What Makes an Ex-Combatant Happy? A Micro-Analysis of Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration in South Sudan

Successful management of combatants through disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) remains one of the main challenges of post-conflict peacebuilding. While DDR is meant to contribute to a secure post-conflict environment conducive to economic and political development, the success of DDR efforts remains mixed. Unlike previous work focusing on procedural aspects or post-conflict reconstruction and development, we shift the focus to understand microlevel conditions—economic, security, and ethnic concerns—that influence ex-combatants' satisfaction with DDR. We argue that ex-combatant satisfaction with DDR should increase as individual-level economic conditions increase, as security situations improve, and as ethnic tensions decrease. We test our expectations using an original data set collected with field interviews and surveys from 122 ex-combatants in South Sudan in 2011–2012. We find that participants are more satisfied when their income-generating activity is based on DDR job training and when the UN has a large presence in their area. Concerns about political instability and an abundance of firearms make ex-combatants less satisfied with DDR

Information, Commitment, and Intra-War Bargaining: The Effect of Governmental Constraints on Civil War Duration

This article considers how governmental variations affect the duration of civil conflicts. Recent work suggests that war termination is likely when competing actors gain information about the power balance and are able to credibly commit to war-ending agreements. I focus on how the strength and stability of executives impact these factors. Regarding information, power consolidation within the government reduces the number of people who must agree on a settlement, which should shorten civil conflicts. Stable leadership should likewise shorten conflicts by making it harder for potential spoilers to derail war-ending agreements, helping minimize credibility problems. This argument is tested by examining how variations in institutional design (executive constitutional and legislative power), political strength (ideological fragmentation and polarization), and stability (leadership tenure) affect the duration of civil conflicts from 1946 to 2004. The results suggest that powerful and stable executives are indeed well equipped to end civil conflicts

Supporter of stability or agent of agitation? The effect of US foreign policy on coups in Latin America, 1960-99

This article takes a two-step approach to improving our understanding of how US foreign policy signals affect the likelihood of coups in Latin America. First, a large body of qualitative literature has developed a 'conventional wisdom' on this subject, suggesting that pressure from the USA plays a key role in stabilizing favored leaders and destabilizing unfavored leaders. Meanwhile, quantitative scholarship analyzing coups focuses almost exclusively on intrastate factors. The first step brings these two bodies of work together by providing quantitative evidence that hostile US signals increase the likelihood of coups, while supportive signals have a stabilizing effect. The second step moves beyond the conventional wisdom by (1) reconsidering theoretical assumptions within the conventional argument and (2) identifying anomalies within the preliminary empirical analyses. These efforts reveal several factors that are likely to impact how coup plotters respond to US signals. Among these factors, empirical analyses indicate that US signals are particularly important when economic dependence on the USA increases, during the middle of a US president's term in office, when they have moderate levels of consistency, and when they specifically mention the military. Overall, the first stage of this article provides a robust confirmation of the conventional wisdom, while the second stage moves the literature down a path that is largely unexplored by previous work.coups d'etat, Latin America, signals, US foreign policy

Contentious Issues as Opportunities for Diversionary Behavior

Scholars have long been fascinated by the potential for leaders to engage in diversionary behavior, where leaders use militarized force abroad to distract their publics from various forms of domestic economic and political turmoil. While there is some evidence that diversionary behavior depends on contextual factors such as regime type, opportunities to use force, and interstate rivalry, we do not know whether and how diversionary strategies are used by states to resolve contentious issues. In fact, most diversionary studies compare the initiation of militarized disputes or crises to non-initiation cases, without considering the slew of interstate interactions in between these extremes, where states have an ongoing contested issue that gets managed with both peaceful and militarized conflict management tools. In this article, we extend theories of diversionary behavior to the context of issue claims, including competing claims to territory, maritime areas, and cross-border rivers as coded by the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) project. Thinking about an ongoing issue claim as a potential diversionary opportunity, we examine the empirical effect of domestic turmoil on the militarization of issue claims. We consider whether issue diversionary behavior is conditioned by the salience level of the issue, previous wars over the issue in question, and whether the disputing states are involved in a broader rivalry. In a broad sample of directed dyad-years, we find that states are more likely to initiate militarized disputes if they are involved in contentious issues claims. We also find that states involved in issue claims are more likely to initiate a militarized dispute if they have high levels of inflation and if they are contesting over highly salient and previously militarized issues.diversionary conflict; inflation; issues; maritime; militarized conflict; river; salience; territory

Global instances of coups from 1950 to 2010: A new dataset

Once considered a 'hot topic' among scholars, research on coups d'état has waned in recent years. This decline is surprising given that 7 coups have happened between January 2008 and December 2010, bringing the last decade's total to almost three dozen. One explanation for the lack of coup research is the absence of a temporally and spatially comprehensive dataset to test theories. Also absent is a discussion of what makes coups distinct from other forms of anti-regime activity. This article seeks to remedy these problems. The authors present a new dataset on coups from 1950 to 2010. They begin by explaining their theoretical definition and coding procedures. Next, they examine general trends in the data across time and space. The authors conclude by explaining why scholars studying a variety of topics, including civil wars, regime stability, and democratization, would benefit by paying closer attention to coups.civil wars; coding procedures; coup d'état; new dataset

What Makes an Ex-Combatant Happy? A Micro-Analysis of Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration in South Sudan

DOI: 10.1111/isqu.1218

A Supply Side Theory of Mediation

We develop and test a theory of the supply side of third-party conflict management. Building on Kydd's (2003) model of mediation, which shows that bias enhances mediator credibility, we offer three complementary mechanisms that may enable mediator credibility. First, democratic mediators face costs for deception in the conflict management process. Second, a vibrant global democratic community supports the norms of unbiased and nonviolent conflict management, again increasing the costs of deception for potential mediators. Third, as disputants’ ties to international organizations increase, the mediator's costs for dishonesty in the conflict management process rise because these institutions provide more frequent and accurate information about the disputants’ capabilities and resolve. These factors, along with sources of bias, increase the availability of credible mediators and their efforts to manage interstate conflicts. Empirical analyses of data on contentious issues from 1816 to 2001 lend mixed support for our arguments. Third-party conflict management occurs more frequently and is more successful if a potential mediator is a democracy, as the average global democracy level increases, and as the disputants’ number of shared International Organization (IO) memberships rises. We also find that powerful states serve as mediators more often and are typically successful. Other factors such as trade ties, alliances, issue salience, and distance influence decisions to mediate and mediation success. Taken together, our study provides evidence in support of Kydd's bias argument while offering several mechanisms for unbiased mediators to become credible and successful mediators

Even Generals Need Friends

Signals from domestic and international actors have been shown to influence the likelihood of coups. Coups remain difficult to predict and consequently leave policy makers in a reactive stance, but little systematic work assesses how these reactions influence long-term outcomes. We examine how reactions from domestic and international actors influence the duration of coup-born regimes, arguing that negative reactions will shorten leadership duration. We further probe these relationships by considering how signaling consistency, Cold War dynamics, and precoup relationships condition the influence of reactions on leadership duration. Tests use events data to capture domestic and international reactions and newly coded information on leadership to capture leader duration. Results indicate that international responses have a profound influence on leadership tenure, especially those from strong actors. We find tentative support that state reactions have the strongest effect during the Cold War, while international organizations matter the most afterward