Spoilers

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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In peacebuilding, "spoilers" are people or groups who try to block, weaken, or destroy a peace process. Stephen John Stedman's classic article on spoiler problems in peace processes describes spoilers as leaders and parties who believe that an emerging peace threatens their power, worldview, or interests, and who use violence to undermine it. Later writers have broadened the concept to include nonviolent spoiling as well: propaganda, intimidation, refusal to implement agreements, manipulation of elections, selective compliance, or efforts to split coalitions that support peace. Spoilers can operate inside a peace process, pretending to cooperate, while undermining implementation. Or they can opperate outside it, attacking the process because they were excluded or because they eject its basic terms.

Not all spoilers are motivated by the same concerns. Some fear that they will be double-crossed if they disarm, demobilize, or accept a compromise. In civil wars, this fear may be realistic: once a group gives up weapons or territory, it may become vulnerable to former enemies. Other spoilers believe that the proposed compromise violates sacred values, betrays martyrs, rewards enemies, or abandons essential goals. Still others are what we call "conflict profiteers" (and others call "conflict entrepreneurs") who seek to gain money, status, protection, or political power from continued violence. For these actors, peace is not simply risky; it is personally costly. If war gives them access to smuggling routes, forced labor, mineral wealth, armed followers, or emergency powers, they may have strong incentives to keep the conflict going.

The 1998 Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland is a clear example of spoiling by a group that rejected a peace agreement. The Good Friday Agreement had been approved by large majorities in referendums in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Yet Britannica notes that the Real Irish Republican Army, an IRA splinter group, violated the spirit of the agreement with the Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people. The attack did not destroy the peace process, but it showed how a small faction opposed to compromise could still inflict enormous harm and try to pull a wider society back into violence.

Rwanda shows an even more catastrophic spoiler problem. The 1993 Arusha Accords were intended to end the civil war between the Rwandan government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front through power sharing and transition. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains that the agreement would have allowed Hutus and Tutsis to share power, but that it angered Hutu extremists, who armed paramilitary forces and used propaganda against Tutsis. After President Juvénal Habyarimana's plane was shot down in April 1994, extremist forces launched the genocide against Tutsis and moderate Hutus. This case illustrates how spoilers can treat a peace agreement, not as an imperfect opportunity, but as an existential threat to be destroyed.

Conflict profiteering adds another layer to the spoiler problem. In Sierra Leone, control of diamonds helped sustain the civil war and made peace harder to achieve. A GSDRC summary of the report The Spoils of War concludes that diamonds were instrumental in creating, sustaining, and heightening the war and frustrating the search for peace. This kind of spoiling is not necessarily driven by ideology or fear of betrayal. It is driven by the benefits some actors receive from disorder itself. When violence becomes profitable, peacebuilding must address not only political grievances, but also the economic systems that reward continued fighting.

The spoiler problem can also appear at lower levels: in organizations, communities, political parties, labor disputes, families, or activist coalitions. A person who benefits from conflict may spread rumors, sabotage meetings, reject any mediator, accuse moderates of betrayal, or provoke retaliation just when agreement seems possible.

Constructive conflict handling therefore requires careful diagnosis. Some spoilers can be reassured through security guarantees, monitoring, phased implementation, inclusion, or face-saving concessions. Others must be isolated, sanctioned, prosecuted, or denied the resources they use to undermine peace. The central task is to distinguish between actors who are afraid of peace, actors who believe peace is immoral, and actors who profit from war. Each requires a different response, and failure to recognize spoilers early can allow a fragile peace process to collapse.

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This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.