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Violence against civilians is portrayed as an antecedent of civil war, a cause, or both. Civil war creates opportune environments for planning and carrying out these acts that in turn can have detrimental effects on peace processes. Since not all civil war factions will see peace as beneficial, some actors may use violence to undermine the peace talks. The rebels may use indiscriminate violence to demonstrate their ability to exact costs on the government thus forcing the latter to negotiate. This article focuses upon acts of violence committed by rebel groups during mediated peace process. The central hypothesis is that violence against civilians increases the probability of mediation that in turn increases the prospects for violence. Using all civil war episodes from 1970 to 2008 as observations results from bivariate probit analysis endogenizing the choice of mediation bear out this theoretical argument.

While research has already focused on power-sharing agreements by assessing specific effects of political, economic, territorial and military provisions, some provisions might be more important than others. This paper argues that the content of an agreement is crucial for the cohesion of a signatory rebel group since these are strongly affected by resource-distribution and the way in which the underlying conflict is managed. Investigating on the Free Aceh Movement and the Moro National Liberation Front, this study concludes that the implementation of power-sharing is decisive. When inner-core provisions and single factions are addressed, groups tend to stay united.

To what extent can international peacekeeping promote micro-foundations for positive peace after violence? Drawing on macro-level peacekeeping theory, our approach uses novel experimental methods to illustrate how monitoring and enforcement by a neutral third party could conceivably enhance prosocial behavior between rival groups in a tense, postconflict peacekeeping environment. Using a laboratory experiment in postwar Kosovo, we find that third-party enforcement is more effective at promoting norms of trust between ethnic Serbs and Albanians than monitoring alone or no intervention at all. We then consider real-world extensions for building positive peace across different intervention environments. Using a dictator experiment that exploits heterogeneity in NATO peacekeeping in different regions of Kosovo, our inferences about monitoring and enforcement appear robust to ecological conditions in the field.

Existing scientific literature on post-conflict police reconstruction is largely divided between two camps. The first, and most widely employed in practice, can be termed a neo-liberal model, which argues progress comes through technological and organizational sophistication delivered by Western officials. This neo-liberal model has been the guiding principle of the reconstruction of the Iraqi state and police force. However, many scholars have argued this model is woefully inadequate for post-conflict reconstruction and have instead developed an alternative approach which can be termed a reflexive model. Similar to what is known as fourth generation peacebuilding in the International Relations literature, the reflexive model stresses building relationships with local stakeholders and relying on indigenous knowledge to guide post-conflict reconstruction. Drawing from 48 intensive interviews, 87 qualitative surveys, and six months of ethnographic examination of an Iraqi police training academy, this article argues that both the neo-liberal and reflexive models suffer from ignoring the material basis of reconstruction. This article employs the term 'material' in the theoretical sense; while police reconstruction programs spend significant effort on reshaping the ideologies of police, few address the real conditions police face, from the necessary levels of funding and equipment in their training centers, to basic concerns such as adequate pay to draw qualified applicants and prevent corruption. This study examines how economic inequality affects the 'other side' of conflicts, the security sector. The central finding is that the material deprivation experienced by Iraqi police has resulted in an underqualified force consisting of uninterested officers whose capacity and skill deficits have fed directly into the rise of powerful non-state organizations such as the Islamic State. This article explicates a central underlying cause of the problem with the reconstruction of the Iraqi police specifically and the larger case of neo-liberal post-conflict police reconstruction generally.

Existing work has shown that membership in intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) can, among other outcomes, reduce conflict, promote democratization, and shape crisis bargaining. The traditional approach to studying how IGOs can reduce conflict has focused on the effects of dyads' direct ties to IGOs. In doing so, these analyses use fairly simple counts of the number of IGOs to which the states in each dyad share membership. We argue that this approach is too narrow; we instead consider the effects of higher-order groupings within the IGO network, which we call IGO clusters. Within these IGO clusters, states share relatively many IGO connections with each other, both directly and through indirect links through third parties, fourth parties, and so on. The effects of indirect IGO ties are especially important within such structures. We use a modularity maximization approach to detect clusters within the IGO network. We find robust empirical support for our hypothesis that the pacifying effect of IGO membership stems from the extent to which pairs of states are more deeply embedded within the wider IGO network. Indeed, we find that once we account for states' shared membership in clusters of IGOs, the simpler dyadic measure of shared IGO membership no longer shows evidence of a conflict-inhibiting effect.

As commitment devices, international institutions encourage cooperation by imposing costs on members who do not live up to their commitments. However, the costs that institutions can impose are limited, so that their commitment capacity is weak. Institutions can also impose costs as a condition of membership, allowing them to serve as costly signals. A model of weak commitment and costly signaling leads to a number of hypotheses about patterns of cooperation, institutional membership, and states' preferences over institutional design. For example, existing members of an institution should impose higher ex ante costs when a potential new member could either gain significant benefits from reneging on their commitments in the future, and when the new member expects to gain high benefits from future cooperation. These results are consistent with empirical work on institutions including peacekeeping and the World Trade Organization.