Speaker: Michael Weintraub, Associate Professor, Universidad de los Andes
Since the end of the Cold War, the United Nations (UN) has increased its involvement in countries emerging from conflict. Most work on UN peacekeeping focuses on how it decreases the odds of conflict relapse by reassuring elite and mid-level commanders. Yet understanding the attitudes of former rank-and-file fighters—low-ranking recruits who primarily do the soldiering—is a pressing task. The speaker and his co-authors (Natalia Garbiras-Díaz, Leopoldo Fergusson, Juana García, and Laia Balcells) conducted an original phone-based survey of 4,435 former combatants of the FARC-EP, Colombia’s largest rebel group, which demobilized following a 2016 peace agreement.
They began with exploratory analyses to understand whether foot soldiers’ contact with and trust in the UN is as-if randomly distributed. Given evidence of selection into contact with the UN, they used a pre-registered survey experiment to isolate the causal effects of the UN Verification Mission in Colombia on attitudes of former rank-and-file soldiers.
They found no evidence that their experimental prompt about the UN Mission increased: confidence among ex-combatants that the government would fulfill its commitment to implement the peace agreement, confidence that the FARC would do the same, perceptions of physical safety, positive perceptions of ex-combatants’ future economic prospects, nor trust in institutions more generally. They ruled out several plausible explanations for these null results and discussed the study’s relevance for debates about conflict termination, peace agreement implementation, and international intervention.
Open to Harvard ID Holders Only: Admittance will be on a first come–first served basis. Coffee &Tea Provided.
