Abstract: How can governments gain the trust of their citizens after civil war? Although previous work has thoroughly considered the drivers of governmental trust, we know relatively little about the role of security perceptions in post-conflict settings. Drawing on data from an original survey fielded with 2000 respondents from Liberia, we show that citizens’ security perceptions shape their trust in government. We also demonstrate that explicit attribution of security to specific institutions is key for linking more effective security governance with more trust. Our findings have significant implications for the design of security institutions and statebuilding in post-conflict settings.

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Abstract: Recent efforts to improve attitudes toward outgroups and reduce support for extremists in violent settings report mixed results. Donors and aid organizations have spent millions of dollars to amplify the voices of moderate religious figures to counter violent extremism in West Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Despite this investment, we know little about whether such messaging persuades the primary recruits of violent extremist organizations: at-risk youth in fragile settings. In this paper, we consider whether pro-peace religious messaging can promote social cohesion among school-age respondents in Burkina Faso. Using a survey experiment, we find little evidence that such messages affect reported attitudes or behaviors towards religious extremism and find instead that it can have the unintended effect of increasing intolerance towards ethnic others. Our findings carry lessons about the inadvertent priming of ethnic identities that can result in a backlash effect among certain societal segments.

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Abstract: Why do former belligerents institutionalize power-sharing arrangements after a civil war ends? The choice of power-sharing institutions shapes the nature of governance in many post-conflict settings. A better understanding of how belligerents come to choose institutionalized forms of power-sharing would thus help us explain how belligerents come to make a seemingly simple institutional choice that may have immense consequences. Existing scholarship emphasizes the nature of the conflict preceding negotiations, international actors, or state institutional capacity as critical factors for determining whether former belligerents will agree to share power or not. Yet these accounts overlook the importance of political considerations between and within ethnic groups. This article argues that elites create power-sharing institutions when the most significant threat to their political power comes from an outside group as opposed to from within their own group. That is, forward-looking and power-minded leaders of former belligerents push for the type of power-sharing at the negotiating table that affords them the greatest opportunity to influence country-level politics after the conflict has concluded in full. For elites facing competition from outside, this means securing power-sharing through institutional rules and guidelines in the settlement of the civil war to ensure that they are included in the governance of the state. By contrast, for elites fearing in-group rivals, complex governance institutions are at best unnecessary and, at worst, a significant concession to weaker opponents. I test the argument with a cross-national analysis of an original dataset of 186 power-sharing negotiations from 1945–2011. The empirical analysis suggests that elites are most likely to institutionalize power-sharing when no single ethnic group dominates politics and when most ethnic groups are unified. The quantitative analysis is complemented with illustrative examples from cases of power-sharing negotiations that offer insight into the proposed theoretical mechanisms.

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Abstract: Although Downes and Monten (2013) offer promising results in support of their hypotheses, two factors should make scholars skeptical of the conclusions drawn from their interpretation of the evidence. First, even though Downes and Monten duly explore the efficacy of varieties of FIRC, they omit the most critical analytical category related to the dependent variable. In evaluating the ability of FIRC to produce democracy, one should focus on cases of foreign-imposed democratization (FID) where the intervener intended to replace a nondemocratic regime with a democratic one. Second, the nature of FIRC operations has changed over time in ways unaccounted for by Downes and Monten. For historical and theoretical reasons outlined in this paper, FIRC carried out before World War I looks significantly different from FIRC carried out since 1918. A closer examination of the targets of FID after World War I reveals a fairly remarkable success rate: thirteen out of seventeen targets transitioned to consolidated democracies within ten years of the intervention (see table 1). Such a record should give us pause be fore concluding that FIRC has little or no independent effect on a state's democratization prospects.

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