Current Research

Rebel leaders can prolong civil wars. Although past research has examined how rebel groups have shaped civil wars, little attention has been paid to rebel leaders. I argue that civil wars last longer and are less likely to be terminated in government-favorable outcomes when rebel leaders with training in a nonstate armed group are in charge, in contrast to leaders with no training or state military service. Nonstate training makes leaders more capable of continuing the conflict with few weapons and resources and more willing to persevere because of their combatant socialization. I test propositions through a quantitative analysis of all rebel leaders in civil conflicts from 1989 to 2015. The analysis is supplemented with a qualitative discussion based on personal interviews with top-level leaders of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia.

Does violence create conditions that facilitate women's political engagement? Two growing literatures hold opposing views on this question. To that end, this article adds important nuance to this discussion by exploring how the identity of victims of violence influences the full electoral circle in Colombian municipal elections. We argue that violence against women activists is used strategically by armed groups to influence electoral outcomes and reinforce gendered norms of order. Building on research on gendered patterns of violence, we show that violence against women activists reduces women's willingness to run for public office, increases voter turnout and promotes voters' demands for male political leadership. Drawing on novel fine-grained data on sex of killed activists, we find strong support for our hypotheses and show in additional analyses a reversed effect during the peace negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) with more women candidates and votes for women. Our findings demonstrate that taking into account victim identities provides powerful new insights into the gendered consequences of violence for elections.

Recent literature attributes patterns in the onset and success of peace processes to rebels' institutional characteristics, yet we have little understanding of why some rebels reach peace agreements rapidly while other civil war negotiations drag on for years. Rebel groups' behavior in peace negotiations is centrally determined by the leaders in charge. We examine peace negotiation duration in 172 peace processes between 1975 and 2013, combining 10,000 negotiation-months observation with recent data on rebel leader attributes. We argue that combat experience provides rebel leaders a particular ability to overcome negotiation holdups due to incomplete information and ameliorate certain types of commitment problems. For rebel groups stronger, at par, or weaker than their government opponent, we find strong quantitative support for our claim that rebel leaders with combat experience reach peace settlements significantly faster. Moreover, we find that leaders lacking combat experience are more likely to stall when in a position of relative weakness vis-à-vis the government.