Divergent Perceptions of Peace in Post-Conflict Societies: Insights from Sri Lanka

• Author: Sabine C. Carey,Belén González,Christian Gläßel
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00220027221104719
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Date: 01 October 2022
• Subject Matter: Special Feature Articles

Special Feature Article

Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution

2022, Vol. 66(9) 1589–1618

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027221104719

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

Divergent Perceptions of

Peace in Post-Conf‌lict

Societies: Insights from Sri

Lanka

Sabine C. Carey

1

, Bel´

en Gonz´

alez

2,3

, and

Christian Gl¨

aßel

4



Abstract

Research on postwar peace focuses primarily on how elites and institutions can prevent

relapse into civil war. In line with this special issue’s focus on citizens’experiences, we

take a micro-level approach to explore peace beyond the absence of war. We in-

vestigate how members of opposing sides experience peace a decade after a decisive

victory of the majority. Using original survey data from a representative sample of

2000 respondents in 2018 Sri Lanka, we f‌ind that even one decade after the conf‌lict

members of the Sinhalese winning majority are consistently more likely to report

improvements in peace than Tamils, who were represented by the defeated minority.

But the benef‌itofa“victor’s peace”does not seem to translate into an optimistic

outlook of the victorious group, nor does it increase people’s endorsement for re-

pressive state measures. Despite the drastically improved physical security for the

defeated ethnic minority since the war, they experience a deterioration in other

dimensions of peace. Our f‌indings have important implications for a deeper under-

standing of variations in peace and reconciliation processes.

1

University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

2

Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany

3

German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg, Germany

4

Hertie School, Berlin, Germany

Replication f‌iles are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/sabinecarey

Corresponding Author:

Sabine C. Carey, School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, A5, 6, Mannheim 68159, Germany.

Email: sabine.carey@uni-mannheim.de

Keywords

reconciliation, civil society, post-conf‌lict peace, perceptions, stability

Civil wars that end with a decisive victory for one side often lead to durable peace

(Licklider 1995;Toft 2010;Wagner 1993). Yet, the mere absence of war might

overshadow a much darker reality. Clear victories can devolve into “enduring peace

with tyranny”(Toft 2010, 49). Despite an increasingly comprehensive view of the

dynamics that shape postwar politics, we know comparatively little about how the

wider population subjectively assesses security and peace in postwar societies. We

complement work that focuses on the role of elites and institutions in preventing a

relapse into full-scale civil war (e.g., Brancati and Snyder 2013;Hartzell and Hoddie

2020;Sriram 2017) by investigating how civilians perceive the quality of peace after a

clear government victory ended a long and bloody civil war.

The focus on institutions and elites, which dominates research on postwar peace,

generally understands peace as the absence of war. But the absence of battle deaths does

not automatically translate into meaningful peace. Postwar societies vary drastically in

what their “peace”looks like (H¨

oglund and Kovacs 2010). We contribute to recent

studies that call for a more differentiated understanding of peace (Davenport, Melander

and Regan 2018;Diehl 2016;Joshi and Wallensteen 2018;Regan 2014;Wallensteen

2015) by distinguishing between core components of post-conf‌lict peace. Together, the

components offer a complementary and multi-faceted depiction of peace, encom-

passing political and personal aspects, as well as government provisions that are

essential for well-functioning post-conf‌lict governance (Stevens and Vaughan-

Williams 2016).

We apply a bottom-up, micro-level analysis of peace processes (Autesserre 2017;

Firchow and Ginty 2017;Firchow 2018;Tellez 2019a) to reveal differences between

societal groups’perceptions of distinct aspects of post-conf‌lict peace (Introduction this

issue). We concentrate on four different facets of post-conf‌lict peace to study the

subjective assessment of peace quality. We analyze citizens’perceptions of the rela-

tionship between former warring groups, of their person al security, of freedom of

speech and fair political treatment. These retrospective evaluations of how conditions

changed since the end of the war are contrasted with individual assessments of the

prospects for future stability and peace.

We apply this micro-level approach to societies emerging from a unilateral victory.

1

Conditions after a decisive government victory are prone to facilitate an “uneven

peace,”where parts of the population enjoy widespread security and human rights,

while other parts see their slice of peace tainted due to unequal treatment by the

government or fear of falling victim to criminal violence. How do citizens that were

represented by formerly warring groups retrospectively and prospectively assess

different dimensions of peace? We argue that citizens associated with the winning

faction should retrospectively perceive the development of peace more positively than

1590 Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution 66(9)