Peace Agreements as Lawfare: The Battle for Transition in Post-Conflict Societies

Peace agreements do not entirely resolve conflict: rather, they contain existing conflict dynamics within a re-negotiated constitutional framework. In doing so, peace agreements trigger legal discourses that constrain the parties’ range of acceptable behaviour and direct them to pursue their interests through reformed political institutions that institutionalize non-violence. Ideally, over time, the parties become socialized to the discourses embedded in the agreement, which guide the peace process when the original agreement is no longer instructive.
The negotiation, interpretation, and implementation of these discourses represents the continuation of conflict by another means, however. Parties can use ambiguity or symbolism in an agreement to advance conflicting interpretations of nation, state, or identity. Conditions and omissions become defences for unanticipated behaviour that results from a particular institutional arrangement. In some cases, the peace agreement even becomes a means to isolate or assimilate separatist elements, a legal instrument capable of achieving a military objective: an instrument of lawfare.
This paper examines the institutional arrangements that resulted from peace agreements in Sudan, the Philippines, and Sierra Leone. Drawing on my doctoral research, the paper charts the impact that legal discourses had on the short-term management of violence; the long-term ‘constitutionalization’ of the peace process; and the redistribution or consolidation of power by parties to a conflict in each case. This paper’s contribution thus lies in mapping the institutional arrangements that stem from particular prescriptions of law, and considering how such provisions could be designed with transformation, rather than transition, in mind.