should investigate other two-track solutions to coax rebels to

the bargaining table. If and when armed combatants get to the negotiation phase,
amnesties may serve as a more useful tool. They are still a signal but of costly com-
mitments to peace. The trick is designing them in a way that is balanced, granting
112. Models without matching are reported in the appendix, and the results are not different in terms of
direction or significance of the amnesty variables.
some concessions without making the deal too costly for the government in the
future.
It may be too costly to forgive rebels for serious violations of human rights and
humanitarian law. The second finding is that amnesties with explicit immunities
for serious violations are not associated with a lower risk of conflict recurrence.
This challenges the conventional wisdom among peacemakers that forgiving
human rights abuses may be a necessary element of war-ending bargains. In the
last sixty years, that is simply not the case. SV immunities are a roll of the dice.
On one hand, they may encourage peace discussions with recalcitrant groups but,
on the other hand, they weaken the government’s position. Immunities for terrible
acts create a negative reputation for the governments that offer them. Governments
will be punished, by civilians audiences and by rebels, for making deals that are
too accommodating. Rebels will see no reason not to fight against such conciliatory
leaders in the future. Civilians will pressure those leaders to renege on the deal and go
back to war. Negotiators need to be clear with rebel and state leaders that human
rights violations—especially if they are extreme—will have to be investigated.
That is now part of the political landscape following conflicts. Ignoring the
problem of human rights atrocities is no longer realistic and it was never very effec-
tive anyway.
The third finding is that amnesties are also more effective when they are embedded
within larger processes of peace. If amnesties are disembodied from a larger frame-
work, or haphazardly offered by governments in high-pressure moments, it might do
little to produce trust on the other side. The offer simply will not be perceived as cred-
ible. However, when they are passed following lengthy and iterated processes of
negotiation—often as part of larger postconflict deals to release political prisoners,
forgive former soldiers of crimes against the state, or to help demobilize the opposi-
tion—they are sometimes successful.
Taken together, the evidence in this article offers an empirical foundation for the
evolving practice of issuing “qualified” amnesties in negotiated settlements. This
practice is outlined in the Belfast Guidelines on Amnesty and Accountability recently
penned by experts in transitional justice.113 As this report suggests, amnesties that
bring together various veto players, spoilers, and combatant groups, while being
careful not to provide impunity for atrocity, help countries stay at peace following
civil war.
By showing that amnesties are pacifying in postconflict settings, but not when they
immunize human rights violators, in this article I directly address a persistent source
of debate between human rights activists and peacemakers. Furthermore, I develop a
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000012
bargaining theory of amnesties in civil war, and test hypotheses from that theory
using the best available data on conflicts and amnesties. These tests resolve lingering
issues about what is necessary and desirable in the wake of civil wars. Forgiving
113. “Belfast Guidelines on Amnesty and Accountability” 2013. University of Ulster, <https://www.
ulster.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/57839/TheBelfastGuidelinesFINAL_000.pdf>.
opponents for political crimes is an act of mercy that helps the country, but forgiving
them for rights abuses is a tragedy that does not work. It already appears that states
like Colombia are learning these lessons: government and rebel forces cannot be
exculpated for everything they have done in the context of the very long civil war.
Entirely absolving FARC and other groups of responsibility for human rights
crimes would only encourage them to violate the terms of peace over and over.
Alternatively, it might anger victims’ groups and government constituencies to
such an extent that they will spoil the peace by encouraging new rounds of violence
against the enemy.
Other elements of the peace-versus-justice debate remain unresolved. For example,
it is still unclear whether mechanisms like human rights prosecutions exacerbate ten-
sions in postwar environments, or whether truth commissions or reparations have
much of any effect. Future research should examine these questions in greater
detail. For now, it is a good start to know that if actors are seeking productive inter-
ventions into cyclical wars, making “deals with the devil” that forgive atrocity crimes
is not necessary.
Supplementary Material
Supplementary material for this article is available at <https://doi.org/10.1017/

S0020818318000012>.
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Deals With The Devil? Conflict Amnesties, Civil War, and Sustainable Peace

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Deals with the Devil?

Conflict Amnesties, Civil

International Organization, 2018, page 1 of 35

I study this question using original and extensive cross-national evidence on

2. Jeffery 2014, 106.

An amnesty is an “extraordinary legal measure whose primary function is to remove

the prospect and consequences of criminal liability for designated individuals or

14. Freeman 2009, 13.

27. Orentlicher 1995, 377.

will resume in the near future.34

FIGURE 1. Conflict amnesties over time

Commission; or Uganda’s amnesty (2000) that offered rebel soldiers amnesty in

… granting a formal amnesty may sometimes be necessary.”37 Amnesties are

37. Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003/4, 14.

amnesties based on whether they forgive combatants for serious violations of

approach to conflict to answer these questions, and to generate expectations about

A Bargaining Theory of Conflict Amnesties

47. Walter 2014.

56. Powell 2006, 176.

60. Campbell and Connolly 2012; Walter 1997, 2009, 2014.

Amnesties and Conflict Termination

68. Rauchhaus 2009, 881.

72. Arnould 2016, 17.

Amnesties and Duration of Peace

H2a: Amnesties issued following conflict termination will be associated with a

Hypothesis 2a is subject to important conditions related to reputation and commit-

77. Campbell and Connolly 2012.

84. Bell 2008.

groups, signaling to potential challengers that rebellion is likely to be rewarded.”86

86. Walter 2009, 257.

theory demands a consideration of both because it makes predictions concerning

Level of Analysis: Fighting Dyads

93. Lupu 2013.

process.96 Yet no established theory of conflict-amnesty provision exists. Little

96. Heckman 1976.

2. A binary measure of whether the country is transitioning to democracy (DEMO

3. A normalized 0–1 measure of judicial independence (JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE).101

A second category of control variables involves general conflict dynamics.

1. A continuous indicator counting how many previous amnesties have been

robust standard errors are clustered by a conflict ID produced by UCDP.

104. Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan 2009.

108. This calculation is generated using STATA’s margins package.

TABLE 1. Amnesties and conflict termination

b/se b/se b/se b/se

AMNESTY −1.048*** −1.027*** −1.053***

The difference in amnesties is not merely a statistically significant factor, but

FIGURE 2. Marginal effect of amnesties

FIGURE 3. Marginal effect of amnesties

TABLE 2. Amnesties and conflict recurrence

b/se b/se b/se b/se b/se

AMNESTY −0.371* −0.123 −0.449

A similar pattern is evident in M9, which separates amnesties with SV immunities

peace in non-amnesty contexts. However, moderate amnesties that forgive combat-

FIGURE 4. Different types of amnesties and conflict recurrence

111. Joshi and Quinn 2016.

reason, negotiators should investigate other two-track solutions to coax rebels to

Supplementary material for this article is available at <https://doi.org/10.1017/

Rauchhaus, Robert W. 2009. Principal-Agent Problems in Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazards,

Violations in International Law. Calilfornia Law Review 78 (2):449–513.

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AMNESTY −1.048* −1.027* −1.053***