A healthy peace: public good provision and post-civil war peace stability

The study of civil war recurrence is situated at the intersection of conflict and peacebuilding. These literatures focus on disparate definitions of peace. These literatures provide different explanations for variation in peace stability, and cover a large number of causal factors. We argue that these causal mechanisms are connected and conditioned by public policy. Specifically, we argue that the production and distribution of public goods post-conflict contribute to the maintenance of negative peace by acting as a credible commitment mechanism. In addition, public goods contribute to the building of positive peace when there is shared access to goods and services. We investigate the impact of public goods provision ‒ measured as health funding and distribution ‒ on causal mechanisms including opportunity, grievance, greed, and credible commitments. Using a duration model, we find that health spending, as a measure of public goods provision, is a strong predictor of the durability of peace after civil conflict.