Who rules where over whom when the fighting stops? Advancing research on war to peace transitions and post-war environments

My PhD thesis explains how political actors try to settle questions of de facto control in the aftermath of secessionist wars (ie when a self-determination movement has fought to break away from a recognised State with the aim to either form its own state or join another state):where will the territorial boundaries of control between the actors fall and who will live within those boundaries? In other words, who rules where over whom when the fighting stops?

The thesis investigates how these questions are settled: what explains state and secessionist postwar territorial and demographic control strategies?

Why do these questions matter? Territorial and demographic control are the foundations of political order and the basis of an international system constituted by states: resolving competing claims to control populated territory is perhaps the fundamental political problem and to study the control strategies used during transitions to a postwar environment is to study political order in the making.

The questions, and the empirically-grounded theoretical framework I developed to answer them, are at the heart of my proposal and underpin the academic contribution of my research and its value for policymakers and practitioners dealing with violent secessionist conflict. My first aim in the Fellowship is to consolidate the output of my research with a monograph and a journal article.

My second aim focuses on the impact of my research for policy and practice and on strengthening the foundations of my future research on the causes and consequences of armed conflict.

Using theory building investigations of the aftermaths of wars in Abkhazia and Kosovo, my thesis shows that what matters in a transition to a postwar environment is how states and secessionists go about establishing, challenging and preserving the 'facts on the ground'. I show how objectives explain the strategies used for controlling territory and people, arguing that in a transition from a war to a postwar environment, states and secessionists form objectives that reflect their relative positions at the end of the war and their preferences for revising or preserving de facto control: states want to reincorporate lost territory, secessionists want the full and permanent separation of the secessionist entity, but constraints in the postwar environment prevent or delay them from achieving these maximalist objectives.

When the fighting has stopped but neither the full restoration of the pre-war status quo nor the full separation of the secessionist territory has been accomplished, states and secessionists attempt to meet their constrained objectives by selecting demographic and territorial control strategies intended to align the facts on the ground with an intended outcome.

By focusing on actors' objectives and their strategies for controlling territory and populations, my research explains what political actors do and why in the critical period after a war ends and helps us understand the formation of postwar orders and the dynamics of political consolidation after conflict. This matters for both 1)its academic contributions to Political Science and Peace and Conflict studies, which I will make through the monograph and journal article, and 2)how my research can influence the ways in which policymakers and practitioners analyse contemporary secessionist conflicts and then design and implement responses to manage conflict and build peace, which I will communicate in the policy brief and develop further in the workshop.

My PhD thesis is also being supplemented and developed by several conference papers and working papers which extend my research into new areas such as the local dynamics and ethnic politics of postwar environments in unrecognised de facto states, the management of secessionist conflict by International Organisations (IOs), the relationship between internal armed conflicts and international relations, and the methods and ethics of studying armed conflict.