Working papers
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Abstract
Nearly half of rebel groups worldwide engage in some form of environmental governance. Drawing on an original household survey, satellite measures of forest loss, and qualitative interviews from the Colombian Amazon, we document a paradox: armed group governance is associated with more rules concerning forest use, but not with reduced forest loss. We argue and show that the effects of environmental rules depend on the economic activities they regulate and on the configuration of actors that creates and enforces them. We show that forest loss is especially high where armed groups govern alongside local civilian institutions and illegal economies are prevalent, consistent with a armed groups co-opting these institutions to promote extraction. By contrast, regional environmental authorities are associated with lower forest loss, especially where extractive pressures are greater. Environmental governance thus cannot be understood independently of the political economy of extraction.
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Abstract
When an ethnic group loses power, how do its members respond? Scholarship on ethnic conflict expects status loss to produce backlash, but these accounts often focus on elites and organized movements. We argue that the mass-level response can be different. Where group status is tied to control of the state, and where participation depends on institutions linked to the ruling coalition, ethnic turnover demobilizes citizens. We test the argument with six-wave panel data of roughly 1,800 Ethiopian women from 2016 to 2021 collected during a political transition that reordered the country’s ethnic hierarchy and dismantled the ruling coalition’s grassroots organizational system. We find that Tigrayan women, the principal status losers, withdrew sharply from local political participation, while Oromo women, the principal status winners, became more engaged. We also show that the ruling coalition’s grassroots participatory system — Ethiopia’s one-to-five networks — weakened after the transition, with former members and local leaders disengaging from politics. Our results show that ethnic turnover can redistribute mass participation, and that status losers can withdraw even as their elites mobilize.
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Abstract
Why do publics condemn past collaborators so uniformly when the underlying behavior varies widely in motive and circumstance? We argue that judgments of blame are not simply products of individual moral reasoning but reflect moral conformity: people align their evaluations with a perceived social consensus, especially when responsibility is hard to assess. We test this with a survey experiment on roughly 3,000 Taiwanese citizens that varies whether respondents see, or can choose to see, how their peers judged regime informants during Taiwan’s ``White Terror’’. Exposure to peer judgments increases the likelihood of choosing the peer-endorsed profile by 10 percentage points — a 20% shift relative to the control — and similarly raises support for publicly exposing former informants. The effect holds despite respondents being given detailed information about each informant’s motives, agency, and consequences, and is strongest among younger respondents, among those who actively seek peer views, and in the most morally ambiguous cases. A second, descriptive survey of 1,500 Taiwanese adults helps explain the moderating role of age: older people have more crystallized views of the past and are more likely to think of political partisans as their immediate peers than younger people.
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Ties that bind: the influence of wartime social networks on ex-combatant reintegration
Abstract
During armed conflicts, combatants forge deep ties with peers and leaders that often persist post-war. There is a growing consensus that these ties are a negative influence on ex-combatants, facilitating a return to arms or pulling former fighters into organized crime. We present suggestive evidence that this view may be overly pessimistic. We collect rare survey and qualitative interview data from demobilized fighters going through an economic reintegration program in Colombia. We find no evidence that ex-combatants who are actively attempting reintegration are influenced by wartime ties and some evidence that they discount information from former fighters. Our results speak to the potential for ex-combatants to vary in their personal investment in demobilization and how state policies can structure ex-combatant decision-making.
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Fostering civic engagement in polarized, autocratic regimes: Evidence from a field experiment in Ethiopia
Abstract
Scholars and practitioners have made a sustained effort to increase citizen participation in public life, based on the premise that greater participation enhances government responsiveness and builds social capital. Most of this work has been conducted in stable, democratic societies and focuses on outcomes related to political participation, such as voting. However, in autocratic settings characterized by conflict, such efforts must contend with risks that new engagement will take a sectarian form or channel participation into political institutions seen as illegitimate or repressive. Using a pre-registered field experiment in Ethiopia, we test an intervention designed to increase youth participation with civil society organizations in an electoral autocracy characterized by extreme polarization. Four months post-treatment, we observed increases in both self-reported and behavioral measures of civic participation without increasing polarization. However, some of this engagement was mobilized toward sectarian causes. Importantly, the intervention worked through new and existing social ties, showing that social networks are a powerful tool for youth engagement.
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Media, Public Opinion, and Polarization over Historical Memory
Abstract
Historical memory issues are highly polarized in Spain, and people’s views on how to memorialize the past are resistant to persuasion. Surprisingly, our replication muddies whether these attitudes are uniquely hard to shift
Peer-reviewed
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Abstract
Scholars and policymakers alike now view competition between states as the primary threat to international security. Yet, the nontraditional threats that previously defined the global security landscape, such as terrorism and civil war, continue to flourish. Recent interstate conflicts have featured nonstate armed groups as central actors, and governments rely on these groups to extend their interests. This paper examines how government support for foreign nonstate actors affects interstate competition. We conceptualize state-nonstate ties as transnational networks comprised of cooperative relationships between governments and foreign terrorist organizations, rebel groups, militias, and civilian groups. We argue that these transnational networks exacerbate interstate tensions in two ways. First, they increase a state’s capacity relative to adversaries, which emboldens the government, increases its bargaining leverage, and leads to increased aggression toward other states. Second, they increase a government’s liability for the actions of sponsored groups, which leads to unintended confrontations and retaliatory actions by affected targets. To measure interstate competition, we use high-resolution event data on verbal and material conflict between governments. We incorporate these data into network models that allow transnational ties and interstate conflict to co-evolve, such that states form ties to nonstate actors in response to interstate conflict, and those ties in turn influence conflict probability. We find that both the size and structure of governments’ respective transnational networks are associated with an increase in verbal and material conflict. Further, this association is particularly strong for states that lack conventional military strength. These findings suggest that cooperation between governments and nonstate actors is integrally connected to interstate competition.
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Abstract
Ethnic federalism, a system that devolves power to subnational states drawn along ethnic lines, is a widely debated approach to managing ethnic conflict. While scholars have studied its macro-level consequences, little is known about micro-level preferences within these countries. We examine two key dilemmas of ethnic federalism: (1) the “minorities within minorities dilemma”, where many ethnic group members live outside their designated state, and (2) the ``devolution dilemma,’’ which concerns which powers should be held by the central versus state governments. Using survey experiments among Ethiopian university students, we find no average effect of changing power distributions on support for ethnic federalism, but substantial heterogeneity: politically and ethnically intolerant respondents respond strongly to devolving state power. We further find security policy is the primary concern in debates over devolution, followed by cultural policies. Our findings highlight the importance of micro-level perspectives in understanding the stability of ethnofederal systems and the political consequences of their reform.
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Abstract
Rebel groups, often too weak to defeat the state in direct combat, adopt strategies to erode its capacity and resolve. One important class of such tactics—what we call economic subversion—is attacks that disrupt economic activity and impose large costs on the state, elites, and civilians. We conceptualize economic subversion as an umbrella class of rebel tactics that disrupt “business as usual,” regardless of whether economic harm is the primary motive. This approach helps connect related concepts in the literature, including looting, sabotage, and other tactics. We further theorize that the economic value of a locale should incentivize rebel subversion, while state fortification efforts should deter it, and test our concept using historical data from the Colombian armed conflict. On the incentive side, we show that rebels are more likely to engage in economic subversion in municipalities important to internal trade, especially during formal negotiations with the state. On the deterrent side, we find mixed, inconclusive evidence via a difference-in-difference design that a large-scale policing effort failed to deter rebel subversion. These findings highlight the substantial leeway rebels have to inflict painful economic costs on the state.
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Abstract
Group-based quotas and affirmative action policies are common in many parts of the world. A large literature has focused on public debates over the perceived fairness of these policies. Yet in highly diverse countries, debates often centre on which groups should benefit and how to establish who counts as a member of those groups. We know comparatively little about these kinds of debates. In this article, we present new experimental evidence on public preferences over targeted race quotas in Brazil, a country where racial identity is famously ambiguous and where substantial controversy over the use of race quotas in university admissions remains. Placing respondents from an online convenience sample in the role of deciding whom to admit as part of a university race quota, the results indicate (1) that while economic class dominates other considerations in quota targeting, racial factors still matter; (2) the public places a large premium on indicators of merit; and (3) that these preferences are largely homogeneous across racial groups and resistant to priming.
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Abstract
Millions of people around the world are internally displaced. And yet – compared to other forms of wartime victimization – scholars know relatively little about the long-run consequences of displacement for victims. This gap in the literature is problematic since displacement is distinct from other forms of victimization, and because IDPs face unique challenges in post-conflict transitions. This study contributes to the literature on the effects of displacement in three ways. First, the study brings to bear a unique sample of households in Colombia that is largely homogeneous along key confounders – mostly poor, rural, and conflict-afflicted – yet varies in their exposure to displacement. Next, the study draws on a rich set of covariates and outcomes to provide plausible estimates on the long-run effects of internal displacement. The study finds that a decade or more after displacement, victims experience substantial negative welfare deficits yet exhibit higher levels of social cohesion than their counterparts. Finally, combining a prediction framework with key stakeholder interviews, the study explores variation in outcomes among victims, particularly why some can return home and seek reparations while others are not. The results reveal a wide assortment of consequences resulting from displacement and should help inform policy-making bearing on support for internally displaced people.
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Abstract
Wars can produce drastic changes in the attitudes and behavior of the citizens of the countries involved in the fighting. Yet such conflicts also have important security and economic implications for uninvolved, third-party states. How do the wars of others shape domestic public attitudes? We explore this question by analyzing the effect of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on Spanish nationalism. Exploiting a natural experiment in Spain, we show that the Russian invasion caused a general increase in the salience of Spanish national identification, but not at the expense of regional or substate national identities. We also find an activation effect on electoral participation and increased support for taxation. Our study illuminates pathways through which international conflicts can affect domestic politics in third-party states.
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Abstract
Millions of people around the world are forcibly displaced. One consequence of displacement is that it brings large numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons into contact with members of ‘host’ communities with whom they might otherwise have little opportunity to interact. Such contact has the capacity to transform social and economic life among both host communities and forcibly displaced persons, yet we have relatively scant evidence of how communities change in response to displacement. In this Special Issue Introductory Essay, we provide an overview of forced displacement as a phenomenon and review the state of knowledge on displacement and social cohesion. We then synthesize findings from nine new studies included in this issue, which bring forth new evidence from over 30 countries across the globe. We conclude with implications for policy and development efforts.
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Abstract
Across the world, citizens sidestep the state to punish offenses on their own. Such vigilantism can help communities provide order, yet it raises concerns about public accountability and the rights of the accused. While prior research has identified the structural correlates of vigilantism, an open question is in which cases citizens prefer vigilantism over conventional policing. To make sense of these preferences, we draw on two logics of punishment: state substitution and retribution. Using survey data from a conjoint experiment presented to over 9000 households across Guatemala, we find that preferences for vigilantism depend on how transgressive the crime is as well as how unlikely it is to be prosecuted by the state. Victim and perpetrator gender, as well as crime severity and profession of the perpetrator, affect whether people endorse vigilante punishment. These results ultimately raise concerns about the viability of “informal” forms of policing.
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Abstract
International relations scholarship concerns dyads, yet standard modeling approaches fail to adequately capture the data generating process behind dyadic events and processes. As a result, they suffer from biased coefficients and poorly calibrated standard errors. We show how a regression-based approach, the Additive and Multiplicative Effects (AME) model, can be used to account for the inherent dependencies in dyadic data and glean substantive insights in the interrelations between actors. First, we conduct a simulation to highlight how the model captures dependencies and show that accounting for these processes improves our ability to conduct inference on dyadic data. Second, we compare the AME model to approaches used in three prominent studies from recent international relations scholarship. For each study, we find that compared to AME, the modeling approach used performs notably worse at capturing the data generating process. Further, conventional methods misstate the effect of key variables and the uncertainty in these effects. Finally, AME outperforms standard approaches in terms of out-of-sample fit. In sum, our work shows the consequences of failing to take the dependencies inherent to dyadic data seriously. Most importantly, by better modeling the data generating process underlying political phenomena, the AME framework improves scholars’ ability to conduct inferential analyses on dyadic data.
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Abstract
It is common for combatants to deliberately force civilians to flee their homes, resulting in incalculable loss for millions around the world. Existing accounts suggest combatants displace civilians whom they suspect are loyal to their opponents. And yet violence is also frequently motivated by local actors taking advantage of war to pursue private interests unrelated to wartime loyalties. However, little evidence exists of these dynamics with respect to displacement. Drawing on theories of opportunistic violence, I test an account in which surges in demand for land create incentives for elites to prey on peasants for their land. Combining new municipal and survey data from the Colombian armed conflict, I find evidence that the expansion of a land-intensive industry—African palm oil—precipitated opportunistic displacement by elites and paramilitary allies. The results demonstrate how elites can take advantage of war to engage in private accumulation and have implications for transitional justice policy.
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Abstract
Peace processes can bring to the fore a host of normative and practical questions that produce heated public disagreement. These disagreements can generate political obstacles to the successful negotiation and implementation of settlements. Here, I argue that public dissatisfaction with peace processes is in part rooted in core, fundamental differences in worldview, which have been found to inform how citizens form preferences over a wide array of security-related policy issues. Drawing on an original survey fielded at the height of the Colombian peace process, I show that the core values that guide people’s everyday lives have implications for how they think about and behave during peace processes. Results from a conjoint experiment indicate that individuals with more fixed, or “authoritarian,” worldviews hold strong preferences for more punitive agreements than individuals who score low on these qualities. These same individuals were also more likely than their counterparts to abstain from the 2016 peace referendum, although surprisingly not more likely to vote against than in favor. The study sheds light on the microfoundations of public barriers to conflict termination and suggests that core, fundamental differences underlie public discord on the merits of conflict negotiations.
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Abstract
Efforts to end civil wars via negotiations often generate sharp divisions in public opinion. A large, quantitative literature has found evidence for numerous variables serving as potential drivers of public support of and opposition to conflict negotiations. Yet the formation of policy preferences is a complex process, and while many factors might make small contributions to an individual’s conflict termination preferences, we lack a sense of which factors matter most or how to adjudicate among competing explanations. In this article, we leverage a large amount of nationally representative survey data from Colombia (2004–2015) and use machine learning tools to systematically explore which variables are the strongest predictors of public support for negotiations with Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). We find that certain aspects of conflict exposure, individual values bearing on justice and punishment, and belief in the efficacy of the state are among the strongest predictors of negotiation preferences, while many conventionally important variables in the literature have little predictive power. The results have implications for scholars seeking to understand broad drivers of (dis)satisfaction with negotiations and shed light on the polarising Colombian peace process.
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Abstract
An extensive literature in political science and sociology has analyzed how state repression shapes attempts by social movements to pursue political objectives. Less studied, however, is the effect that state repression of activists has on the broader public. Understanding public responses to repression is important, as both states and social movements take action with an eye toward (de)mobilizing broader constituencies. This letter analyzes this dynamic in the context of contemporary Catalonia, where the Spanish state cracked down on efforts by Catalan activists to hold a public referendum on independence. Matching poll respondents in the months before and after the crackdown in late 2017, the study finds that repression increased public sympathy for independence for a short period, and heightened animosity towards actors perceived to be associated or complicit with the Spanish state. The findings speak to the potential for state repression of nonviolent movements to create windows of opportunity for broader mobilization.
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Abstract
Day-to-day policing represents a fundamental interface between citizens and states. Yet even in the most capable states, local policing varies enormously from one community to the next. The authors seek to understand this variation and in doing so make three contributions: First, they conceptualize communities and individuals as networks more or less capable of demanding high-quality policing. Second, they present original survey data and semistructured interviews on local policing from over one hundred sixty slums, eight thousand households, and one hundred seventy informal neighborhood leaders in India that contribute to the nascent empirical work on comparative policing and order. Third, they find evidence that well-connected individuals and densely connected neighborhoods express greater confidence in and satisfaction with local policing. Critically, these differences do not appear to be a function of a lower propensity for local conflict but rather of an increased capacity to leverage neighborhood leaders to mediate relations with the police. The combination of analytics and empirics in this article provides insight into the conditions under which individuals and communities experience the police as expropriators of rents or neutral providers of order.
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Abstract
The anarchic international system is actually heavily structured: communities of states join together for common benefit; strong states form hierarchical relationships with weak states to enforce order and achieve preferred outcomes. Breaking from prior research, we conceptualize structures such as community and hierarchy as properties of networks of states’ interactions that can capture unobserved constraints in state behavior, constraints that may reduce conflict. We offer two claims. One, common membership in trade communities pacifies to the extent that breaking trade ties would entail high switching costs: thus, we expect heavy arms trade, more than most types of commercial trade, to reduce intracommunity conflict. Two, this is driven by hierarchical communities in which strong states can use high switching costs as leverage to constrain conflict between weaker states in the community. We find empirical support for these claims using a time-dependent multilayer network model and a new measure of hierarchy based on network centrality.
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Abstract
Conflict negotiations are often met with backlash in the public sphere. A substantial literature has explored why civilians support or oppose peace agreements in general. Yet, the terms underlying peace agreements are often absent in this literature, even though (a) settlement negotiators must craft agreement provisions covering a host of issues that are complex, multidimensional, and vary across conflicts, and (b) civilian support is likely to vary depending on what peace agreements look like. As a result, we know much less about how settlement design molds overall public response, which settlement provisions are more or less controversial, or what citizens prioritize in conflict termination. In this article, I identify four key types of peace agreement provisions and derive expectations for how they might shape civilian attitudes toward conflict termination. Using novel conjoint experiments fielded during the Colombian peace process, I find evidence that citizens evaluate agreements based primarily on how provisions mete out justice to out-group combatants, and further that transitional justice provisions produced sharp divisions among urban voters in the 2016 referendum. Additional analysis suggests that material, distributive concerns were particularly salient for rural citizens. The results have implications for understanding the challenge of generating public buy-in for conflict termination and sheds light on the polarizing Colombian peace process.
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Abstract
Interstate relations are highly interdependent: a change in relations between a pair of states can impact the relationship each of those states has with third parties, as well as relations among those third party states. This is particularly salient in cases where emerging security threats have the potential to destabilize existing patterns of interstate behavior. While the interdependent nature of states’ strategic responses to varied security challenges is often discussed and theorized in the international relations (IR) literature, it is less frequently modeled empirically. We present an approach for analyzing state relations that takes into account higher-order dependencies in the position of states within a network. We apply the approach to a unique context: diplomatic relations between Middle East and North African (MENA) states during a period in which the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) becomes a significant destabilizing force in the region. We find that the emergence of ISIL dramatically reshaped the region’s politics, improving relations among the region’s major powers while worsening relations for the states facing territorial threats from the group.
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Abstract
Life on the frontlines of a civil war is markedly different from life in safe(r) areas. How does this drastic difference in lived experience shape civilian attitudes toward war and peace? Contrary to theories that link conflict exposure to intransigence, I argue that under certain conditions, exposure increases support for both peace as an outcome and the granting of concessions to armed actors who render settlement more likely. I use various model specifications and matching methodology on survey data from the Colombian peace process, finding strong evidence that civilians in conflict zones exhibit greater support for the peace process overall and are more willing to grant political concessions to armed groups. Mixed evidence further suggests that exposed civilians are less willing to reintegrate with demobilized fighters. The study has theoretical implications for accounts of conflict exposure and helps explain regional variation in the failed referendum vote in Colombia.
Other writing
Book chapters, reports, blogs…
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Entre el plomo y la pluma: apoyo ciudadano a las negociaciones de paz 2004-2015
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Social Cohesion and Forced Displacement : A Synthesis of New Research.
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The Effect of Social Ties on Engagement & Cohesion: Evidence from Ethiopian University Students
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Las guerras de los otros: ¿cómo nos afectan políticamente?
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El impacto de la deportacion.
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Biden wants to halt deportations. Here’s what happens when migrants are sent back.
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4 things the Biden administration should pay attention to with the border crisis
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Encuesta a deportados: Solo quieren volver a huir del país. Plaza Pública’.
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Five years after Colombia’s peace deal, the FARC is no longer on U.S. terrorist group lists
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Freedom House’s scarlet letter: Assessment power through transnational pressure
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Indonesia’s Generasi Program Long-term Impact Evaluation Report
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Mid-Term Performance Evaluation of the Land and Rural Development Program