 Good morning. Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. It's truly a pleasure. Today I want to do two things in this talk, which probably is a bit ambitious, but I'm going to show you mainly some joint research together with Miguel García Sánchez and Natalia Garbías-Dez. What I want to talk about today is thinking about how commitment problems can be overcome. Commitment problems are particular moments in time where rebel groups and governments come together to sign some sort of power sharing deal, but each fears that the other side may renege on its promise once the implementation is underway. Basically, during the implementation process there are these opportunities for either the government or the rebel side to sort of step back and undermine some component of the power sharing that it had promised. Often the government is the one that's in the position to do this. The question then, a major question that has been in the research for quite some time since Barb Walter really articulated these commitment problems in civil wars, is what changes their minds? What makes these combatant parties willing to actually cooperate and sign peace agreements and go on to implement them? And what I want to do, the two points that I want to make today are first, that international actors often do serve as these stabilizing forces in these contexts. They can often engage around post-conflict elections in particular to serve as sort of a backstop to backsliding. These are typically elite deals, but there is some question about whether citizens might be able to similarly serve in this role and actually overcome these commitment problems. Today in this talk I'm going to argue that we have some preliminary evidence that they don't serve this function, so citizens may not serve this function whereas international actors could. So let me start with just a brief bit of evidence on the first point that international actors can serve this role. So this is from my 2017 book, Electing Peace, in which I argue that international actors can change combatants incentives once they're into a peace process by rewarding compliance and punishing violations. The major argument here is that as both sides become political parties, they're both into the system and so pretty minor incentive changes by the international actors can help them stay on track in these peace processes. I test this in this book with cross-national data, new cross-national data that I collected on rebel parties between 1975 and 2010, and on case studies that draw on archival data and elite interviews in a set of cases. So let me just give you the main take-home line from that book. The main argument here is that the expectation of external engagement alongside combatant parties participating is associated with more stability. And so what you can see in the major chart here is a declining effect as you have more expectation of international engagement, which here is captured as increased election observation, increased monitoring, and increased funding from international actors. You'll actually see a decline in the risk of conflict recurrence if you also have rebel parties participating in these elections. So that's the dotted line that you can see, declining risk of conflict recurrence there. To give you just an example, the photo here is from the El Salvador conflict, which ended in the early 1990s. And one of the things there was that the rebel group was going to participate in the elections. FMLN was going to become a political party, but the government in some ways drew back on its promises. So it, for example, tried to pull polling stations out of a rebel stronghold. It tried to slow voting cards given to rebels in this, rebel supporters in this context, and both the UN and the US in particular weighed in on these processes as the government slowed. And actually the US froze aid in this conflict, frozen development aid until the government complied with the terms that it was supposed to go along with. So this is just a small incentive that the international community is able to offer, but it's enough to sort of overcome the incentives by the government to renege on the power sharing deal that it had enacted in this case. Okay, so that's just a very little bit of evidence. I'm very happy to talk more in the Q&A about the international actors and what role they might play in these contexts. But the question that I often get is like, could citizens play a similar role in terms of balancing power? Could they similarly help reward compliance and punish violations? And so in order to answer that question, what we wanted to do was answer a first question, which is how citizens form attitudes towards peace processes and provisions for policy change that emerge from them. And so this is where we design the theory and then have some research data from Columbia. And as you'll see, I'm not particularly optimistic that citizens can serve this particular role in peace processes. Okay, so to jump right into the theory, citizens increasingly play a role in peace processes. I don't think this is surprising to anyone. But these photos, of course, are from the Columbia peace process and the demonstrations after the referendum failed narrowly. But in general, citizens often vote in referendums. They always vote, sorry, they always shape implementation. And sometimes they vote on the actors who actually write the deals, write in democracies, for instance. The implementation process features these commitment problems where the government and the rebel group may be afraid that the other side is going to draw back on what it promises. And so including civil society and citizens may improve implementation. What we want to know, though, is how citizens think and act and whether their influence stabilizes. So we don't know very much about how citizens actually form their attitudes in these processes. There is some really interesting new work that's emerging on this. We have some widespread theory that support for said settlements may depend on whether or not you've been exposed to violence previously. But the findings are actually pretty mixed on this many of them coming from the Colombian case. Studies also focus on other determinants. If you've been victimized, for example, directly, that may have an effect. But there is this growing experimental work that begins to tackle sort of like how we form attitudes about peace processes. So we want to contribute to this literature. And so what we're going to suggest is that in contrast to the two existing models, we're going to put forth a new model about how citizens form attitudes here. So the two prevalent models, one has been that citizens generally are war weary. And so they'll support basically any valid peace process, collectively observing and rewarding compliance with the implementation of the agreement. The other is that citizens are always going to spoil a peace process, right, that they aren't going to want any compromise. And so they actually will will enact sort of amplifying any divisions that are there. Most of these models suggest that citizens have a really strong incentive to fully inform themselves about these peace processes and really actually think about compliance and what that means here. We're going to argue instead that citizens rely mainly on heuristics and follow political camps in forming their attitudes about these processes. So this builds on a long tradition in developed countries of information acquisition, which suggests that many citizens are strategically uninformed about a lot of different complex policies, right, that it's not worth the investment to become fully informed on many of these. And so instead, what people will rely on our cues from trusted political elites in particular peace processes, we think are actually a moment where this is especially likely because they're complex policies that are negotiated between elites. And the implications aren't always immediately clear to citizens lives of particular policies that emerge from them. In post conflict context, there's also sort of the cognitive effort that has been placed elsewhere during the fighting. And so it's just focused on rebuilding one's life, right? So this is sort of a model that we think is in existence in a lot of our policy decisions, but we think it also should be in existence in the peace processes, even though they're often sort of treated as special in literature. So our two hypotheses that we want to test are that first elites representing political camps should supply clear cues from starkly split positions. So the first hypothesis that we're going to test is that citizens will rely on political political elites cues to form their opinions about provisions in the agreement. And secondly, that among factions, citizens often are going to become very divided during the conflict. And so their affinity with one or the other political camp is often clear. And so they'll take a cue from one side or the other, but they maybe even will take a negative cue from the side that they don't like. So we also have some evidence in here about how exactly cues work, whether it's just transferring your affect or your feelings from a politician toward a policy or whether it really is about updating your beliefs and information. I'm not sure if I'll have time to get to those results, but I'll try. Okay, so our research design is a survey experiment in Columbia. In the interest of time, I'm not going to talk too much about this. I think many of you know the broad strokes of the Colombian peace process. There were negotiations with the FARC in October. The plebiscite was narrowly rejected. There was a slightly revised version that was passed through Congress. And then now implementation has been slowly progressing, although there were these major opponents to the peace process elected in 2018. So the negotiations were led by then President Santos with significant opposition for his predecessor, President Uribe. Those will be important to our experiments in just a minute. And the settlement is really complex. It's 300 pages and it's being passed piecemeal through Congress. Okay, so our survey then was face to face. We looked across many different municipalities. There are regions that were among the most exposed to conflict. Happy to talk more about the survey if you're interested in that. Two minutes. Okay, great. So what we did is we had two provisions here. One is the creation of the special jurisdiction for peace, which is transitional justice process with a randomized endorsement from Santos. The other is the eligibility to compete by existing political parties in these new special seats. And this was a randomized endorsement by Uribe. The important thing to note here is we didn't want to use any deception. So these are both true endorsements, but one is essentially revising a provision of peace agreement and the other is just putting through a provision of the peace agreement. Okay, so we randomized these. We also randomized, we also blocked on individuals pre-treatment affinity for different politicians. Okay, so let me just show you the main finding. The main finding is that when you actually see this support for the HEP from Santos, what you get is a decrease in support among those who do not have affinity for Santos to those who don't like Santos. And you have a slight increase in support among those who do have affinity for Santos. On the other side, when you have Uribe, what you see is that people who have affinity with Uribe have a strong bump in support for this particular provision. Those who don't have affinity with Uribe basically don't move. They're not statistically significantly different here. So I can show you more about how the heuristics work and I'm happy to do this in the Q&A, but I'm going to skip this in the interest of time. I'm also happy to talk about some of the extensions that we did in this experiment and others. What I want to just note is a couple of conclusions. So what I think basic bottom line, our results show, is that citizens use these political elite cues shaped by their information and they seem to use other information less. Our work suggests that citizens typically are not either self-enforcing or spoiling peace processes in general. Instead, they seem likely to ratify any elite divisions or elite consensus that exists about the deal. So we shouldn't count on citizens to serve in this stabilizing role. That is overcoming these classic commitment problems. They may be useful for other purposes, but likely not for this one. Instead, this is a place where likely we need international actors to help stabilize these contexts. Looking forward to the Q&A and thank you all very much.