Review: The Peace Formula, by Dominic Rohner

Engaging, thoroughly researched book that offers a strong foundation, if at times incomplete, for domestic peace

Overview

I appreciate this book by economist Dominic Rohner. It’s a thoroughly researched presentation, from a rationalist IR perspective, about necessary ingredients for peace, supporting conditions, how those things need to come together, and what happens when they don’t.

Though it felt incomplete at times, this didn’t take away from the book’s usefulness and contribution. I wish more scholars like Rohner synthesized their work in an accessible way.

Summary

Definitions

Rohner examines armed conflict, defined as organized, politically motivated violence.

Classification of conflict:

  • One sided conflict - such as state repression against its own population
  • Two-sided conflict - armed violence between groups

Another way to classify conflict:

  • Civil war, or intra-state
  • International, or between states
  • Internationalized civil wars: conflicts that draw interventions from foreign powers. Some of these can be proxy wars, but not always.

Conflict from the rationalist perspective is viewed as a bargaining failure.1 “Barganing failure” may at first blush sound like a negotiation that breaks down. But it actually includes a wide range of scenarios, including what may really be coercion or domination. In cases of asymmetrical power - think colonialism or imperial aggression - the “bargaining” may look like:

  • Group 1 (more powerful): surrender and give us what we want, or be destroyed
  • Group 2 (less powerful): we surrender and give you what you want (“rational” response assumed to avoid an even less desirable outcome)

One critique of this view is that it views coercion as “success” and normalizes aggression, while diminishing reasons to defend against oppression.

Causes of conflict

Why and when do bargaining failures happen? The causes described in this book are:

  1. Asymmetrical information (e.g. not understanding an opponent’s strength or resolve to fight back) 2
  2. Commitment problems - related to trust and changing power dynamics. Include:
    • Pre-emptive war (one side fears attack from another, strikes first)
    • Preventive war (another group growing in power and is feared to be a threat in the future, attack now while they’re weaker )
    • Fear of retaliation, e.g. after cease fire and disarment. Prolongs civil wars.
  3. Political bias - private incentives among people in power that are not aligned with population (which stands to suffer from conflict) and isolation from negative consequences.
  4. Bargaining over indivisibilities (e.g. a geographic region with special significance)

Factors like poverty increase the likelihood of conflict by lowering the opportunity costs of fighting, but are not viewed as causes.

The peace formula

Peace is not explicitly defined in the book. But whatever “peace” is, the book treats it as going beyond the absence of violent conflict (negative peace) and devotes significant attention to conditions for some minimum degree of sustainable well-being in a society.

The peace formula as presented is comprised of: 1) necessary ingredients 2) supporting conditions, and 3) the right process of putting them together

The necessary ingredients for peace are presented as:

Ingredient Examples
Voice Democratic participation and inclusive political representation Free and fair elections, power-sharing, proportional representation, protection of civil liberties and minority rights
Work Economic opportunities Education, job creation programs, active labor market policies, social safety net?
Warranties Security guarantees and state monopoly on what is viewed as legitimate violence Professional military and police forces, peacekeeping operations, justice system enforcement, international security guarantees (e.g. NATO)

Supporting conditions: Robust and responsive state capacity is emphasized as a critical supporting condition. Many other important things, like education, public health, healthcare, employment programs, etc. are downstream of that.

Process: Alluding to a hierarchy of needs, the book emphasizes safety and security, state capacity, and infrastructure (water, electricity) as foundations. If these needs are not met, other ingredients of the peace formula, such as voice/political participation, cannot flourish.

Case studies illustrating successes of the peace formula include economic opportunities, counseling, and training for men returning from combat in Liberia, economic opportunities for asylum seekers in Switzerland, and public health interventions to address the HIV epidemic in many countries in Africa and subsequent effects on building state capacity, increasing trust in government, and reducing conflict.

Impressions

How well does the peace formula address causes of war?

Warranties is a big one and tries to address commitment problems in addition to serving as a foundation for stability. The books talks about a lot of examples of effectiveness of security guarantees, particularly in the immediate post-conflict stages.

Voice addresses asymmetrical information domestically and can reduce the likelihood of civil conflict. It can also serve as a check on political bias. However, voice does not address information problems relating to the strength or resolve of an unfriendly country. It also doesn’t directly address dis/misinformation. Overall though, voice seems like a moderate-strong antidote to some causes of war.

Work diminishes the desire of people to directly join armed conflict, but it does not explicitly address any causes of war presented in the book.

Indivisibilities is the least addressed cause (voice through power-sharing and warranties can alleviate some of the issue). However, it doesn’t seem to be as common of a cause of conflict based on the examples in the book.

How the peace formula contributes to sustainable peace

Safety and security, economic opportunities, and inclusive and representative government, supported by factors like robust state capacity - all designed to address people’s basic needs and chance at opportunities and to build a decent life - seems like a strong foundation for domestic peace.

Limitations and gaps

  1. The peace formula of voice, work, and warranties does a strong, if incomplete, job of diminishing one-sided and two-sided armed civil conflict. That goes a long way. The book also talks about how the formula - especially warranties - can reduce international conflict. Overall though, causes of international conflicts like private incentives of non-domestic actors are addressed in a less satisfying way. May be there are fewer strong answers? May be it’s outside of the scope of the book, and that’s OK.

  2. There’s no distinction made between defensive wars and wars of aggression. But the decisions for how another group responds to conflict, and factors on the defensive side that prolong such conflicts, are mainly discussed as commitment problems. The short- and long-term intangible incentives and other motivators of a group defending itself are overlooked or diminished, especially in asymmetrical conflicts.

  3. Lack of clarity about what makes something a “cause” of conflict, and where in the causal chain something belongs:
    • Political bias/private intentives are more of a direct cause. On the other hand, asymmetrical information seems like it would belong elsewhere. Yes, it may be viewed as a “cause” in a causal inference/counterfactual framework, but may be it’s more precise to classify it as an effect modifier (moderator?) 3
    • Intangible or non-material factors like grievances - are discussed but don’t seem to be viewed as causes of war.

  4. I don’t know to what extent dis/misinformation is a unique thing historically. I also wonder how the modern information environment affects perception of economic conditions, threats, and opportunity costs. In the US, consumer sentiment has become partially a partisan issue. Moreover, some people express that they have nothing to lose. This perception has an impact on opportunity costs on participating in conflict. There was an article in Political Behavior by Michael Shepherd about how people in rural areas blamed Democrats for hospital closures, even though it’s actually due to Republican policies that reduce funding for Medicaid and support for safety net hospitals. There’s nothing in the peace formula that is an explicit antidote against this.

  5. The final gaps in explaining conflict and how to address it are related to the rationalist IR/conflict literature and its applications - the foundations that the book rests on.
    • The rationalist view - that actors seek to maximize benefits (utility) for themselves - is a useful analytical framework. But the utility function that defines an actor’s benefit of a particular action, like going to war or not, still does a poor job of integrating intangible motivations like grievances and negative sentiment toward another group.
    • “Irrational” factors like emotions and cognitive biases that affect how potential benefits and risks are assessed - while not entirely ignored - still don’t receive enough attention. The few exceptions are prospect theory/loss aversion, but otherwise insights from psychology are not commonly integrated unless recognized through a Nobel Prize.
    • Unit of analysis: the actors are usually groups, states, elites. All important, but incomplete the more personalist a regime is, i.e. the more power is concentrated in one individual leader with private incentives and unchecked power.

Overall, the book is excellent and I would recommend to everyone, despite the limitations above. The material would also be valuable addition to civic education. Many people in democratic systems don’t appreciate what makes those systems successful in many ways - including voice/representation as a growth and mistake correction mechanism.

  1. Fearon 1995, https://pages.ucsd.edu/~bslantchev/courses/pdf/fearon-io1995v49n3.pdf ↩

  2. Includes dictator’s dilemma = authoritarians are less likely to have their finger on the pulse because of repression of its population, and perhaps inner circle discouraged from telling the truth. ↩

  3. Example: the covid vaccine is a cause of less severe disease incidence in a population, compared to no vaccine, under the counterfactual framework. However, a virus may be viewed as a more direct cause, with the vaccine as an effect modifier. ↩