Ongoing Research

Articles Under Review

“Weapons of the Weak State: How Post-Conflict States Shape International Statebuilding” forthcoming Review of International Organizations (with Aila Matanock)

• International Organizations (IOs), such as the United Nations (U.N.), engage in statebuilding in a range of post-conflict states. Statebuilding scholarship largely assumes these IO statebuilders are the dominant authority, at least temporarily, in seemingly ``weak" states. We argue, in contrast, that the post-conflict state retains authority over the IO statebuilding effort via incomplete contracts that give the post-conflict state the residual rights of control over the unnegotiated components of their statebuilding contracts with IOs. Statebuilding contracts provide procedural ``weapons of the weak state," enabling the post-conflict state to shape the content of the IO's mandate, where it intervenes, whom it hires, and when it exits. Using quantitative text analysis of U.N. Security-Council speeches, analysis of 35 U.N. interventions, and in-depth case studies, this article demonstrates the potential of statebuilding contracts to give post-conflict states power over IO statebuilders, with important implications for scholarship on statebuilding and global governance.

Completed Manuscripts in Preparation for Submission

Aid in Conflict: Donor Politics and Agency in War (with Michael Findley and Haley Swedlund) [Book Manuscript]

• Over the past two decades, international aid donors have steadily and dramatically increased the amount of aid to fragile and conflict-affected countries, with the goal of reducing violence and increasing stability. Successful outcomes depend on aid being being allocated by country-based staff who are better equipped to respond to changing conflict-affected contexts. Contrary to claims of much foreign aid scholarship, we argue that foreign assistance can be responsive to the ebbs and flows of war-to-peace transitions, particularly when aid donors empower their country-based bureaucrats to allocate aid in politically nuanced ways. But when aid is viewed solely as a foreign policy tool meant to achieve the donor country’s strategic interests, it is likely to be largely unresponsive to the recipient country’s war-to-peace transition. When foreign policy decision-makers use aid to support their favored policy or political actor, they reduce its ability to influence the rapidly shifting conflict dynamics. Ironically, international aid is likely to be least effective in the aid donor’s highest priority conflict-affected countries, where headquarter-based politicians are most involved in aid allocation decisions.

“Networks of Influence and Support in UN Peace Operations” (with Jessica Maves Braithwaite, Alex Bruens, and Hatem Zayed)

• In countries facing civil war and political violence, pathways to power and influence are contested. Political violence and civil war emerge, in part, because the existing institutions of state and society either exclude certain groups from power or are unable to contain or integrate emergent groups. Scholarship on civil war, international peacekeeping, and international aid tends to focus on the behavior of a single type of actor operating in these contexts – whether the government, non-state armed groups, international peacekeepers, international donors, or international NGOs. By focusing only on one type of group, existing scholarship fails to capture the ways in which peacekeepers, development actors, and national stakeholders support one another, forging new pathways to power and influence. The inability to capture these networks of influence and support is exacerbated by very poor data about the non-state, non-governmental, and intergovernmental actors operating in conflict-affected countries. Using detailed mixed-method analyses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this paper develops a theory of networks of influence and support among diverse state, non-state, and intergovernmental actors in contexts of civil war and political violence, explaining how they shape conflict and cooperation outcomes in often counter-intuitive ways.

“Who Makes the State? National Ownership and International Statebuilding” (with Yolande Bouka and Travis Curtice)

• How do liberal international institutions carry out statebuilding interventions in increasingly authoritarian post-conflict states? In spite of claims that the liberal international order is declining, the United Nations (UN) and other Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs) still engage in international statebuilding and peacebuilding efforts aimed at transforming war-torn countries into liberal democratic states. Scholarship on international peacebuilding and statebuilding largely argues that international peacebuilders impose their liberal norms on post-conflict countries, regardless of the recipient countries' characteristics. Using a unique multi-method research design, grounded in surveys and semi-structured interviews with peacebuilding staff, we argue that IGO peacebuilders change their peacebuilding approach in response to the post-conflict state's regime type. Specifically, in increasingly authoritarian post-conflict states, IGO peacebuilders prioritize the preferences of the post-conflict state over those of their leadership at headquarters. But even within this constrained context, IGO staff can work with their domestic interlocutors in the post-conflict state to find pathways to pursue liberal peacebuilding aims. These findings challenge commonly held assumptions in the peacebuilding, statebuilding, IGO, and democratization literature, and point to ways that individual bureaucrats help make the post-conflict state.

“The Gendered Perceptions of Post-conflict Peace” (with Caroline Brandt and Laura Huber) [Research complete; Paper in progress]

• UN peace operations are increasingly focused not only on keeping the peace but also on enhancing the peacebuilding capacity of conflict-affected communities (United Nations 2020). The literature on UN peace operations has largely overlooked their peacebuilding capacity; instead, focusing on the coercive security capacity of UN peacekeeping troops and their effect on violence reduction, rather than examining the UN's community-level efforts to build peace in the aftermath of conflict. Moreover, given men and women's different experiences with and understanding of peace and conflict, as well as their varying interactions with formal institutions, UN peacebuilding activities may have differential effects on men's and women's perspectives of community well-being and the factors that contribute to peace and well-being. Based on the findings from an impact evaluation of US$ 44 million that the UN Peacebuilding Fund allocated to Burundi between 2007 and 2013, our study, which combines a 250-person household-level survey with 165 semi-structured interviews demonstrates that individuals living in communities that hosted PBF activites, were significantly more likely to perceive higher levels of community-well being, as measured through decreased poverty and discrimination, compared to those living in non-PBF locations. While gendered perceptions of overall community well-being were similar, men and women did attribute improvements in social cohesion, human rights, and conflict mitigation to different actors and institutions. These findings have implications for the literature on UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding, identifying the peacebuilding effects of UN peace operations while pointing to the complex gender dynamics of community-based peacebuilding efforts.

“A Call for Peace: Non-State Armed Groups as Humanitarian Actors” (with Hilary Matfess)

• There is a pressing need to understand how the dynamics of aid provision in conflict-affected contexts. Three-quarters of the world’s population lives in the 57 countries and territories deemed ‘fragile contexts’ by the OECD.[1] Over the past decade, while poverty has gone down in the rest of the world, it has risen in these communities. Ongoing violence reduces the ability of the state to provide social services and increases the vulnerability of citizens to disease, malnutrition, and other livelihood vulnerabilities. Much of the aid scholarship focuses on how international aid actors provide services to the population in these contexts, doing that which the state is unwilling or unable to do. Less well-understood is how Non-State Armed Groups (NSAGs)—defined as “armed organizations operating outside the control of the state and willing and able to use force to achieve their objectives,” which includes organizations like rebel groups, political militias, community-based armed groups, and violent criminal organizations—may serve as valuable partners or daunting hurdles for those providing aid and assistance in conflict-affected areas.

Work in Progress

“Agents of Aid: Who believes aid influences post-conflict states and why?” (with Gabriele Spilker) [Research complete; Paper in progress]

• International aid donors have increasingly focused their resources on fragile and conflict-affected countries to help them break out of the cycle of violence and underdevelopment. Scholarship on international aid has largely argued that international aid is used to buy political favor of governments, not respond to the needs of impoverished or conflict-affected populations. Relying on an original survey-embedded experiment administered to over 1,100 experts working for donor and implementing organizations, this paper argues that perceptions of political influence by international donors is conditioned by whether the aid worker is employed by an implementing partner or a donor. Even though donors are charged with implementing their country’s foreign policy, we find that implementing partners are more likely than donors to believe that aid influences political behavior within the conflict-affected country. We also find that while both donors and implementers believe they are influential when the country is progressing toward peace, only implementing partners believe they are influential when the country is regressing toward war. These findings hold across country contexts, years of experience of the aid worker, gender, and nationality. 

“Measuring War in Peace: A Latent Variable for Cooperation” (with Jessica Braithwaite and Rob Williams) [Research complete; Paper in progress]

• What is peace in the midst or aftermath of civil war? In spite of the breadth of research on conflict-affected countries, we still do not have answers to this fundamental question. In fact, most research on peacekeeping and peace processes measures peace as the absence of violence, rather than the presence of peaceful cooperation. As a result, it identifies the factors that lead to the absence of violence, not those that sustain peace. This paper uses the case of Colombia to develop this measure of peace, harmonizing existing data sources. Colombia provides unique analytical opportunities to investigate the relationship between violent conflict and peaceful cooperation. The Colombian civil war has been ongoing for over half a century, with a great deal of variation in episodes of violent conflict and peaceful cooperation. As a middle-income country that has made significant investment in its own statistics infrastructure and national research institutions, Colombia has significantly better sub-national data than most countries affected by ongoing civil war. We use these data to develop an approach to identifying the correlates of peace that appear in the absence of violence. We find that higher levels and job availability, unsurprisingly, are indicators of peace. Future research will investigate further indicators and develop measures of peace that researchers can apply beyond the Colombia context.

“Power and Populism in Foreign Aid: Twitter as a Tool of Strategic Communication in Donor-Recipient Relations” (with Abrehet Gebremedhin, Karsten Donnay, and Haley Swedlund) [Research in progress; Paper in progress]

• This study investigates the use of Twitter as a tool of strategic communication in foreign aid negotiations. The literature on foreign aid bargaining has focused on the structural conditions affecting donor-government relations (Swedlund, 2017; Swedlund and Lierl, 2019; Whitfield, 2009; Whitfield and Fraser, 2009), overlooking the potential role of narratives and strategic communications in shaping these relations. In this project, we use computational analysis of data collected through the Twitter API to investigate how donor and recipient officials are using the social media platform to influence aid negotiations in eleven African countries—Rwanda, Burundi, DRC, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Tanzania—between 2018 and 2022. Specifically, we use automated content analysis and machine learning to identify at scale those instances in which officials use Twitter for strategic communication in the context of aid negotiations. We then use manual annotations to classify the exact strategic communication used in each instance. Our approach allows us to systematically analyze the strategic use of narratives to reveal how recipient countries use strategic communication to exert power over donors, and how donors respond, even when structural conditions are highly asymmetric. And, by exploiting the variation in local context, donor-recipient relations, the type and scale of aid negotiated across the eleven countries and multitude of donor organizations, we can further shed light on the specific mechanisms behind the strategic use of Twitter in the context of foreign aid negotiations.

“What is Statebuilding?” (with Naazneen Barma and Aila Matanock) [Research in progress; Paper in progress]

• What is statebuilding? Burgeoning international studies scholarship began to address this topic in the late 1990s as international interventions to stop genocide, prevent violent conflict, and rebuild countries in the aftermath of civil war became the norm. Yet, in spite of growing international investment in statebuilding, the study of statebuilding overall has stagnated, splintering among subfields within international relations and comparative politics, including peacebuilding, foreign aid, democratization, peacekeeping, rebel governance, humanitarian relief, global governance, and the political economy of development. This paper reconceptualizes statebuilding as one of the core topics and practices of international relations. Contrary to its common characterization as efforts at the periphery of international relations—occurring only in impoverished, war-torn countries, and driven primarily by the whims of powerful states—we contend that international statebuilding has been a central feature of the practice of international relations over the past three decades. By addressing the true scope and scale of international statebuilding efforts, scholarship can not only capture what is known about international statebuilding, but it can also reconsider the importance of statebuilding efforts in shaping international relations today.