Abstract
If an armed group cannot be defeated in war, are there conditions in peace that will allow for its demobilization and disbandment?  What are the key barriers that stand in the way?  Using case studies of the three large paramilitary organizations in Northern Ireland since the 1994 ceasefires, I weigh competing arguments from the civil conflict literature about the security concerns of previously warring parties that stand in the way of security normalization.  I find that existing theories miss two crucial forms of post-conflict security crises: intra-community criminality and inter-communal confrontations.  These two kinds of security concerns present two major challenges to the normalization of security that are instructive to broader theory on conflict termination and peace-building.  First, these security concerns are not the kind that outside actors can successfully manage without the partnership of local power brokers.  As a result, state actors institutionalize paramilitary authority rather than replacing it.  Second, the management of these security concerns does not present clear-cut opportunities for signaling the commitment to peace necessary for trust-building amongst formerly warring parties.  Armed groups are forced to make impossible choices that signal weak commitments and make a return to war more likely.

Brenna Marea Powell is a 6th year PhD candidate in the department of Government at Harvard University, and a doctoral fellow at the Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. She received her AB from Stanford in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her research interests include inequality, civil conflict and political violence in divided societies. Her three-article dissertation research explores the role of political institutions in redefining ethno-racial boundaries and social hierarchy. This includes work on post-conflict policing in Northern Ireland, racial policy in Brazil, and the politics of ethno-racial classification in the United States.

Eric Morris is a Visiting Scholar at CISAC and is Practitioner-in-Residence at the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies. Most recently he served as the UN Recovery Coordinator for Aceh and Nias following the Indian Ocean tsunami of December, 2004. He headed the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from 2002 to 2005. In 2000-01 he served simultaneously as Special Envoy in the Balkans of the High Commissioner for Refugees and as UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Kosovo. In 1998-99 he was Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General for the UN Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on police and judicial reform issues. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University, an MA from Yale University, and a BA from Baylor University.

Kulyk’s talk at Stanford will focus on popular preferences regarding language policy of the Ukrainian state as revealed by a comprehensive survey conducted in December 2006, the first such survey ever conducted in Ukraine. He will analyze the respondents’ views of actual and desirable language use in different practices, legal statuses of languages, and evolution of the language situation in the country, both on the aggregate level and broken down by ethnic, linguistic, regional, generational and other categories. He will thus demonstrate both diversity and ambivalence of popular attitudes and discuss how they influenced the state policy by constraining a compromise between the adherents of opposing political courses and, at the same time, enabling the government and major parties to alternate between emphasizing and downplaying the language issue in their political rhetoric and practice.

Volodymyr Kulyk is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in Kyiv, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1999. Currently, he is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. His research fields include politics of language and ethnicity in contemporary Ukraine and other multilingual societies, language ideologies, and media discourse. Kulyk is the author of two published books and numerous articles and book chapters on these topics in Ukrainian, English and other languages. His last published text is “Language Policies and Language Attitudes in Post-Orange Ukraine”, in Juliane Besters-Dilger (ed.), Language policy and language situation in Ukraine. Analysis and recommendations (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008). His new book, Dyskurs ukraïns’kykh medii: Identychnosti, ideolohiï, vladni stosunky (Ukrainian Media Discourse: Identities, Ideologies, Power Relations) will be published in Kyiv later this year. He guest-edited a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language on “Languages and Language Ideologies in Ukraine”, to appear in early 2010. As a Wilson Center Fellow, Kulyk works on a project titled “Language, Identity and Democracy in Post-Soviet Ukraine”, which will result in an English-language book.

Jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor of political science and CISAC affiliated faculty member at Stanford University. His research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy and the evaluation of foreign aid projects promoting improved governance.

He is presently working on a book manuscript (with David Laitin) on civil war since 1945. Recent publications include “Iraq’s Civil War” (Foreign Affairs, March/April 2007), “Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States” (International Security, Spring 2004), and “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” (APSR, February 2003).

Fearon won the 1999 Karl Deutsch Award, which is "presented annually to a scholar under the age of forty, or within ten years of the acquisition of his or her Doctoral Degree, who is judged to have made, through a body publications, the most significant contribution to the study of International Relations and Peace Research." He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in 2002.

Patrick Johnston is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University and a CISAC predoctoral fellow. His dissertation examines the military effectiveness of civilian targeting in civil wars. He has published articles on the organization of insurgencies, spoiler dynamics in peace processes, and the political economy of civil war in journals such as Security Studies, Civil Wars, Canadian Journal of African Studies, andReview of African Political Economy. Johnston holds a BA in political science from the University of Minnesota, Morris and an MA in political science from Northwestern University.

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