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Successful management of combatants through disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) remains one of the main challenges of post‐conflict peacebuilding. While DDR is meant to contribute to a secure post‐conflict environment conducive to economic and political development, the success of DDR efforts remains mixed. Unlike previous work focusing on procedural aspects or post‐conflict reconstruction and development, we shift the focus to understand microlevel conditions—economic, security, and ethnic concerns—that influence ex‐combatants' satisfaction with DDR. We argue that ex‐combatant satisfaction with DDR should increase as individual‐level economic conditions increase, as security situations improve, and as ethnic tensions decrease. We test our expectations using an original data set collected with field interviews and surveys from 122 ex‐combatants in South Sudan in 2011–2012. We find that participants are more satisfied when their income‐generating activity is based on DDR job training and when the UN has a large presence in their area. Concerns about political instability and an abundance of firearms make ex‐combatants less satisfied with DDR.

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Previous research has shown that the outcome of a civil war is related to conflict duration: military victory by either the government or the rebels occurs early if it occurs at all, and the longer a civil war lasts, the more likely it is to end in a negotiated settlement. The models of civil war duration and outcome that have produced these findings are built on characteristics of the civil war and less on attributes of the state itself, other than where the state lies on the Polity autocracy-democracy scale. We propose that how civil wars end varies not only between democracies and authoritarian regimes but among the different authoritarian regime types identified by Geddes, Wright, and Franz. The distinguishing attributes of these regime types—democracy, one-party, personalist, military, monarchical—should lead to different likelihood in defeating a rebel movement, being defeated by a rebel movement, and negotiating a peace agreement with a rebel movement. Results from a series of competing-risk models using the Uppsala–Peace Research Institute Oslo Armed Conflict Dataset demonstrate support for our claim that how civil wars end is partly a function of the characteristics of the regime.

The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating. Job losses, negative growth rates, and increased poverty have all followed rising infection rates. The economic costs have been especially challenging for many piracy-prone countries. The international monetary fund anticipates sizable unemployment increases in many Indo-Pacific countries. Deeper and more durable economic damage may materialize in some West African countries. Often, negative economic shocks produce surges in crime, both on land and at sea. The present study evaluates the effects of COVID-19 on maritime pirate attacks in two countries, Nigeria, located in the Gulf of Guinea, and Indonesia, located in the Indo-Pacific. We employ monthly and quarterly data on government measures to prevent infection, sea-piracy incidents, and economic conditions to explore whether the subsequent economic fallout produced more maritime crime. We do not find clear evidence of this relationship in Indonesia. However, COVID-19-induced stringency measure does appear to have increased sea-piracy incidents in Nigeria.