Peacebuilding and Democratic Consolidation in Post-War Guatemala: A Comparative Assessment of the Impact of Civil-Military Reforms in the Peace Accords

This thesis seeks to combine institutional peacebuilding theory and democratization theory in order to understand the process and the result of the implementation of the Guatemalan peace agreement. The nature of the peace agreement, a negotiated transition from war to peace and from an authoritarian regime to political democracy, provides the empirical conditions for the complementary use of the two analytical frameworks. The partial agreement of the 1996 peace accords, ‘the Strengthening of Civilian Power and the Role of the Armed Forces in a Democratic Society' (AFPC), included provisions to restrict the army's political influence and institutional autonomy and to strengthen the civilian institutions in charge of public security. Hence, it constituted a roadmap to democratic consolidation in post-war Guatemala. The first part of this thesis attempts to explain the extent to which the AFPC was implemented from 1996 to 2004. The democratic outcome of the implementation has been measured in the degree of democratic civil-military relations and it is concluded that the Guatemalan army is still only conditionally subordinated to the civilian authorities because of the partial implementation of the AFPC. The second part of this thesis seeks to explain the process and the result of the implementation and includes the implementation process in post-war El Salvador from 1992 to 1995 as a contrasting case. It includes a discussion of five explanatory causes, namely the degree of a hurting stalemate, the quality of the design of the peace agreements, the role of political society, the role of the oligarchy and the impact of civil-military relations. The empirical findings show that the absence of a hurting stalemate, the poor quality of the peace agreement in terms of substance and specification, the poor performance of a weakly institutionalized political society, the politicized character of the oligarchy's corporative interest organization and the emergence of a post-war hard-liner alliance between the civilian and military authorities caused the failure of the implementation and the subsequent conditional subordination of the armed forces to the civilian authorities in post-war Guatemala. Finally, the effort of combining institutional peacebuilding theory and democratic consolidation theory had made it possible to point out one explanatory factor, which has been overlooked by institutional peacebuilding theories so far. The quality of political society and the character of the national political actors' power constellations influence the success or failure of the implementation of a political negotiated settlement.