Running Candidates after Using Violence?

Abstract:

Designing peace agreements that can be signed and sustained can be difficult in civil conflict. A recent transformation in successful settlement design has produced many cases that include electoral or other political participation provisions. In this paper, we examine popular support for the transformation from bullets to ballots, testing whether individuals object to providing former rebels with the protections and legitimacy of electoral participation. Using a survey experiment in the context of Colombia’s current peace process between the Government and the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), we find that the latter is a highly controversial actor in the country—indeed, invoking the specific group diminishes support for the peace process, particularly accords that would allow for increased representation in municipalities more affected by conflict. These findings are important to understanding how to design settlements, providing policy implications for the peace process with the FARC in Colombia but also in other civil conflicts that negotiators may seek to end through electoral participation by the former rebels, a proposal that has become common in many cases, including the Taliban in Afghanistan.

 

Speaker Bio:

Aila M. Matanock is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and, during 2015-2016, a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Her research focuses on post-conflict elections that are produced by peace processes, foreign intervention that occurs by host state invitation, and armed actor governance and social support, especially in counterinsurgency contexts. She uses case studies, survey experiments, and cross-national data in this work. She has conducted fieldwork in Colombia, Central America, the Pacific, and elsewhere. She has received funding for these projects from many sources, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START), and the Center for Global Development (CGD). Her dissertation won the 2012 Helen Dwight Reid Award from the American Political Science Association, and a revised version is currently under review as a book manuscript. She has worked at the RAND Corporation before graduate school, and she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation afterward. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and her A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard University.