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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (17 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2014)
Governance delegation agreements-international treaties allowing external actors legal authority within host states for fixed terms-succeed in simple and, under certain conditions, complex state-building tasks. These deals are well institutionalized and have input legitimacy because ratification requires sufficient domestic support from a ruling coalition. In order to obtain that input legitimacy, however, host states constrain external actors commensurate with their level of statehood: Stronger states delegate less legal authority. This article argues that these constraints, which produce joint rather than complete authority, require external actors to work within state structures rather than substituting for them, and thus make coordination of complex tasks more difficult. A quantitative overview of data on consent-based peacekeeping missions complements a qualitative analysis focused on comparative case studies in Melanesia and Central America to test the theory. The results support the theory and suggest that these deals hold promise particularly for accomplishing complex tasks in especially weak states.
    Cover page: Governance Delegation Agreements
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2018)
    When do settlements to civil conflict bring former combatants into normal politics as political parties? Prior work shows that electoral-participation provisions in settlements correlate with enduring peace; such provisions help end some of the longest and deadliest civil conflicts. But they are not always included in negotiated settlements. This article presents original data showing that no settlements included electoral-participation provisions until the end of the Cold War. Since then, they appear in almost half of all settlements. What explains this pattern? I argue that combatants include electoral-participation provisions to engage international actors; through these provisions, international actors can often enforce negotiated deals by monitoring and providing incentives conditioned on combatant compliance. This helps to overcome commitment problems that often prevent peaceful settlements of civil conflicts. An analysis of data on civil conflicts and settlements since 1975, as well as illustrative case evidence, provides support this argument.
      Cover page: External Engagement: Explaining the Spread of Electoral Participation Provisions in Civil Conflict Settlements
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2020)
      International actors at times seek to help bring peace, democracy, and human rights. Studies of how international actors help enforce political bargains between incumbent governments and their domestic opponents are proliferating. They show that opposition groups have trouble trusting incumbents to adhere to the political bargains they strike because incumbents can use their familiarity with state institutions and can use their asymmetric hold on power during bargain implementation to violate terms by retaining more of the status quo than agreed. International actors can overcome these ¤quot¤reversion problems,¤quot¤ however, by using monitoring mechanisms (often focused on electoral campaigns) and incentives conditioned on compliance. Reversion problems, and enforcement by international actors as a solution, are common across issue areas¤mdash¤arising when domestic actors try to end civil conflict, open elections, and reduce repression¤mdash¤but the literatures in these issue areas have largely remained segregated. This review proposes advancing this research agenda by unifying them and (re)examining the conditions under which this solution works best.
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2016)
        In many cases, including some of the most destructive civil conflicts and some of the newest emerging democracies, militant and ex-militant groups form political parties to participate in elections. Despite the prevalence of such electoral participation, it has rarely been studied, and scholars have not explored its influence on outcomes such as conflict or democratization. A lack of comprehensive data has impeded this research. The dataset introduced in this article provides annual data on militant and ex-militant group participation in legislative elections between 1970 and 2010. The Militant Group Electoral Participation (MGEP) dataset allows for further empirical study of the patterns, causes, and consequences of this behavior. Moreover, in combination with other datasets, MGEP stands to provide additional insights on conflict, peace, democratization, and electoral politics more broadly. In this article, I describe MGEP, provide summary statistics on the data, and show its applications, including through a replication study on post-conflict elections.
          Cover page: Using violence, seeking votes
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2018)
          Armed actors are often involved in electoral politics, from the fusing of ballots and bullets in armed political parties to insurgents covertly backing politicians. We develop new concepts and theory to better understand these complex relationships between violent actors and democratic practice. We first offer a novel conceptualization of armed groups' electoral strategies that systematically maps out variation in the organizational directness and public openness of groups' involvement in elections. We then use comparative case studies to develop theory about the conditions under which each of these electoral strategies is most likely, and what can trigger changes between them. The interaction of armed groups' power and expectations of popular support with governments' policies of toleration or repression determines the strategies of electoral participation that groups pursue. These concepts and arguments lay the foundation for a systematic research agenda on when and how normal and armed politics become intertwined.
            Cover page: How and Why Armed Groups Participate in Elections
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2018)
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2022)
              There is an emerging consensus that international intervention can secure peace by helping combatants resolve commitment problems following civil wars. But how do interveners accomplish this? Some suggest that intervention primarily works through military coercion, while others propose non-military instruments. We build on the existing literature to theorize that interveners commonly condition political, economic, and legal incentives on compliance with peace processes. Despite a rich literature on intervention, scholars have only started to test the underlying instruments. This article takes a critical step toward this end, examining peacekeeping missions led by the United Nations from 1989 to 2012. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we show military coercion is neither commonly used nor necessary to ensure peace. Missions that employ conditional incentives-on which we collect original data- A re consistently correlated with a reduced risk of conflict recurrence, even when controlling for observed selection effects, and regardless of whether they are also authorized to use military coercion.
                • Article
                • Peer Reviewed
                UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2017)
                  • Thesis
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2022)

                  This dissertation examines how the psychological implications of living through conflict and forced migration affect social cohesion. While scholars have begun to test the relationship between trauma exposure, the subsequent psychological distress that can emerge in its aftermath, and various sociopolitical outcomes—including prosociality, group relations, political participation, and institutional trust—they have conceptualized, operationalized, and measured trauma exposure and psychological distress in different ways, often resulting in disparate conclusions.

                  As the process of living through and responding to trauma exposure has significant heterogeneity at the individual level, I maintain that it should be conceptualized and studied as such. I present the theory of psychological foundations of social cohesion, which posits that individuals' adverse responses to trauma exposure, manifest as psychological distress, lead to changes in social cohesion outcomes. I identify two dimensions of social cohesion: bonding social cohesion, which is social cohesion targeted at ingroup members, and bridging social cohesion, which is social cohesion targeted at outgroup members. I develop seven hypotheses regarding the variation in how individuals react to living through trauma exposure (H1-H2), how differential responses to trauma shape social cohesion (H3-H6), and how emotion regulation shapes social cohesion (H7). I hypothesize that only a subset of individuals will develop psychological distress in responses to trauma exposure, that there will be variation in the characteristics of that distress, and that different manifestations of psychological distress will differentially affect bonding and bridging social cohesion. I further theorize that individuals whose response to trauma is characterized by hyperarousal—commonly referred to as "fight or flight" behaviors—will have lower reported levels of bridging social cohesion, while individuals whose response to trauma is characterized by hypoarousal—commonly referred to as "freezing or immobilizing" behaviors—will have lower levels of bridging and bonding social cohesion. I additionally theorize that individuals with increased emotion regulation, defined as the ability to modulate one's emotional responses in a way proportional to stimuli, will have greater reported bonding and bridging social cohesion.

                  I present three main empirical tests of the hypotheses. The first takes a cross-context approach, assessing cross-national variation in rates of trauma exposure and psychological disorders, as reported by the World Health Organization's World Mental Health Survey Initiative. I find that rates of trauma exposure and psychological disorders vary significantly across countries, and there is a significant positive association between the proportion of a nation's population that reports at least one trauma exposure and the prevalence of mental health disorders, including anxiety and mood disorders. I next estimate associations between individual-level measures of psychological distress and social cohesion, as measured cross-nationally in the second wave of the World Values Survey. The findings provide cross-national support for the expectation that hyperarousal and hypoarousal have differential impacts on social cohesion, such that hyperarousal is significantly negatively associated with bridging social cohesion, while hypoarousal is significantly negatively associated with both bonding and bridging social cohesion.

                  The second—and primary—test of the theory uses an original panel dataset gathered via a randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluating the efficacy of The Field Guide for Barefoot Psychologists, a novel psychoeducational program designed to improve emotion regulation and reduce psychological distress among Syrian refugees living in Za'atari Refugee Camp in Jordan. I use the baseline data to assess the prevalence of trauma exposure and psychological distress, as well as associations between baseline levels of psychological distress and social cohesion. I then use the baseline and endline data to evaluate how intervention-driven improvements in psychological distress and emotion regulation are associated with changes in social cohesion. The intervention has a significant effect on both hypoarousal and emotion regulation, leading to a 21.4% improvement in hypoarousal from baseline, and a 18.7% improvement in emotion regulation from baseline; the intervention has no significant effect on hyperarousal. Using a structural equation model, I find that the intervention-driven improvement in hypoarousal is significantly associated with improvements in bonding social cohesion (ingroup trust) and bridging social cohesion (outgroup trust, outgroup anxiety, and perceived communal security), while the improvement in emotion regulation is significantly associated with improvements in bonding social cohesion (ingroup trust) and bridging social cohesion (outgroup trust and perceived communal security). These findings indicate that interventions designed to improve individual psychological well-being may have secondary improvements on community-relevant factors via the theorized relationship between psychological distress and social cohesion.

                  The third empirical test uses data from the Survey of War Affected Youth (SWAY) to provide another individual-level test of the theory in a highly different context. The SWAY data is a large-scale survey of 1360 conflict-affected youth in Kitgum and Pader districts in northern Uganda. I assess variations in psychological distress based on degree and type of trauma exposure, finding that forced violence and sexual abuse are the two types of trauma exposure most strongly positively associated with both hyperarousal and hypoarousal. I then estimate associations between psychological distress and social cohesion.

                  From these empirical tests I draw three key conclusions. First, trauma exposure cannot be seen as a uniform experience, and neither can responses to trauma exposure. As such, social science research must ensure that we are conceptualizing and measuring each in a way that reflects the complexity and heterogeneity in both trauma exposure and psychological distress. The theory on psychological foundations of social cohesion provides an informative framework for conceptualizing psychological distress by differentiating between responses characterized by hyperarousal and hypoarousal. Second, the results provide empirical support for the hypotheses derived from the theory of psychological foundations of social cohesion regarding psychological distress. Specifically, they support the expectations that hyperarousal and hypoarousal have differential effects on social cohesion, that hyperarousal is associated with lower reported bridging social cohesion, that among individuals with hyperarousal, those who do not additionally have hypoarousal will have higher reported bonding social cohesion, and that hypoarousal will be associated with lower bonding and bridging social cohesion. Third, the results from the evaluation of The Field Guide for Barefoot Psychologists indicate that the relationship between intervention-driven improvements in psychological distress and emotion regulation with social cohesion outcomes is a promising avenue for future inquiry and practice. If these results reflect the theorized underlying relationship, then they would indicate that treatments designed to improve individual mental health are worth investing in not only because of improvements in individual psychological well-being, but because of improvements in social cohesion outcomes, driven by improvements in distress and emotion regulation, relevant to the wider community.

                  This dissertation project makes both theoretical and empirical contributions related to how different manifestations of psychological distress that can emerge in the aftermath of trauma exposure affect social cohesion. It offers important contributions to the understanding of how mental health contributes to peace and stability in communities affected by conflict and forced migration, new avenues for academic and practical inquiry, and insights into broader implications and policy strategies regarding mental health and social cohesion.

                    • Article
                    • Peer Reviewed
                    UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2018)
                    Studies of the contagious spread of insurgency and conflict across national boundaries has generated a good deal of empirical research over time. While the contagious spread of terrorism has also been a policy concern, few empirical studies exist on the extent to which terrorism spreads contagiously. This article uses methods developed by criminologists to study the spread of crime to examine the worldwide diffusion of terrorism from 1970 to 2013. We distinguish between contagious increases (based on shared borders) and noncontagious increases (where no borders are shared). We define the “domino effect” as a particular type of contagious diffusion where high levels of terrorism spread to an adjoining country but also remain high in the host country. Our analysis shows that both contagious and non-contagious diffusion has been rare over the past 43 years, noncontagious diffusion is more common than contagious, and when contagious diffusion occurs, it is very likely to occur according to the domino effect.
                      Cover page: The Contagious Diffusion of Worldwide Terrorism: Is It Less Common Than We Might Think?
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