Life on the frontlines of a civil war is markedly different from life in safe(r) areas. How does this drastic difference in lived experience shape civilian attitudes toward war and peace? Contrary to theories that link conflict exposure to intransigence, I argue that under certain conditions, exposure increases support for both peace as an outcome and the granting of concessions to armed actors who render settlement more likely. I use various model specifications and matching methodology on survey data from the Colombian peace process, finding strong evidence that civilians in conflict zones exhibit greater support for the peace process overall and are more willing to grant political concessions to armed groups. Mixed evidence further suggests that exposed civilians are less willing to reintegrate with demobilized fighters. The study has theoretical implications for accounts of conflict exposure and helps explain regional variation in the failed referendum vote in Colombia.

Conflict negotiations are often met with backlash in the public sphere. A substantial literature has explored why civilians support or oppose peace agreements in general. Yet, the terms underlying peace agreements are often absent in this literature, even though (a) settlement negotiators must craft agreement provisions covering a host of issues that are complex, multidimensional, and vary across conflicts, and (b) civilian support is likely to vary depending on what peace agreements look like. As a result, we know much less about how settlement design molds overall public response, which settlement provisions are more or less controversial, or what citizens prioritize in conflict termination. In this article, I identify four key types of peace agreement provisions and derive expectations for how they might shape civilian attitudes toward conflict termination. Using novel conjoint experiments fielded during the Colombian peace process, I find evidence that citizens evaluate agreements based primarily on how provisions mete out justice to out-group combatants, and further that transitional justice provisions produced sharp divisions among urban voters in the 2016 referendum. Additional analysis suggests that material, distributive concerns were particularly salient for rural citizens. The results have implications for understanding the challenge of generating public buy-in for conflict termination and sheds light on the polarizing Colombian peace process.

An extensive literature in political science and sociology has analyzed how state repression shapes attempts by social movements to pursue political objectives. Less studied, however, is the effect that state repression of activists has on the broader public. Understanding public responses to repression is important, as both states and social movements take action with an eye toward (de)mobilizing broader constituencies. This letter analyzes this dynamic in the context of contemporary Catalonia, where the Spanish state cracked down on efforts by Catalan activists to hold a public referendum on independence. Matching poll respondents in the months before and after the crackdown in late 2017, the study finds that repression increased public sympathy for independence for a short period, and heightened animosity towards actors perceived to be associated or complicit with the Spanish state. The findings speak to the potential for state repression of nonviolent movements to create windows of opportunity for broader mobilization.

The anarchic international system is actually heavily structured: communities of states join together for common benefit; strong states form hierarchical relationships with weak states to enforce order and achieve preferred outcomes. Breaking from prior research, we conceptualize structures such as community and hierarchy as properties of networks of states' interactions that can capture unobserved constraints in state behavior, constraints that may reduce conflict. We offer two claims. One, common membership in trade communities pacifies to the extent that breaking trade ties would entail high switching costs: thus, we expect heavy arms trade, more than most types of commercial trade, to reduce intracommunity conflict. Two, this is driven by hierarchical communities in which strong states can use high switching costs as leverage to constrain conflict between weaker states in the community. We find empirical support for these claims using a timedependent multilayer network model and a new measure of hierarchy based on network centrality.

It is common for combatants to deliberately force civilians to flee their homes, resulting in incalculable loss for millions around the world. Existing accounts suggest combatants displace civilians whom they suspect are loyal to their opponents. And yet violence is also frequently motivated by local actors taking advantage of war to pursue private interests unrelated to wartime loyalties. However, little evidence exists of these dynamics with respect to displacement. Drawing on theories of opportunistic violence, I test an account in which surges in demand for land create incentives for elites to prey on peasants for their land. Combining new municipal and survey data from the Colombian armed conflict, I find evidence that the expansion of a land-intensive industry—African palm oil—precipitated opportunistic displacement by elites and paramilitary allies. The results demonstrate how elites can take advantage of war to engage in private accumulation and have implications for transitional justice policy.