Research Areas
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Dissertation: Community Dispute Resolution and International Peacebuilding
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Gender and Conflict
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Peacebuilding and Peacekeeping
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International Change
Dissertation: Community Dispute Resolution and International Peacebuilding: Competitors or Complementary Actors? Evidence from Liberia and Central Asia
In many countries throughout the world, local communities have ways of solving different kinds of issues, including dealing with local level disputes. However, once conflict or war ends, international peacebuilding initiatives often try to influence how issues are solved at the local level. My dissertation asks, under what conditions do community dispute resolution and international peacebuilding initiatives compliment or undermine one another in achieving local peace?
I build my argument with interview data with community leaders from Liberia. I then test the argument with household and leadership surveys in three different areas of Liberia and use United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) exposure as a case of international peacebuilding to test my argument. In a most different case, I use household survey data and community leadership data from several cases in Central Asia and a community-driven development (CDD) projects with peacebuilding components to explore whether the argument extends beyond Liberia.
Gender and Conflict
Ethnic and Gender Hierarchies in the Crucible of War with Kyle Beardsley, Chong Chen and Katie Webster
Recent scholarship shows war can catalyze reforms related to gender power imbalances, but what about reforms related to ethnic inequalities? While war can disrupt the political, social and economic institutions at the root of ethnic hierarchy—just as it can shake up the institutions at the root of gender hierarchy—war is also prone to have either a reinforcing effect or a pendulum effect. Our project uses data from the Varieties of Democracy project to examine specific manifestations of changes in gender and ethnic civil-liberty equality (1900–2015). Interstate war, but not intrastate war, tends to be followed by gains in ethnic civil-liberty equality, and intrastate war tends to be followed by long-term gains in gender civil-liberty equality. Wars with government losses are prone to lead to improvements in civil-liberty equality along both dimensions. In considering overlapping gender and ethnic hierarchies, we find that when wars open up space for gains in gender equality, they also facilitate gains in equality for excluded ethnic groups.
Rape after Civil Conflict: How State Building Shapes Prevalence with Sabrina Karim and Sumin Lee
Much of the scholarship on rape addresses variation of wartime sexual violence or the legacies of conflict on violence against women after war. We argue that these legacies of war are important for explaining variation in rape after civil war, but also that the state building process itself contributes to rape. Specifically, when international state builders engage in transactional sex, they fundamentally alter male roles within relationships, making it more difficult for them to enter into sexual relationships, which may lead to rape. Additionally, state building sometimes pits informal and formal institutions against one another, which leads to a reliance on justice mechanisms that do not deter rape. To test these intuitions, we use novel, quantitative data on rape in Monrovia, Liberia collected from One Stop Centers from 2015-2019. We combine it with representative surveys of Monrovia. We supplement these data with original interview data from perpetrators and a survivor survey. Triangulating our data, we find support for our theory. The paper problematizes state building as a means to prevent rape.
Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in the Aftermath of War (Book Project) with Sabrina Karim, Angie Torres-Beltran and Taylor Vincent
In many “post-conflict” settings, many gender-based reforms are often passed in an effort to address the treatment of women in society. Despite these reforms, and improvements with respect to policy, many post-conflict countries tend to experience varying levels of violence against women in the aftermath of war. What accounts for this variation in violence against women in the aftermath of conflict? In this book project we posit that post-conflict gains for women are often seen as a challenge to enduring patriarchy, which drives greater levels of violence against women. In the book we draw primarily from two cases, Liberia and Peru using interview evidence as well as survey evidence. Additionally, we draw from cross-national data to highlight these trends globally.
Peacebuilding and Peacekeeping
International Peacekeeping and Community Dispute Resolution: Implications for Local Peace in Liberia
Communities throughout the world have developed many different ways to find local solutions to local problems. However, in communities that are exposed to peacebuilding, international actors often influence how local issues are solved. Under what conditions do community dispute resolution and international peacebuilding complement or undermine one another? Through the use of original interview data, and survey data from household respondents and community leaders in Liberia, I explore these dynamics. I posit that access to community dispute resolution, social cohesion and community leadership's vested interests in long-term community wellbeing contribute to local peace, conditional on peacekeeping exposure. The findings suggest that when local institutions are not well funded and have leaders with short time horizons, peacebuilding exposure can help communities to overcome challenges to local peace. Conversely, when local institutions are well funded and have leaders with vested interests in the long-term wellbeing of the community, peacebuilding exposure undermines the positive influence of community institutions on local peace.
Gender Stereotypes and UN Peacekeeping Deployments: Conjoint Survey Analysis from Security Force Personnel Around the World with Sabrina Karim, Laura Huber, Zinab Attai and Sara Fox
The gendered protection norm refersto the stereotypical belief –explicit or implicit –that men are the natural protectors of women and children, and that women and children should not be put in harm’sway.It is often the reason that women are kept away from combat and other violent situations despite their willingness and capability to use violence. In the context of peacekeeping operations, prior research finds that women are often deployed to missionswhere thereisless risk of sexualviolence and gender inequity isless pervasive (Karim and Beardsley 2013, 2017). Using a novel conjoint experiment, this paper will examine how thegendered protection normmanifestsin security forces’decision-making by asking the question: under what conditions do individuals prefer to deployfemale peacekeepers? Through the use of survey data from members of security forces (members of the armed forces, police and gendarmerie) from a cross-national sample, we test several arguments by varying the level of sexual violence and peacekeeper deaths that an operation has experienced, the sexof a hypothetical peacekeeper, their years of experience,and the type of experience they have. The results of this paper have implications for peacekeeping effectiveness as well as for the exclusion of women insecurity more generally.
Peacekeeping as Socialization Experiences with Sabrina Karim, Laura Huber, Roya Izadi, Michael Kriner, Lindsey Pruett, Cameron Mailhot and Sara Fox
Under what conditions do security force personnel change their attitudes towards violence? In this paper, we develop a theory of socialization to account for variation in beliefs about the acceptability of misconduct and the use of violence among members of security institutions. We theorize that deployment with United Nations peacekeeping operations socializes personnel to be more restrained because participation in these missions introduces security personnel to an array of new practices, procedures, training and experiences. We consider these mechanisms separately, but argue that this experience should be understood as a holistic event. Deployment is a significant stage in many security force personnel's professional careers, and should have a pacifying effect, by reducing preference for or toleration of engaging in violence towards civilians. We test our hypotheses on original, novel data of surveys with police and military personnel in eight different countries (N=3,784). We find that peacekeeping does have a socializing effect, particularly for civilian protection and reporting misconduct. This study contributes to literature on violence and abuse committed by security institutions and the impact of international peacekeeping beyond the host country.
International Change
The Right Transmission: Understanding Global Diffusion of the Far Right with Jennifer M. Ramos
Around the globe, a growing group of politicians are drawing on far-right sentiments to win elections and pursue their policy agendas. Such trends have the potential to undermine established democratic principles within states and reverse trends towards democracy on a global scale. Global public opinion polls in democracies show that citizens no longer find it essential to live in a democracy (Foa and Mounk 2016; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). Furthermore, some see events such as the election of US President Trump and Brexit as catalysts for the diffusion of ultra-right-wing policies. In this article, we seek to explain the rise of the far-right beyond socio-economic and immigration concerns. We propose that not only do such politicians rely on domestic networks of support, but they are also aided by transnational far-right communities. These communities reinforce one another through the sharing of ideas, frames, and strategies to form an epistemic community. By examining political leaders’, parties’, and movements’ actions and rhetoric in our case studies of the U.S., Germany and the U.K., we illustrate the mutually supportive global communities of right-wing demagoguery. We conclude with a discussion of the findings and considerations for future research.