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Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that's where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency.
--Desmond Tutu
The peace agreement between the African National Congress (ANC) and the last Apartheid government of South Africa is considered one of the most successful for ending a protracted conflict.[1] As the above passage indicates, Mandela's ability to achieve internal consensus among the black opposition was a defining factor in peacefully resolving the conflict. Although military issues are at the forefront of conflict resolution research ([Gent 2011]; [Mason, Weingarten, and Fett 1999]), in-group political support plays a pivotal role in successful settlement of civil conflict. Neither governments nor rebel groups are unitary actors. To understand how civil conflict adversaries negotiate a settlement, it is necessary to examine how they converge on a point acceptable to their internal actors while trying to reconcile these preferences with their adversary.
In this paper, I argue that negotiations are more likely to settle civil conflicts if warring party leadership have greater in-group cohesion and autonomy in decision making. In-group cohesion contributes to negotiation success in two major ways. First, internal cohesion is what gives both sides' leadership the opportunity to ratify the peace agreement without obstruction. Second, leaders who can unite their in-group coalition can credibly signal their party's compliance to the agreement, mitigating commitment problems between their party and their opponent. I disaggregate in-group dynamics of governments and rebels into their respective political actors that alleviate or aggravate commitment problems during negotiations, namely, their constituencies and institutional elites.
Conditions that impel combatants to initiate negotiations and conditions that facilitate successful settlement are not always fully aligned ([Findley 2013]). Although internal cohesion is necessary for agreements to be ratified, it is not required for initiation of negotiations. Settlement is when binding commitment takes place. Examining negotiation initiation as well as success, I also argue that negotiations initiated only with short-term considerations such as war-weariness are likely to break down in the absence of in-group political support. I use original data on civil conflict negotiations for all internal conflict-dyad-years between 1980 and 2005, and employ a...