Introduction

This essay argues that the salience of commitment problems as the main impediment to ending civil conflict can be substantiated through a novel and relevant case study: civil conflict in Ukraine. This involves assessing how paradigmatic theoretical arguments around commitment problems in civil conflict explain the continued failure of peace implementation in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Ukraine’s civil conflict presents a puzzle for conflict cessation: A roadmap to peace has already been negotiated and signed since Minsk I and II, 2014 and 2015 respectively, yet something is impeding its actual implementation. This essay argues that this failure to implement peace is best explained by commitment problems. Just as this case study offers novel empirical grounding for assessing theoretical answers to peace impediments, it also engages with a nascent peace and conflict literature on the Donbas specifically. The academic contribution of this essay is therefore to assess how the theoretical literature around commitment problems complements scholarship on the Donbas by illustrating how commitment problems are the main impediment to peace in Ukraine. The policy contribution of this essay is contained within the conclusion, which offers theoretically-grounded policy recommendations relevant to the ongoing effort at implementing peace in Ukraine. Structurally, this essay begins by briefly contextualising and defining the commitment problem, followed by assessing how signals of commitment, peace spoilers, and third-parties all illustrate the centrality of a commitment problem impeding peace in Ukraine.

The ‘commitment problem.

As a point of departure, it is useful to elaborate on the ‘commitment problem’ as a theoretical impediment, illustrating how it generally impedes peace and determining how to observe this theory in a case study of Ukraine. The rationalist perspective on conflict was pioneered by Fearon’s (1995) analysis of commitment problems, private information with incentives to misrepresent, and indivisible issues. Rationalist commitment problems were first applied to civil conflicts by Walter (1997), but it is not exclusive to the neorealist premises of rationalism—it also survives within the revisions of neoliberal institutionalists (Hoddie and Hartzell, 2005, pp. 26-8). Commitment problems in civil conflict emphasise the unique challenges to negotiating an intrastate peace agreement: the state demands monopolistic force within its borders, requiring the demobilisation of rebels and greatly diminishing their power to enforce government compliance with peace agreements, exposing themselves to opportunistic reneging (Walter, 1997, pp. 337-8). If one side believes their opponents are not committed to peace, they perceive higher costs to bargaining in accordance with expectations of reneging. Consequently, bargains seemingly within the bargaining range are precluded by non-credible commitment due to expectations that bargains will be violated to one’s own disadvantage. Testing this theoretical impediment within Ukraine requires assessing whether actors are failing to credibly commit to peace. Here, the work of Hartzell and Hoddie (2005) is especially useful, because it categorises observable, costly signals of credible commitment. If the commitment problem accurately explains the failure of peace implementation in Ukraine, actors should be signalling non-commitment. As will now be explored, this failure to credibly commit to peace is observable from all sides—from Kyiv, the separatists, their Russian patrons, the OSCE, and the superficial French and German intervention, none of whom have displayed credible commitment to peace.

How the commitment problem impedes peace implementation

Analysing signals of commitment is crucial for evaluating how the commitment problem impedes peace implementation, because these are the signals actors interpret when determining whether their opponents are likely to violate agreements. Three signals described by Hartzell and Hoddie (2005, pp. 28-30) indicate participants’ commitment to peace: Firstly, through the political costs incurred from negotiating with opponents, which is especially costly for the government; secondly, through costs incurred from the settlement’s institutional agreements, like power-sharing arrangements; thirdly, through costs incurred from actively implementing
the agreements. These categories are invaluable for applying Walter’s (1997) commitment problem to an empirical case study despite the differences in rationalist and neoliberal institutionalist premises, because the rationality of actors is asserted by both camps, and signals are critical for information-gathering that facilitates rational calculations. Regarding the first signal, Kyiv has refused to recognise the separatists as legitimate actors in the conflict, excluding them from negotiations at Minsk (Matveeva, 2018, pp. 260-1). Recognising the separatists at negotiations would be politically costly, especially following the Ukrainian nationalist surge in the Rada after Yanukovych’s deposition, because it would legitimise the separatist agenda of what Kyiv currently deems a Russian invasion (Wittke, 2019, p. 269; Dulebova et al., 2018, p. 60). For the second signal, Kyiv and the separatists have superficially agreed to costly power-sharing arrangements outlined in Minsk II, determining that the separatist territories should be reintegrated as ‘Special Status’ autonomous regions (Matveeva, 2018, p. 259; Wittke, 2019, p. 268). This is territorial power-sharing as categorised by Hartzell and Hoddie (2003, pp. 320-1), though missing the kind of cross-provisional complementarity they recommend, making the implementation of this lone provision vital to durable peace. However, despite this superficial agreement at Minsk, its credibility relies on the third signal—taking costly steps to implement agreements. For this signal, neither Kyiv nor the separatists have signalled sufficiently costly implementation to overcome the commitment problem, as detailed below. It is therefore clear that negotiating a bargain is not the main impediment to peace in Ukraine—the negotiations are tentatively settled and signed. Rather, the main impediment to peace is implementing these agreements, especially creating territorial power-sharing legislation, and this impediment is—as illustrated through the above signals—a commitment problem.

Why adopt policies of non-commitment?

While these signals indicate the salience of the commitment problem in implementing peace, it remains to be explained why actors adopted policies of non-commitment instead of credibly committing. Here, theories on ‘peace spoilers’ complement the commitment problem, where spoiling behaviour contributes to policies that signal non-commitment and thus impede peace implementation. According to Stedman (1997, pp. 5-7), spoilers are a leading impediment to peace, defined as actors who believe perpetuating conflict benefits their preferences and so actively seek to undermine peace efforts. However, Stedman’s spoilers ought not be considered an impediment exclusive from the commitment problem; rather, they complement each other. For example, efforts in Kyiv to implement the territorial power-sharing outlined in Minsk II were continually undermined by greed-based spoilers in the Rada for whom opposing the ‘Special Status’ bill provided political capital in nationalist constituencies (Matveeva, 2018, pp. 261-2). Because implementing this agreement on autonomy is a crucial signal of credible commitment, spoilers in Kyiv have therefore played an important role in developing the policy positions that signal non-commitment—refusing to implement agreed power-sharing. Meanwhile, in the separatist republics, spoiling is characterised by militia commanders enriching themselves through semi-militarised governments, disinterested in a return to civil government subject to the Ukrainian legal system (Matveeva, 2018, pp. 175-6 and 259). Although separatist spoiling was intense during ceasefire violations in 2014 and 2015, it is important to note that the separatists are not veto players, unlike Kyiv (Matveeva, 2018, pp. 169-74). Although separatist leaders’ preferences sometimes diverge from Moscow’s, and although they are cohesively organised, they do not satisfy the third veto player characteristic outlined by Cunningham (2006, pp. 878-9)—they cannot unilaterally continue fighting Kyiv without Russian patronage. This makes separatist spoiling less concerning than Kyiv’s, because Russia could pressure separatist incentives towards non-spoiling, as theorised by Greenhill and Major (2006, pp. 11-14), minimising the separatists’ expected spoiling gains. This could operate through a ‘departing train’ strategy, where Donbas elections and reintegration are presented as inevitable, agreed upon by Ukraine and Russia, the veto players (Stedman, 1997, p. 14; Greenhill and Major, 2006, p. 38). Spoilers are therefore especially a problem for Kyiv’s commitment to peace, impeding the implementation of power-sharing that is crucial to Minsk II. Separatists’ spoiling is less of an impediment, but this only draws attention to how Russia’s third-party intervention defines the impediment to peace—how has Russia’s intervention affected commitment problems?

The role of Russia as a veto player

This Russian role as a veto player and separatist patron helps to explain why third-party interventions have failed to overcome the commitment problem in Ukraine. For Walter (1997), a credible third-party guarantor reduces the anxiety around disarming that underlies her assessment of intrastate commitment problems. In Ukraine only the separatists will disarm, yet they already have Russia’s credible security guarantee, signalled by costly material support and the covert deployment of some regular soldiers (Dulebova et al., 2018, p. 60; Matveeva, 2018, pp. 126-7). While Russian patronage will ultimately allow the separatists to disarm with reasonable security, it has done nothing to resolve the commitment problem for Kyiv. Instead, it has prevented a Ukrainian military victory by inducing separatist military parity with Kyiv and has generated Ukrainian expectations that peace will not be properly implemented in the Donbas under biased Russian supervision. This is where a neutral third-party intervention is essential to overcoming commitment problems, as described by Matanock (2017, pp. 100-1), but it is also where we observe the neutral OSCE fail miserably as a third-party guarantor. Minsk’s roadmap to peace, to be monitored by the OSCE, first required implementation of a ceasefire (Wittke, 2019, p. 268). Yet the ceasefire was effectively ignored by both sides, accompanied by major military engagements in 2015, and the OSCE was powerless to enforce sanctions for observed violations (Matveeva, 2018, pp. 169-70). Despite being a neutral intervener actively monitoring compliance with the implementation of peace agreements through accurate information-gathering, the OSCE still cannot overcome Ukraine’s commitment problem because it cannot sanction non-compliance or reward compliance.

Outside interventions

Meanwhile, third-party interventions from states that could exert this power—namely France and Germany of the Normandy Format—have demonstrated a lack of resolve to enforce agreements. Though they facilitated the Minsk negotiations, they neither signed the agreements nor enforced its implementation, delegating that task to the impotent OSCE. These observations of third-party intervention in Ukraine conform to predictions of commitment problem theories: these third-parties are either too biased to guarantee fair peace implementation, as with Russia, or they lack the capacity to enforce peace agreements, as with the OSCE, or they
lack the resolve to enforce peace agreements, as with France and Germany. The failure of these interventions to achieve peace is entirely congruent with predictions by Walter (1997, pp. 340-1), who stresses the need for credible third-parties to enforce commitments, and Matanock (2017, pp. 106-7) who stresses that external engagement must involve sanctions for non-compliance on all sides. The failure of these interventions therefore underscores the predictions of the literature on commitment problems, demonstrating further why commitment problems remain the main impediment to peace despite interventions that might otherwise be expected to alleviate this problem.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Ukraine offers a novel, ongoing demonstration of how commitment problems can be the main impediment to peace. While the academic contribution of this essay has been in demonstrating the utility of conflict cessation theories for assessing a presently relevant case of civil conflict, this essay now proposes two policy recommendations for advancing peace implementation in Ukraine, each based on the centrality of commitment problems: Firstly, there should be an escalation in biased third-party intervention favouring Kyiv. The separatists already have credible security guarantees from Russia, but Kyiv would profit from external guarantees that the implementation of territorial power-sharing in the Donbas will occur under free and fair elections, and that its autonomous governments will comply with processes of reintegration into Ukraine. Since the OSCE has demonstrated impotence in sanctioning non-compliance, this monitoring should be enforced through escalated involvement from France and Germany, who could credibly threaten sanctions if only they signal sufficient resolve. Secondly, Kyiv must pass legislation implementing the territorial power-sharing agreed at Minsk. This is the crux of the bargain, without which no signals of implementation will be credible. Simultaneously, Kyiv must ensure it does not cede too much in its legislation for power-sharing; nationalist anxieties remain high, and anything perceived as surrender to Moscow could easily produce the widespread election of nationalists in 2023, who might seek to renege on agreements and pursue a course similar to the nationalist spoilers mentioned earlier. Although these will be difficult policy achievements, they do reflect the present conditions necessary for achieving peace, without which this main impediment to peace—the commitment problem—seems insurmountable.

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