The Neural Circuitry of Aggression, Sex and Sexual AggressionDavid J. Anderson, Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience, California Institute of TechnologyResearch Grant, 2014 Mating and aggression are innate (or instinctive) behaviors that are performed without training. Interestingly, among animals, these two seemingly different behaviors appear to be inextricably intertwined: aggressive encounters are often associated with mating, when males exhibit their dominance for sexual opportunities. However, male-female interactions are primarily sexual (mating) and male-male interactions tend to be aggressive, while aggression toward females is more often the exception than the norm. What brain mechanisms are responsible for separating sexual behavior toward females, and violent aggression toward males, under normal conditions? To investigate the brain mechanisms, we used a technique called microendoscopy that allowed us to image deep-brain (hypothalamic) neuronal activity in male mice engaged in social behaviors. We recorded over two hundred neurons on average in each mouse (total 25 mice), and the mice had no trouble fighting or mating because of the microendoscope neural implant. In sexually and socially experienced adult male mice, neurons were strongly active during interactions with conspecifics, but not with a toy. It was immediately clear that characteristic, yet separate, ensembles of neurons were active during interactions with male or female conspecifics. But surprisingly, in inexperienced adult males, common populations of neurons were activated by both male and female conspecifics. The sex-specific ensembles gradually emerged as the mice acquired social and sexual experience. These observations indicated that interactions with males and females was required for the distinct representations of males and females in the adult mouse brain. These observations reveal an unexpected requirement of experience for behaviors that were traditionally viewed as "hard-wired" or innate. We performed another set of experiments where adult male mice were permitted to investigate (touch, smell, etc.) but not mount or attack other female or male mice. In this case, we did not observe female- or male-specific ensembles or divergent representations in the brain, suggesting that sensory exposure itself was insufficient. However, providing male mice with brief sexual experience was sufficient to generate neuronal ensembles that were specific to males and females, divergent neural representations of conspecific sex and aggression towards males. This experiment demonstrated that social interactions are necessary for the formation of male and female specific neuronal ensembles. These observations reveal an unexpected requirement of experience for behaviors that were traditionally viewed as “hard-wired” or innate. Social experience was required for the formation of neuronal ensembles that themselves control social behavior. Bibliography Remedios R, Kennedy A, Zelikowsky M, Grewe BF, Schnitzer MJ, Anderson DJ. (2017) Social Behaviour Shapes Hypothalamic Neural Ensemble Representations Of Conspecific Sex. Nature. In Press. Kennedy A, Asahina K, Hoopfer E, Inagaki H, Jung Y, Lee H, Remedios R, Anderson DJ. (2015) Internal States and Behavioral Decision-Making: Toward an Integration of Emotion and Cognition. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 79:199-210.
Organization and Community: The Determinants of Insurgent Military EffectivenessAlec Worsnop, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, College ParkDissertation Fellowship, 2014 The United States and other members of the international community have lost thousands of lives and expended significant resources confronting insurgent organizations across the world. Strikingly, however, there has been little systematic analysis of how some insurgents have developed the military capacity to challenge superior forces. This puzzle has played out in Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s success has continually confounded analysts; in Syria and Mali, where insurgents pose significant challenges to stability; and most recently in Iraq, where the Islamic State operated with military prowess. In response, this research project studies the development and military capacity of insurgent groups. First, the project constructs a novel conception of military effectiveness fitting for the types of combat common in civil war, including the (in)ability to keep ceasefires, to control who is targeted by violence, or to employ increasingly complex guerrilla or conventional tactics. Next, it develops a theory arguing that it is not the structural conditions in which organizations operate—such as access to material resources or strong social networks—that determine effectiveness, but how well insurgents’ organizational composition allows them to leverage those conditions. It is what insurgents do with what they have that matters. Like in all militaries, insurgent organizations must deliberately generate esprit de corps and military skill through training, indoctrination, well-designed command and control systems, and the formation of a competent set of lower-level officers. While social and material factors must be taken into account, some organizations become militarily effective without these endowments while some well-endowed organizations fail despite these advantages. To test the theory and isolate the importance of organizational versus structural factors, the project adopts a two-stage approach. First, I use a set of statistical models to demonstrate that structural variables are poor predictors of insurgent organizational composition. Second, I conduct in-depth case studies of ten organizations in Vietnam (1940–1975) and fifteen organizations in Iraq (2003–present). These two countries represent promising areas of study because there is a high degree of variation in structural and organizational factors as well as in military effectiveness. To evaluate the detailed hypotheses generated by the theory, I collected precise information about the internal dynamics of insurgents through archival research, interviews with ex-combatants, and secondary sources. For example, during nearly five months at the National Archives II in HÓ Chí Minh City, Vietnam, I reviewed thousands of documents including internal memoranda from rebel organizations along with French interrogations and intelligence reporting. By demonstrating the centrality of organizational processes to insurgent military effectiveness, the project underscores that insurgent forces are not sui generis, but fit within the broader spectrum of military organizations attempting to use violence in a calibrated manner. Thus, the project highlights the importance for policymakers of explicitly assessing organizational capacity rather than treating all insurgent or terrorist groups as like entities or overvaluing the effect of social networks and material resources. While some insurgent groups can only be defeated with involved and costly tactics—including major ground combat—the project also shows that many seemingly weaker groups are still able to reliably maintain ceasefires. As a result, rather than risk escalating violence by militarily destroying such groups, conflict mediators can work to craft peace agreements by identifying the actors that can be brought to the negotiating table. Similarly, while social and material factors must be taken into account, some organizations become militarily effective without these endowments while some well-endowed organizations fail despite these advantages.
Drug Violence, Fear of Crime, and the Transformation of Everyday Life in the Mexican MetropolisAna Villarreal, Sociology, University of California-BerkeleyDissertation Fellowship, 2014 My dissertation, “Drug Violence, Fear of Crime and the Transformation of Everyday Life in the Mexican Metropolis,” is an ethnography of how and why increased criminal violence and fear have prompted a new form of urban seclusion and governance in contemporary Latin America. Most of the research we have on violence and urban inequality focuses on the living conditions of the urban poor in favelas, barrios marginados, and the inner-city. In stark contrast, this book examines the impact of a tidal wave of gruesome violence on one of Latin America’s wealthiest cities: San Pedro in Monterrey, Mexico. As a San Pedro native, I had unique access to observe the responses of the wealthy to horrific criminal turf wars over cocaine and human trafficking routes in recent years. In brief, the upper class leveraged private and state resources to make of San Pedro a city-within-a-city. The upper class is not only relying on private security, but on the public security apparatus to create an "armored city" in detriment of the rest of the metropolis. A similar phenomenon took place in Caracas in the aftermath of the violent riots of the Caracazo in 1989 when the upper class created the municipality of Chacao. Although researchers have shown that the upper class is more and more likely to enclose living, leisure and work spaces in Latin America and beyond, these cases are different. Here, the upper class is not only relying on private security, but on the public security apparatus to create an “armored city” in detriment of the rest of the metropolis. This book will make a unique contribution to the fields of urban and political sociology by revealing this new pattern of exacerbated urban inequality raising new challenges for urban inclusion and democracy in Latin America. BibliographyVillarreal, Ana. 2015. "Fear and the Spectacular Drug Violence in Monterrey" in Violence at the Urban Margins, edited by Javier Auyero, Phillipe Bourgois, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Oxford University Press.
Dynamics of Violence in Conventional Civil WarsLaia Balcells, Institut d’Analisi Economia, CSICResearch Grant, 2011 What explains violence against civilians in civil wars? Why do armed groups use violence in some places but not in neighboring places with similar characteristics? Why do they kill more civilians in some places than in others? More specifically, why do groups kill civilians in areas where they have full military control and their rivals have no military presence? This research project explores the determinants of violence against civilians in the context of conventional civil wars, which are fought between armies, as opposed to civil wars fought between a state and irregular armed groups. Conventional civil wars are much more common than thought and display markedly different characteristics than insurgencies or guerrilla wars. The theoretical argument in this project incorporates political factors in a strategic explanation of violence. I contend that armed groups target civilians who are strong supporters of the enemy, either to strengthen control over territory they already occupy or to weaken the enemy in territory the enemy occupies. Violence takes two forms, direct or indirect, depending on the location of civilian supporters of the enemy. While direct violence occurs when enemy supporters are located in zones controlled by the armed group, indirect violence occurs when enemy supporters are located in zones controlled by the adversary (provided the armed group possesses the military technology to carry out attacks in these areas). The key difference between the two forms of violence is that the armed group’s own supporters can constrain direct violence in zones of control, whereas they cannot do so in zones of enemy control. Direct and indirect violence imply different strategies. When targeting enemy supporters behind enemy lines, the armed group aims to kill as many of them as possible, hence they target locations with high concentrations of enemy supporters. In territory the armed group controls, in contrast, the group must take into account the preferences of their own supporters, who know the identity of the rival’s supporters and can choose whether or not to collaborate with the group’s militants. Group supporters are likely to collaborate with the armed group and identify enemy supporters if and only if it is in their own interest to do so, which is the case when eliminating enemy supporters can decisively shift the local demographic balance and help them gain or consolidate political control of the locality. Thus, direct violence is likely to occur where the balance between group supporters and enemy supporters is relatively even. Indeed, in places where the group’s supporters are already predominant, violence is unnecessary, whereas in places where enemy supporters dominate, violence would have to be massive (hence too costly) to make a difference. The prediction is thus that indirect violence increases with rival supporters’ domination of a locality whereas direct violence increases with parity between supporters of the two rival groups. Conventional civil wars without meaningful prewar mobilization should not be the sites of mass violence against civilians. Violence against civilians is only likely to occur, however, where there have been high levels of prewar mobilization along the cleavage line that divides the two groups, whether being ethnicity, religion, or ideology. This mobilization is what leads people to identify as strong supporters of one side or the other. Put differently, conventional civil wars without meaningful prewar mobilization should not be the sites of mass violence against civilians. The empirical strategy of this project is multimethod: I use quantitative methods in combination with qualitative analyses. Following a recent trend in political science, the research design consists of systematically exploring intracountry variation (with large-n subnational data) and combining it with additional secondary evidence from other cases in order to provide external validity. I combine insights from two novel subnational datasets (i.e., Spain and Côte d’Ivoire) with a crossnational test of implications and secondary evidence from other cases (e.g. Bosnia, Northern Ireland). In addition, for the case of Spain, I use evidence collected from oral sources (i.e., sixty civil war testimonies) and from over a hundred published sources, including general history books, as well as regional and local studies. The Spanish Civil War is the main case study of the book; this is, together with the US Civil War, a paradigmatic case of a conventional civil war. Using this civil war constitutes a dispute to the neglect of historical cases in the study of civil war violence, which risks generating wrong conceptualizations of the phenomenon. The Spanish Civil War has a special relevance on its own because it was a crucial conflict in the West European interwar period and it was a particularly severe conflict. The case of the recent Ivorian civil war permits us to test the observable implications of the theory with a recent civil war that was fought along ethnic lines. Thanks to the HFG research grant, I was able to build a provincial level dataset on violence during the armed conflict in Côte d’Ivoire (2002–2011), which also includes data on electoral results, ethnic composition, natural resources, and geographical characteristics of the provinces. I also gathered data on violence across the neighborhoods of the capital of the country, Abidjan. The results for the Ivorian Civil War are broadly consistent with those obtained for the Spanish Civil War, showing that direct violence increases with levels of parity between rival groups. Although the Spanish and the Ivorian civil wars are very dissimilar, the comparison of the two cases yields valuable insights. Importantly, the combination of evidence from an old and ideological civil war (Spain) and a new and ethnic civil war (Côte d’Ivoire) adds external validity to the theory put forward in this project. BibliographyBalcells, Laia. 2017. Rivalry and Revenge: the Politics of Violence during Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics).Balcells, Laia and Abbey Steele. 2016. “Warfare, Political Identities, and Displacement in Spain and Colombia.” Political Geography 51: 15-29.Balcells, Laia, Lesley-Ann Daniels, and Abel Escribà-Folch. 2016. “The Determinants of Low-intensity Intergroup Violence. The Case of Northern Ireland.” Journal of Peace Research 53: 33-48.Balcells, Laia and Stathis Kalyvas. 2014. “Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 58(8): 1390-1418.
Troubled Peace: Explaining Political Violence in Post-Conflict SettingsFrancesca Grandi, Political Science, Yale UniversityDissertation Fellowship, 2013 My research is about violence after war. Contrary to received wisdom, violent societies are not a natural outcome of war. Violence is not ubiquitous in post-war countries. It does not emerge everywhere all the time; its distribution varies significantly across time and space. Explaining where violence occurs allows us to understand why it does–which is the objective of my dissertation, a history-grounded investigation in the nature and impact of post-conflict violence and the dynamics of its variation. My project explains why the winners of a war kill their former enemies after the hostilities have officially ended. They do so to convert their military advantage into political dominance. The winners cleanse the territories under their control as a way to consolidate their military victory and sanction their political power. Post-conflict targeted assassinations are therefore a strategy to establish political hegemony and, as such, they occur in the areas where the winners’ influence concentrates. In other words, my explanation centers on the forward-looking, strategic dimension of postwar violence, which most existing accounts overlook by privileging past dynamics, i.e., revenge, justice demands, or the conflict’s “root-causes.” The end of a war, no matter how decisive its military settlement, does not automatically lead to a definitive political solution. Most often, a transitional period begins, during which the question of who governs and how to distribute power ought to be solved. In other words, the winners have to transform their military advantage into a political victory. This process happens during the time lag between the official end of the hostilities and the return of “normal” politics. It is during this time that the foundations of a new political system are laid and so are the bases for durable peace or renewed conflict. Violence plays a crucial role in this transition from civil war to peaceful democratic politics. It intertwines with the emerging electoral competition. It becomes an integral part of the political contestation process and a strategy to influence the post-war allocation of power. The fast-changing political system at war’s end creates a sense of urgency, which is the underlying condition for targeted extra-judicial assassinations of former enemies. But violence emerges only under specific conditions. The war experience and its military resolution forge the winning actors’ preferences, particularly in regards to how political power should be distributed and attained. The wartime legacies combine with forward-looking expectations to create a series of mismatches, which give the winners incentives to kill, and organization, which gives them the capacity to do so. The mismatches create a more complicated net of incentives than the dichotomies of winner-loser or military vs. political actors would predict. Instead, the causes of post-war targeted killings during transitions rest in the relative strength of the parties within the winning coalition and the relative position of party affiliates within these parties. My empirical strategy focuses on a structured, sub-national comparison of post-WWII Italy. I generalize these findings to contemporary settings, by developing a topology of post-conflict violence, by mapping cases of post-conflict violence across the world since 1945, and by testing my theoretical findings in a contemporary case study–post-Qadhafi Libya. My research bridges academia and practice by providing a basis for more suited data collecting strategies and more tailored intervention policies in post-conflict settings, with the ultimate goal of increasing international peacebuilding and conflict prevention capacity.
Killing Campaigns: The Origins and Dynamics of Mass Violence in AfricaScott Straus, Political Science, University of Wisconsin, MadisonResearch Grant, 2008 I received a grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation at the early stages of what became an eight-year-long inquiry into the causes of mass violence against civilians, in particular genocide. The project’s methodological premise was that scholars (and policymakers) should seek to learn from “negative cases,” that is, situations where theory would predict genocide to occur but where it did not. The early stages of my research, which HFG funded, focused on intensive study of Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa as well as on understanding the range of variation in violence across sub-Saharan Africa since independence. The initial research in Côte d’Ivoire prompted two developments. One was a set of new hypotheses about the determinants and dynamics of mass violence. Second was some expertise on the country. In turn, when an electoral crisis broke in 2010 in Côte d’Ivoire, I became engaged in public commentary on the country via the Huffington Post, and I published accessible academic articles in Foreign Affairs and African Affairs. In the former, Tom Bassett and I argued for the central importance of regional organizations in the management of the Ivorian violent crisis. In the latter, I demonstrated patterns of violence in the electoral crisis and distinguished the logic of electoral violence from that of exterminatory and civil war violence. The intensity of war—specifically threat perception—shapes leaders’ willingness to use mass violence and the public’s acceptance of it. The Ivoirian crisis, as well as my survey of violence in postindependence Africa, led to an inquiry into the dynamics of electoral violence more broadly. With Charlie Taylor, I assembled a dataset on electoral violence in Africa since the transition to multipartyism in the early 1990s. The dataset, the African Electoral Violence Dataset, uncovered a set of patterns that were unexpected given our prior assumptions. We found, for example, that about one in five African elections resulted in serious violence; that violence after war was less common than if a country had not experienced war; that income level was not correlated to electoral violence; that incumbents committed the majority of electoral violence; and that the dynamics of prevote violence differed from postvote violence. Those findings were published in an influential volume edited by Dorina Bekoe of the United States Institute for Peace. Charlie, Jon Pevehouse, and I also published an article in the Journal of Peace Research, in which we show through a battery of regression analyses that incumbent running is the strongest predictor of significant African elections. The HFG research also launched the broader, longer project examining why genocide took place in some conflicts but not others. That project culminated in a book published by Cornell University Press in 2015, entitled Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa. Three findings stand out and all relate to the initial findings from the HFG-funded research in Côte d’Ivoire. First, the intensity of war—specifically threat perception—shapes leaders’ willingness to use mass violence and the public’s acceptance of it. Second, ideological constructs—what I label “founding narratives”—influence the ways in which political and military leaders devise strategies of violence in war. Third, other sources of restraint—such as certain kinds of economic structures—can create incentives to moderate violence. I extend the empirical analysis to Senegal, Mali, Rwanda, and Sudan, each occupying case study chapters in the book. The book has won four awards, including the 2018 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.
Diaspora and Conflict: The Liberians of Staten IslandJonny Steinberg, Institute for Security Studies, PretoriaResearch Grant, 2008, 2009 This is a study of a community of Liberian refugees and economic migrants in a housing project in the New York City borough of Staten Island. The purpose was to examine the ways in which a diaspora takes conflict from home with it, and, in particular, the ways in which diasporas, frozen in the moment of their flight and caught up in old resentments, might transmit conflict back to the home country. The research results were published in two forms. The first was a book titled Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City. It documented and analyzed a conflict that raged in Staten Island’s Liberian community from 2003 to 2008. I argued that the community had erected a stage on which it had played out, in miniature, so to speak, its deep fears about the nature of the postwar settlement taking shape back home. The very distance from home is what gave the theater its credibility; in the mutual anonymity of exile, people invented horrendous histories for their neighbors, such that it appeared that the most horrendous of the characters who had prosecuted the war back home were living on Staten Island. The conflict was thus incubated in exile. It was not, though, to the best of my knowledge, transmitted back home inasmuch as I saw no evidence of Staten Islanders funding conflict in Liberia. The conflict was thus incubated in exile. The second research product was an article published in the journal African Affairs; it documented and interpreted the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) work among the Liberian diaspora in the United States. The TRC undertook this work on the grounds that the diaspora was intimately involved in Liberia’s civil war and that no process of reconciliation would be complete without its involvement. I argued that the TRC’s diaspora project failed, in large part because the body’s work was seen as a substitute for an endeavor to bring to justice those who had prosecuted the war. BibliographyJonny Steinberg, Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York, London and Johannesburg, 2011. Jonny Steinberg, "A Truth Commission Goes Abroad: Liberian Transitional Justice in New York," African Affairs, 110 (2011), pp. 35-53
Longitudinal and Contextual Analyses of Violent Crime in the European UnionPatricia L. McCall, Sociology, North Carolina State UniversityResearch Grant, 2009, 2010 The purpose of this research is to explore the extent to which retrenchment in welfare support is related to homicide trends across European countries between 1994 and 2010. Using a longitudinal decomposition design that allows for stronger causal inferences compared to typical cross-sectional designs, we examine these potential linkages between social support spending and homicide with data collected from a heterogeneous sample of European nations, including twenty Western nations and nine less frequently analyzed East-Central nations, during recent years in which European nations generally witnessed substantial changes in homicide rates as well as both economic prosperity and fiscal crisis. Results suggest that even incremental, short-term changes in welfare support spending are associated with short-term reductions in homicide specifically, impacting homicide rates within two to three years for this sample of European nations. Results suggest that even incremental, short-term changes in welfare support spending are associated with short-term reductions in homicide.
Beijing-Seoul Families and Neighborhoods StudyClifton R. Emery, School of Social Welfare, Yonsei UniversityResearch Grant, 2011, 2012 What do neighbors, friends, and extended family members do in response to domestic violence and child abuse, and does it make a difference? Are there cultural differences in this informal social control of family violence, and do such differences explain cultural differences in the prevalence and severity of domestic violence and child maltreatment? These are the principal questions the Families and Neighborhoods Study (FNS) attempts to answer, using newly developed measures of informal social control on random probability samples of cities. The FNS also tests propositions developed from Emery’s (2011) theoretical typology of domestic violence. The principal investigator (PI) received funding from HFG in 2011 and 2012 to carry out the FNS survey in Beijing, China, and Seoul, South Korea. In 2011 the study team interviewed 506 adults in a representative random probability sample of 506 families in Beijing. In 2012 the study team followed up with 541 interviews of adults in a representative random probability sample of families in Seoul. The findings from both cities suggest that whether your neighbors do anything, and especially what they do, may matter. The findings also suggest that the neighborhood collective efficacy measure may not be the best way to capture informal social control of family violence, as the data do not show the expected relationships between collective efficacy and family violence, but do show relationships between the PI’s informal social control measures and family violence. Based on the promising findings from the HFG-funded study, the FNS has now expanded to include data from representative samples from Beijing, Seoul, Hanoi, Ulaan Baatar, Kathmandu (collected and currently under analysis or review), Philadelphia (collection in progress) and Madrid (planned for summer 2014). In one of the twists of fate that so frequently baffle academics, the findings from the first two cities (Seoul and Beijing) remain in the peer review process while findings from later waves of data collection have already been published. This fact frustratingly prevents a detailed discussion of the Beijing-Seoul findings here. It is hoped that this omission can be corrected soon as the Seoul findings are presently under revision for the Journal of Interpersonal Violence. The findings from both cities suggest that whether your neighbors do anything, and especially what they do, may matter. In Hanoi, the FNS found that acts of informal social control by neighbors that try to protect the child are associated with less very severe abuse of the child (Emery, Trung & Wu, 2013). The same study found that when very severe abuse did occur, abuse-related externalizing behavior problems were lower when parents reported protective informal social control by neighbors (ibid). The goals of current data collection include making possible East-West comparisons of informal social control and the assessment of causal relationships via experimental techniques on population-based surveys. The FNS has also found important relationships between variables suggested by Emery’s (2011) typology and intimate partner violence in Kathmandu and Ulaan Baatar. BibliographyEmery, C.R., Trung, H. & Wu, S. Neighborhood Informal Social Control of Child Maltreatment: A Comparison of Protective and Punitive Approaches. Child Abuse & Neglect, June, 2013. DOI: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2013.05.002.Emery, C.R. Disorder or Deviant Order? Re-Theorizing Domestic Violence in Terms of Order, Power and Legitimacy. A Typology. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 16(6): 525-540, November-December, 2011.
Seeing Like a Peacebuilder: An Ethnography of International InterventionSéverine Autesserre, Political Science, Barnard CollegeResearch Grant, 2010, 2011 Why do international peace interventions so often fail to reach their full potential? To answer this question, I conducted several years of research in conflict zones around the world, including in Burundi, Congo, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, South Sudan, and Timor-Leste. My main finding is that everyday elements such as the expatriates’ social habits, standard security procedures, and habitual approaches to collecting information on violence strongly impact the effectiveness of intervention efforts. A number of interveners challenge the dominant modes of thinking and acting. The publications based on this research demonstrate that individuals from all parts of the world and all walks of life, who would have little in common outside of the peacebuilding arena, share a number of practices, habits, and narratives when they serve as interveners in conflict zones. These shared modes of operation enable foreign peacebuilders to function in the field, but they often have unintended consequences that decrease the effectiveness of international efforts. The way that interveners construct knowledge of their areas of deployment prevents them from fully grasping the contexts in which they work. Consequently, they tend to rely on overly simplistic narratives that obscure the complex causes of and potential solutions to violence. The foreign peacebuilders’ everyday practices also create and perpetuate firm boundaries and a wide power disparity between themselves and local people. These dynamics create numerous obstacles to the peace efforts and frequently prompt local counterparts to evade, resist, or reject international initiatives. A number of interveners challenge the dominant modes of thinking and acting. Their peacebuilding efforts are usually more effective than those of their peers who follow the prevailing practices. However, these individuals often end up either forced to conform or so frustrated that they change careers and leave the peacebuilding field. Despite their marginalization, these dissenters are tremendously important: By looking at their alternative modes of operation, we can begin to specify the conditions under which peace interventions can be more effective. BibliographyPeaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Publisher's webpage for the book"Dangerous Tales: Dominant Narratives on the Congo and their Unintended Consequences," African Affairs 111 (443), pp. 202-222, Spring 2012.
