 So I'm presenting a paper co-authored with Patricia Giustino, who is right here, who you all know. And Maria Ivánis, who you have seen around as well, and Juan Camilo Cardenas, who is not here. And so this is a paper looking at the legacies of civil war, not just rebel governance on support for the rule of law. So when we think about the rule of law in post-conflict settings, we know from different literatures, in research, in policy that this is crucial. It's crucial for democracy. This is one of the pillars of democracy. You cannot have democracy without the rule of law. This is essential for peace, right? For peace to really exist. You need the ruler to be constrained in some way and to follow the law. And this is also crucial for development based on a large literature in economics. This is one of the basic functions of the states that you need for people to engage in productive economic activities, right? So we need the rule of law. Another finding of the literature that is very clear in political science is that for the rule of law to prevail, you need citizen support, right? So we need people to rely on institutionalized ways to resolve their disputes. We need people who are willing to withdraw support from politicians who fail to abide by the rule of law, who punish them in elections. We also need citizens of a country to prevent the rise of extremists or authoritarian political groups and rise to power. And we also need this influence and this demand for the rule of law, because that's going to push the government and the authorities to respond to violations of the rule of law. So this is very well established. And so when people think about promoting the rule of law in these post-conflict settings, we usually find, again, both in policymaking debates and in research, that one of the critical barriers for building the rule of law in these post-conflict settings is that you have low support for the rule of law. And usually this is explained in terms of a very weak civic culture, discredited political institutions so people don't trust these institutions and they are not going to really demand the authorities to defend them. And so there is this widespread assumption and I could give you quotes of how one of the critical things, of the critical barriers that we have to build the rule of law in post-conflict settings is just that people don't want the rule of law or they don't care enough. And so in this paper we ask, is this true? So we think this has been assumed rather than investigated. We were not able to find research, even descriptive research, really showing that people who live in conflict zones are more likely to have a weak preference for the rule of law. And there is also a lack of development of mechanisms. How is it that civil war erodes support for the rule of law? And so the goals of the paper are twofold. First, we want to derive hypothesis based on existing research. So if we assume that this is true, how is a civil war going to erode support for the rule of law? And in particular, if we think of a country and not cross country, it might be the case that if we compare countries that have endured a civil war, support for the rule of law is lower. But if you look at a particular country, where are the places where this is more problematic? Based on what we know about civil wars and about support for the rule of law, can we think about which are the populations where support for the rule of law is going to be more problematic and therefore in greater need of policies to build the support? And we are going to test this hypothesis with data on Columbia. So let me walk you through the hypothesis that we derive. Again, this is based on existing research, but it's one of the contributions of the paper because this has been an assumption that has not really been unpacked. So the first hypothesis is very obvious and it's that people who live in conflict zones in places where there is presence of armed actors are going to be more likely to disregard the rule of law. Why? Well, because it can be that there are many different dynamics of war that undermine the support for the rule of law. So the presence of armed actors is going to be correlated with destruction of physical property, violence, rebel governance, or paramilitary governance, and all the different things that you can think of that could undermine these preferences for the rule of law. So our first hypothesis is that exposure to armed actors or living in conflict zones is going to be correlated with a weaker support for the rule of law. The second hypothesis that comes from the literature on support for the rule of law is that disorder, so living in a place where because of the presence of armed actors, people don't really know what to expect, there is no social conflict, people don't really know how to form expectations about what might happen. These people are going to be more likely to support a strong ruler and really have a weak preferences for the rule of law. And again, this comes from a literature that is especially developed for Latin America where people have found over and over that high levels of criminal violence, either real or perceived, correlate with support for what is called iron fist policies, right, Manolura policies, where basically people don't care about rulers violating the law in order to carve crime. So we expect that if we look at people who live in conflict zones, those who have lived for more time or under highest higher levels of disorder of this uncertainty are going to have weaker preferences for the rule of law. The next hypothesis is also building on this literature, and again, it's that violence is going to undermine support for the rule of law. And again, here the mechanism is that when you feel unsafe, when there is this perception or real insecurity, people care more about like a strong ruler that can defend themselves than about following the rule of law and preserving this principle. So we expect civilians who have lived in conflict zones that have experienced higher levels than other civilians also living in conflict zones, right, to be more likely to disregard the rule of law. The next hypothesis also builds on this literature on how criminal violence and insecurity increases support for these Manolura or iron fist policies, but it's trying to think a little more and saying, well, if you have lived under an armed actor that is present in your community, and this group governs, and it's actually quite effective at carving crime, reducing insecurity, which often happens, then you may learn that this is the way to rule. This is the way to have a better situation in your community because we learn. We learn based on our experiences with institutions. And so here we expect that people who actually portray their community as being ruled by an armed actor that was able to decrease criminality or to promote public order are more likely to prefer this kind of a strong ruler in the post conflict situation. And so we're going to see weak support for the rule of law. And then finally, and this is building on a completely different literature on the legacies of authoritarianism. We expect that people who are living under these very authoritarian forms of governance may also just learn that this internalize this form of governance in their minds, and especially in cases where you see people living under these armed actors for many years or even decades, as in the Colombian case. So there's a literature that shows that people who have lived through a dictatorship for a long time sort of internalize these forms of governance and it's difficult for a country to sort of move on to embrace their support for the rule of law and democracy. So if this is true, we should see people in conflict zones who have lived under more repressive institutions having weaker support for the rule of law than others who are also living in conflict zones but who are not really exposed to these authoritarian institutions. So we're going to test these simple hypothesis with data on the Colombian armed conflict. I'm not going to say a lot about Colombia. I have five minutes. Yes, okay. I think you have probably already heard about Colombia in different sessions, but basically it's a very long conflict. We have guerrillas, we have paramilitaries. There has been a lot of rebel governance. And I want to say that I'm talking about post-conflict right now, not saying that Colombia is in a real post-conflict stage, right? But what we show in the paper is the data that we are using come from places where there was indeed demobilization of paramilitaries and then of the guerrillas and there have not been presence of armed actors in the territory. Actually we exclude the couple of cases where there is still presence. So again, Colombia is not in a full post-conflict stage but we're looking at communities that have actually lived without the presence of armed actors for quite some time. So we rely on data that comes from two sources. First is the El Cal Longitudinal Study of Los Andes University, which has been looking at rural communities in a sample of municipalities. It's 17 municipalities, the survey, it's a panel, it's large, it's about 4,500 households. And some of these communities endured the presence of armed actors in the past and some did not. This is the first source. The second one, as we went back to these communities and relying on a methodology that I proposed in previous work, we combined memory workshops, surveys and qualitative work to construct both data sets describing the patterns of wartime governance and of interactions between armed actors and communities and the local histories before and during the presence of these groups. So we have the data on this exposure to different dynamics of the war and then we have this data on individuals, these are household heads who were interviewed in 2013. We're just using the data on 2013. So I'm just going to show you the findings of a model where the outcome of interest is whether the person responded that they disagreed or totally disagreed with authorities relying on extra legal measures to control crime. And so that's our proxy for support for the rule of law. And again, this is very relevant in Latin America where support for these measures is really high and it's actually really higher in places that endure a lot of criminal violence. So we really expect these two, if those patterns apply to civil wars, we expect to see the same here. This is a linear regression model with fixed effects of the municipality level and I can talk more about the models and concerns about the cluster, the structure of the data, if anyone is interested. Okay, so the findings, so the first one. Do we, sorry. So do we find that exposure to armed actors decreases support for the rule of law? So here we are comparing civilians living in areas of the country where there were never armed actors with civilians who lived under the presence of an armed actor or more than one. And what we find is that the coefficient is positive, not significant, so there is no evidence of a negative effect. There is no difference between, especially there is no lower levels of support for the rule of law in conflict zones. So what happens if we look inside conflict zones? Just comparing people who have been exposed to armed actors, let's see which of these dynamics decreased support for the rule of law. So first we look at disorder. I'm happy to talk about how we measure this and we see if people who are exposed to high levels of disorder show weaker preferences for the rule of law. And again, if anything, people who lived under disorder actually support more the rule of law. And remember, we have fixed effects for the municipality so we are controlling for the local governance on what has happened after the groups have left. And we are not focusing here on the fact that we have a positive effect. We don't want to claim a cultural effect but definitely it's not negative, right? So people living this disorder are not less interested in the rule of law. How about violence? So I'm gonna quickly show you three different proxies. One is sort of the mechanism, it's insecurity. So we ask people about levels of insecurity under the presence of these groups. Again, people who report higher levels of insecurity are not less supportive of the rule of law. If we look at people reporting the armed actors threatening community leaders, we don't find, this is the only coefficient that is negative actually in one of the models and I wanted to show you. It's not significant but it's the only one. And then we also asked if the group target a specific sector of the community with violence and again, the coefficients are always positive, sometimes significant, sometimes not. Displacement, if the armed actor displaced people, again, positive effect, not significant. So we don't find that people who were exposed to these forms of violence are less supportive of the rule of law. The next hypothesis was whether people who say, well, you know, under the paramilitaries, there was no crime or the group was in charge of, so it's a combination of two questions. The group was in charge of preserving public order, security, and there actually was very low in security. So we find actually that when people lived under these successful authoritarian rule, there is no less support for the rule of law. If anything, it's higher. And finally, we look at whether people who lived under more restrictions to individual freedoms and rights internalize this form of authoritarian governance are now more supportive of breaking the law to fight crime. And again, we find that this is not the case. The coefficients are again positive, sometimes significant, sometimes not. So in conclusion, we know that the rule of law is critical. We know that citizen support for the rule of law is essential to finally get to this respect for the rule of law. And this widespread assumption that these communities have this democratic deficit seems to be an assumption that requires more attention. We are not saying that the effect is the opposite. We need to think more about this, but the different dynamics that you can think of that could explain these negative association, at least in the Colombian case, this is not working out. I want to emphasize that we are not claiming that there is actually a cultural positive effect. There is a lot more to think about. And the implications I think are, the first one is that not just this one, I think there are many assumptions that we have about conflict zones and what people learn and what their preferences and what the challenges in these communities are that we may need to reconsider. Because there's a lot that we still don't understand about conflict zones and about how people process these experiences. I think we need more theoretical approaches to really unpack and understand better the legacies of civil war dynamics on political behavior in general. So this is not just about support for the rule of law. I think in general, we have been focusing on prosocial behavior, maybe participation. There is a lot more that we need to unpack to really say that we understand what are these political legacies of civil war and of specific dynamics. And finally for policy, we need to be very cautious when making these assumptions and then designing policies to solve these problems and to prioritize communities where actually there may be opportunities. Maybe based on this data, maybe other communities may be in a greater deficit of democratic values, perhaps because war teaches you that you need the rule of law, that you need institutions to work, that living under these armed actors that have this unbounded authority is really bad for the quality of your life and for the cohesion of your community. So we need to theorize more, get more data, think more and pack more and generalize less. Thank you.