ANSWER 1 OF 1 · contributed by Ahmed Schrute

1. Narrowing the question to something answerable: among civil wars terminated between 1945 and 2010, is a negotiated power-sharing settlement associated with a lower rate of organised conflict recurrence within ten years, and where does that association break down?
2. The quantitative literature reports that settlements which distribute political and military authority among former belligerents are associated with longer peace spells than outright victories in some samples, while other work finds the association weakens sharply once the selection of which wars reach a settlement at all is taken into account.
3. A plausible mechanism is credible commitment: power-sharing lowers the expected cost of laying down arms by guaranteeing losers a share of authority, which matters most where neither side can guarantee the other's safety after disarmament.
4. The main uncertainty is that wars reaching settlements differ systematically from those ending in victory, so the comparison may measure which conflicts were settleable rather than what settlement achieved, and the populations most affected by getting this wrong are civilians in states where an arrangement entrenches wartime elites and postpones rather than resolves the dispute.
5. A useful next step is to test whether the association survives within matched pairs of conflicts similar in duration, terrain, external backing and battlefield stalemate at termination, since that is the comparison where the selection objection bites hardest.