Is the implementation of power-sharing provisions the key to durable peace? This study analyzes whether the implementation of political, military, and territorial power-sharing provisions contributes to peace. We introduce a new dataset (IMPACT), which contains unique information on the implementation of power-sharing pacts in peace accords in the post—Cold War period. Based on the logic of costly signaling, we demonstrate that when the parties engage in costly concessions by implementing military and territorial provisions, peace is more likely to prevail. In contrast, the implementation of political pacts is less costly, and hence does not increase the prospects of peace.

No abstract

This article presents ViEWS – a political violence early-warning system that seeks to be maximally transparent, publicly available, and have uniform coverage, and sketches the methodological innovations required to achieve these objectives. ViEWS produces monthly forecasts at the country and subnational level for 36 months into the future and all three UCDP types of organized violence: state-based conflict, non-state conflict, and one-sided violence in Africa. The article presents the methodology and data behind these forecasts, evaluates their predictive performance, provides selected forecasts for October 2018 through October 2021, and indicates future extensions. ViEWS is built as an ensemble of constituent models designed to optimize its predictions. Each of these represents a theme that the conflict research literature suggests is relevant, or implements a specific statistical/machine-learning approach. Current forecasts indicate a persistence of conflict in regions in Africa with a recent history of political violence but also alert to new conflicts such as in Southern Cameroon and Northern Mozambique. The subsequent evaluation additionally shows that ViEWS is able to accurately capture the long-term behavior of established political violence, as well as diffusion processes such as the spread of violence in Cameroon. The performance demonstrated here indicates that ViEWS can be a useful complement to non-public conflict-warning systems, and also serves as a reference against which future improvements can be evaluated.

Are UN peacekeepers effective in protecting civilians from violence? Existing studies examine this issue at the country level, thereby making it difficult to isolate the effect of peacekeepers and to assess the actual mechanism at work. This article provides the first comprehensive evaluation of UN peacekeeping success in protecting civilians at the subnational level. We argue that peacekeepers through their sizable local presence can increase the political and military costs for warring actors to engage in civilian targeting. Since peacekeepers' access to civilian populations rests on government consent, peacekeepers will primarily be effective in imposing these costs on rebel groups, but less so for government actors. To test these conjectures we combine new monthly data on the location of peacekeepers with data on the location and timing of civilian killings in Africa. Our findings suggest that local peacekeeping presence enhances the effectiveness of civilian protection against rebel abuse, but that UN peacekeeping struggles to protect civilians from government forces.

The Post-Conflict Transitions Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about post-conflict development (more information about the Post-Conflict Transitions Project can be found at http://econ.worldbank.org/programs/ conflict ). An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in these papers are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent.