Shaping sustainable peace: citizen perspectives on settlements design

The literature on peace settlements elaborates on the conditions that make elites willing to cooperate, but citizens’ views are rarely examined. This study develops a testable framework to understand how peace settlement design impacts public opinion in attempts to resolve intercommunal conflicts. The framework provides a citizens’ perspective on peace settlement institutions. It argues two types of institutional arrangements are important in shaping citizens’ views: those with zero-sum consequences will divide communities, and those with joint benefits will unite them. We use this framework to hypothesize about cross-community differences and overlaps on territorial arrangements, political institutions, economic compensation, and security provisions and human rights protections. Testing this argument with conjoint experiments in Northern Ireland and Cyprus, we find some support for the theory. Territorial issues are the most divisive issues across communities, and some provisions offering joint benefits attracted cross-community support. Surprisingly, power-sharing institutions do not matter. Our findings suggest the public has a different orientation and different priorities than elites are assumed to have. We discuss implications for policy attempts to include citizens’ preferences in peace settlement processes.