Michael J. Gilligan

Do UN Interventions Cause Peace? Using Matching to Improve Causal Inference

Previous statistical studies of the effects of UN peacekeeping have generally suggested that UN interventions have a positive effect on building a sustainable peace after civil war. Recent methodological developments have questioned this result because the cases in which the United Nations intervenedwere quite different from those in which they did not. Therefore the estimated causal effect may be due to the assumptions of the model that the researchers chose rather than to peacekeeping itself. The root of the problem is that UN missions are not randomly assigned. We argue that standard approaches for dealing with this problem (Heckman regression and instrumental variables) are invalid and impracticable in the context of UN peacekeeping and would lead to estimates of the effects of UN operations that are largely a result of the assumptions of the statistical model rather than the data. We correct for the effects of nonrandom assignment with matching techniques on a sample of UN interventions in post-Cold-War conflicts and find that UN interventions are indeed effective in the sample of post-civil-conflict interventions, but that UN interventions while civil wars are still ongoing have no causal effect.

Is There a Broader-Deeper Trade-off in International Multilateral Agreements?

It is commonly thought that there is a trade-off between the breadth and depth of multilateral institutions—that is, multilaterals that are more inclusive in their memberships will necessarily be shallower in their level of cooperation. Using a multilateral bargaining model with self-seeking rational actors, I show that such a trade-off does not exist for a broad class of multilateral cooperation problems. The conclusion that there is a broader-deeper trade-off follows from the assumption that the members of the multilateral must set their policies at an identical level. The multilateral agreement modeled in this article allows states to set their policies at different levels. Once this change is made, there is no broader-deeper trade-off, a finding that has obvious empirical and policy implications. It explains why some regimes are created with fairly large memberships at the outset, and it calls into question the policy prescription of limiting membership of multilateral institutions to a small group of committed cooperators for the class of cooperation problems modeled in this article.I am indebted to the editor, an anonymous reviewer, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, William Clark, Eric Dickson, Catherine Hafer, Charles Holt, Marek Kaminski, Dimitri Landa, Antonio Merlo, Robert Powell, Adam Przeworski, Ann Sartori, Shanker Satyanath, Randall Stone, and the participants at seminars at Rutgers and University of California-Berkeley in May and October 2000, respectively, for comments on earlier drafts of this work. I thank Jon Preimesberger for editorial assistance. All errors remain my responsibility.

Strengthening International Courts and the Early Settlement of Disputes

How does variation in the strength of a court’s jurisdiction and enforcement affect strategic behavior by states involved in international disputes? The authors construct a formal model and identify three important ways that legal institutions can have a deleterious effect on international cooperation by magnifying the bargaining problems arising from incomplete information about the quality of the legal claims. First, strong courts create less information revelation in pretrial bargaining. Second, strong courts reduce the likelihood of pretrial settlements between states. Third, strong courts lead to more brinksmanship over high-value assets, which leads to conflict if the court refuses to intervene. The authors argue that a key policy implication of their model is that attempts to strengthen international courts must be accompanied by increased precision of international law to ameliorate the deleterious effects of strong courts.

Civil War and Social Capital: Behavioral-Game Evidence from Nepal

Using original behavioral games and survey data from Nepal we find that members of communities with greater exposure to violence during Nepal’s ten-year civil war exhibit significantly greater levels of social capital, measured by subjects’ willingness to invest in trust-based transactions and contribute to a collective good. Our identification strategy exploits communities’ exogenous isolation from the unpredictable path of war. We also offer new causal mechanisms. Previous work has suggested a mechanism at the level of individuals’ preferences. We by contrast hypothesize two community-level causal mechanisms for this relationship. First according to our institutional hypothesis communities that suffered war-related violence were forced to adopt new norms that fostered pro-social behavior. Second, our purging hypothesis conjectures that violence may have caused less pro-social individuals to flee at a higher rate than more pro-social persons, leaving a disproportionately pro-social population in violence- plagued communities. We find strong evidence for a community-level effect and no evidence for the purging hypothesis, suggesting the institutional mechanism is at work. We also find evidence for the individual-preference-based mechanism.

International Interventions to Build Social Capital: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Sudan

Increasingly the international community attempts to improve local public infrastructure in developing countries by creating more participatory local governance and social capital. We report on a randomized field experiment conducted in 24 communities (16 treated and 8 control) in rural Sudan. We offer a clearer theoretical statement of how these programs might alter the political landscape of the recipient villages. We measure norms using lab-in-the-field techniques and we measure network density with a survey of our 475 lab subjects. We appraise the participatory character of local governance and civic participation with a survey of 576 households. The program did not affect either networks or norms, but civic participation and the participatory nature of local governance increased. Thus we attribute the increase in citizen participation not to social capital growth but to more open local governing institutions.

Reintegrating Rebels into Civilian Life

Considerable resources are devoted to ex-combatant reintegration programs in current peace processes, but evidence on their effectiveness remains thin. We use original survey data to study an ex-combatant reintegration program implemented after Burundis 1993-2004 civil war. Previous quantitative studies have found reintegration programs to be ineffective, but only ex-combatants who self-selected into programs were studied. We avoid such selection problems with a quasi-experimental design exploiting an exogenous bureaucratic failure. We find the program resulted in a 20 to 35 percentage point reduction in poverty incidence among ex-combatants and moderate improvement in livelihoods. But this economic boost does not seem to have caused political reintegration: while we find a modest increase in propensities to report civilian life as preferable to combatant life, we find no evidence that the program contributed to either more satisfaction with the peace process or a more positive disposition toward current government institutions.

Do Norms Reduce Torture

One of the most important developments in international political and legal theory over the last 15 years has been the assertion that norms affect state behavior. Scholars have claimed that states are constrained by norms of appropriate behavior and furthermore that norms actually change (“reconstitute”) states’ understandings of their interests, thereby leading states to adapt their behavior in accordance with these new understandings. We test the proposition that norms alter state behavior with respect to the expanding international norm against torture from 1985 through 2003. Unfortunately, we find no evidence that the spreading of the international norm against torture, measured by the percentage of countries in the world that have acceded to the United Nations Convention against Torture, has led to any reduction in torture according to a variety of measures.

Peacekeeping, Compliance with International Norms, and Transactional Sex in Monrovia, Liberia

United Nations policy forbids its peacekeepers and other personnel from engaging in transactional sex (the exchange of money, favors, or gifts for sex), but we find the behavior to be very common in our survey of Liberian women. Using satellite imagery and GPS locators, we randomly selected 1,381 households and randomly sampled 475 women between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Using an iPod in private to preserve the anonymity of their responses, these women answered sensitive questions about their sexual histories. More than half of them had engaged in transactional sex, a large majority of them (more than 75 percent) with UN personnel. We estimate that each additional battalion of UN peacekeepers caused a significant increase in a womans probability of engaging in her first transactional sex. Our findings raise the concern that the private actions of UN personnel in the field may set back the UNs broader gender-equality and economic development goals, and raise broader questions about compliance with international norms.

Self-help groups, savings and social capital : evidence from a field experiment in Cambodia

This paper studies how self-help groups?village-based organizations designed to encourage savings, household production and social cohesion among the poor?can promote economic and social capital. The paper uses survey data and a wide array of social capital measures to assess the impact of a pilot program that was randomly rolled out in rural villages in Cambodia. The study finds that the program encouraged savings and associations via self-help groups. However it did not improve social capital measured by household and network surveys and lab activities that gauge trust, trustworthiness and the willingness to contribute to public goods. The findings contradict recent work that has found significant positive impacts of such groups on social capital. This paper evaluates community-wide impacts while most previous studies focus on program participants. In addition, the empirical strategy is based on a broader array of social capital measures, including behavioral indicators, suggesting that finding impacts of such programs on social capital is sensitive to the measurement strategy.