 Thanks for coming. I'm going to be sharing a paper that was just published a few weeks ago, so hot off the presses with Michael Weintraub who's in the audience and a couple of our friends. Project is motivated by two questions. So first, how can states recovering from civil war avoid an escalation of local disputes during transitions to national peace? And then second, how can states prevent armed groups from exploiting local governance gaps that tend to emerge as other armed groups are demobilizing and seize territory during these national peace processes? So the core sort of theoretical intuition at the heart of this project is that projecting state power into areas that were previously governed by armed groups requires providing mechanisms to resolve disputes. So we know from the literature on rebel governance, including and especially work by Anarhona, who's sitting right in front of me and other folks in this room, that one of the most important ways that armed groups win civilians' loyalties and establish territorial control is by adjudicating crimes and resolving more quotidian disputes. So we argue that establishing peace and preventing rebel resurgence at the local level requires providing alternatives to rebel dispute resolution. And most existing attempts to provide those sorts of alternatives are either entirely top down, so for example interventions that focus on improving the performance of the police and the courts, or they are entirely bottom up. So for example, focused on building the capacity of civil society organizations. And we think this sort of top down, bottom up dichotomy is just fundamentally misguided and that really the most promising ways to prevent rebel resurgence involve building bridges between these top down and bottom up institutions. We argue that in particular for weak states, states with weak capacity, their most viable strategy for resolving disputes fairly and efficiently is to partner with communal institutions. And by communal institutions, we mean localized mechanisms for sustaining order, typically through social sanctions rather than through physical force. And if you look around the world, you find tons of examples of these sorts of communal institutions everywhere. Now, we think that communal institutions have some really important comparative advantages over states in post-conflict contexts. They typically enjoy a level of local legitimacy that states often lack. They tend to be quite socially embedded and they often have access to inside information about the most important sources of disputes at the community level. But they often suffer from biases and inefficiencies of their own. So for example, they can resolve disputes in ways that contravene state laws and do process protections. Their decisions are often unenforceable because they lack a credible threat of third party coercion. And unenforceable decisions are problematic because they incentivize forum shopping and prevent sort of a definitive resolution of disputes. So we argue for an approach that exploits complementarities between state and communal authorities. And this approach involves communal authorities adjudicating nonviolent crimes and petty disputes and then connecting with the state to inform state authorities about more serious conflicts. State authorities for their part are responsible for resolving those more serious conflicts, but then also providing a coercive capacity that can help reinforce communal authorities' decisions, especially when those decisions are unpopular. And we think that this approach is a potentially promising way to help states avoid local conflict escalation and prevent new or existing armed groups from gaining a foothold as national peace processes are unfolding. So we're going to test this approach through an experimental evaluation of the Common Pass program in rural Colombia. This is a program that focused on four regions of the country for former FARC strongholds. I think probably most of you guys are familiar with Colombia, but this is the site of the world's longest civil war. There was a peace agreement with the FARC, the largest rebel group in the country in 2016. FARC has largely demobilized, but other armed groups are now vowing to take the FARC's place. So we were working in places where the FARC had demobilized, but where other armed groups were already starting to operate. Hadn't established territorial control yet, but they were definitely active and working to try to build some territorial control. We're going to work in 149 communities, 72 of which we randomly assigned to treatment. I'm going to skip a lot of the empirical details of the research design, but happy to talk about them in the Q&A if you'd like. So this program targeted three sets of actors. So on the side of the state, police commanders and police inspectors. So commanders are responsible for more serious crimes. Police inspectors resolve less serious disputes. And then on the side of the community, juntas de action comunal, sort of communal action boards, which are responsible for maintaining harmony at the local level. And what's interesting about the juntas is that in many places, not everywhere, but in many places, the FARC leveraged the juntas to resolve disputes and control the flow of goods and people and gather intelligence on potential civilian defectors. So in a sense, the intervention that we're evaluating sort of mimicked the FARC's strategy, but this time on the side of the state, basically trying to leverage the juntas to build state capacity and prevent rebel resurgence. The program had three basic goals. One was to just provide information to help state and communal authorities understand one another's comparative advantages and their legal roles and responsibilities. A second was to build trust, to create opportunities for citizens and state and communal authorities to interact with one another in a structured, safe, mutually respectful environment, and then to help improve coordination. So develop and disseminate what we're called rutas de atención or response routes. Basically, you can think of them as sort of decision trees that would help citizens know, you know, if you have a dispute, where should you go to get that dispute resolved, right? And sort of thinking through, okay, is it violent? Is it not violent? You know, if it's violent, take it to the state. If it's not violent, take it to the junta. You know, if the junta can't resolve it, you know, take it somewhere else. So basically a sort of a way for citizens to really understand how they can get their disputes resolved. So it rolled out over four modules. The first module targeted state authorities. Second module targeted communal authorities. The third module brought state and communal authorities together to help coordinate their activities and then and to develop these these response routes which were tailor made for each community. And then finally, in the fourth module, citizens got together with both the state and communal authorities to disseminate these response routes and help communities understand these sort of new mechanisms for resolving disputes. Just sort of give you a flavor for what this looked like. Here's, you know, module one with police, module two with the junta's, module three, they come together to build these response routes, module four, they disseminate. And really the sort of deliverable at the end of this process was something that looks like this. So this is an actual response route. It came, if you look at that picture from module three, right? So they're building this response route as part of the intervention. And then the UNDP and Seraku who implemented the intervention, they would turn it into this nice really polished poster which would get handed out as sort of flyers and then posted in prominent locations throughout the community to help citizens see. You know, how these dispute resolution mechanisms really work. So we're going to combine data from multiple sources to evaluate the effects of this intervention. Again, I'll skip a lot of the details, but happy to talk in the Q&A if you'd like. So we have surveys of citizens and both state and communal authorities. These surveys include some indirect measurement techniques to try to get at sensitive topics, a list experiment to measure reliance on armed groups, an endorsement experiment to measure perceptions of armed groups. This is a survey we conducted about six months after the end of the intervention. So we're looking at sort of medium term effects here. We also have some behavioral measures. So we created a petition that citizens could sign requesting more involvement of municipal authorities in local dispute resolution. And then we went back and measured how many citizens actually signed these petitions. We also encouraged local leaders to create WhatsApp groups with police inspectors and police commanders to help coordinate their activities. And we went back and measured whether they actually did that, whether they created those WhatsApp groups. And then we have this really incredibly rich qualitative data from field reports that the implementers provided to us that gave us a real rich sense of how exactly the intervention unfolded. I'm going to skip again the regression equation, but again, happy to talk about in the Q&A. Let me just highlight a small handful of results. There's a ton in this paper if you're interested in more, but I'll just show you a few quick things. So one, we do observe a reduction in disputes, especially at the community level. So we asked residents about disputes that they themselves were involved in. And then we asked local leaders about disputes that were happening at the community level as a whole. And we observe a 16% reduction in the prevalence of unresolved disputes in the community as a whole and a 25% reduction in the prevalence of violent disputes. So substantively, pretty large effects. We don't really see effects among citizens, which is not terribly surprising because disputes are much more rare when you ask individuals about their own experiences of disputes rather than asking local leaders about disputes in the community as a whole. We also observe less reliance on armed groups among residents. Now I should say reliance on armed groups was already pretty rare in these communities, which is not surprising. Again, we're working in places where the FARC had already demobilized, where other armed groups were active, but had not yet established territorial control. So citizens weren't really relying on them yet. Nonetheless, we find that the program reduced reliance on armed groups basically to zero, even despite the risk of floor effects. Interestingly, we don't find any effect on reliance on the junta's or on reliance on the police and police inspector. So citizens are less likely to rely on armed groups, no more likely to rely on either the state or communal authorities to resolve disputes. And I'll say more about that in just a second. Finally, we find a reduction in perceptions of armed groups. Again, perceptions of armed groups were relatively unfavorable, even in the control group. But the program diminished those perceptions even further, again, basically to zero, despite the risk of floor effects. So for example, we find that residents were 47% less likely to express trust in armed groups. They were 45% less likely to say that armed groups resolved disputes fairly and effectively. We don't find significant effects among local leaders, but the point estimate there that the size of the effect is basically the same. It's just not as precisely estimated. We also find that when we ask police inspectors about their perceptions of the junta's, we find an improvement in their perceptions as well. We don't find a significant effect on citizens' perceptions or local leaders' perceptions of state authorities as a whole. But if we disaggregate this to look at perceptions of police and perceptions of police inspectors, we actually do find an improvement in perceptions of police inspectors specifically. So summarizing there, you basically have police inspectors perceiving local institutions more favorably, local institutions perceiving police inspectors more favorably. And we think that's because police inspectors really work quite closely with these communal institutions, especially through this intervention. So for those of you who are familiar with experimental work, you often get some results that make a lot of sense and some results that are harder to understand. So one puzzle we found was this sort of combination of results where on the one hand the program reduced the prevalence of unresolved and violent disputes. It also decreased reliance on armed groups, but didn't increase reliance on either state or communal authorities. So what's sort of puzzling there is disputes are being resolved. They're not being resolved by armed groups, but they also don't seem to be resolved by state or communal authorities. So who exactly is resolving them? I think a potential solution to this puzzle lies in the fact that the program appears to have enabled better coexistence and cohabitation within these communities, resulting in fewer disputes to resolve in the first place. So basically, communities much more likely to report that there just aren't as many disputes to resolve, period. I won't go through this in detail for the sake of time. So just wrapping up, so again the motivation for this project was that in post-conflict settings or countries that are transitioning to post-conflict periods, states often struggle to consolidate territorial control in former rebel strongholds. We think one way to help facilitate state consolidation is to exploit these promising but underutilized complementarities between state and communal authorities. That's complementarities, not implementarities. And we show one way to try to do that and show that exploiting these complementarities can help mitigate local conflicts and prevent armed groups from regaining citizens' loyalties at the local level as these national-level peace processes are unfolding. Thanks a lot.