Although the majority of civil wars end when one warring party achieves a victory over the other, negotiated agreements are growing more common as a means of ending intrastate conflict. To explain why some negotiated settlements prove stable and others do not, scholars have examined the impact of factors such as superpower conflict, group identities, and third-party guarantors. This article argues that those negotiated settlements that are the most extensively institutionalized—that is, that provide institutional guarantees for the security threats antagonists face as they move toward a situation of centralized state power—are the ones most likely to prove stable. An analysis of all settlements negotiated to end intrastate conflicts during the period between 1945 and 1997 supports this proposition.
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