 So, what I'm presenting today is a small piece of a large project that has several moving parts. I'm working with two colleagues, at one at the Naval Postgraduate School, one at Santa Clara University, and we've been working on a multi-country, largely qualitative so far project that is moving into a qualitative and quantitative phase at this point. And we've been basically trying to tackle this question about how we achieve peace in post-conflict countries, looking at this idea that we often have a state-building project and a peace-building project, which are often pursued at the same time and often through a lot of similar overlapping instruments. And yet we think that state-building and peace-building are very different and different processes which lead to very different outcomes. So state-building is supposed to help to build something that we're calling state coherence, and peace-building is supposed to build something that we're labeling as depth of peace. And each of those has a subset of dimensions that I'll go through in a moment. We want to look at the causal effects of international assistance specifically. So we are not saying that international assistance is the only thing that affects peace-building and state-building, nor are we saying that is necessarily the most important thing. But because it is a very prominent dynamic of many state-building, peace-building contexts, we want to specifically pick apart this concept of something that we're calling aid dynamics. And by aid dynamics, we mean the overall interactive dynamic of international assistance taking into account both the development partner community and the host nation's responses. And so aid dynamics is the newest awkward term we've come up with for this concept. We used to say external engagement, and then nobody knew what that meant either. So aid dynamics is kind of just this composite phrase that we're using for this. And we're looking at this through public service delivery. So we're trying not to just say state capacity of peace writ large, but state capacity in specific sectors of three countries that we're looking at. And we look at public service delivery because of this concept that David mentioned earlier about this social contract between the state and society. The public service delivery is kind of one of those places in which when you think about what states do, yes, they provide authority, yes, they provide kind of rule of law. But in a lot of contexts, we also expect them to do things like providing a basic minimum of education, healthcare, infrastructure. And so how are states doing that? That's a very concrete area in which we can study the impacts of external engagement and aid on things like specific capacity building, specific state developments, but also because as a part of keeping the peace, part of providing public goods, that's also a way to get into a quality and sustainable, peaceful outcome. Public service delivery also is an arena in which you're likely to get a lot of low-scale distributional tensions. So by examining specific arenas of state engagement, we can also look at low-level distributional conflicts over who gets education, who gets healthcare, where is infrastructure developed, what language is education, that sort of thing delivered in. And then if there are tensions, how are they resolved? So we think the public service delivery as a way out of this two-broadstroke macro look at capacity, two-broadstroke macro look at just aid, allows us to more fine-grain analyze. So ultimately, we've come up with a kind of schematic where we say we have this concept of aid dynamics and we break it down into three sub-dimensions, level, purpose administration, and that we want to suggest that we and other scholars start to separate out the state building and the peace building dynamics of this in a post-conflict scenario to look at creating state coherence and depth of peace. And so each of these has three dimensions. So aid dynamics, when we look at level, that's kind of the amount of aid at base, it's the amount of aid, it's a couple other dynamics. Purpose gets into what is the purpose of the assistance? Is it for policy development? Is it for institutional development? Is it for human capacity building? Not all aid is the same, right? Just as not all development partners give the same amounts of aid, they give it for very different purposes. And technical assistance versus direct service provision is going to have a very different impact on the development of an outcome. And today I'm looking at the state coherence outcome. And then the administration of aid is how is aid administered both within the development partner? And forgive me if I say donor, because as someone who went to school in the 1990s, I learned donor instead of development, and I'm trying to shift my thinking. But also the systems of administration within recipient countries. So that give and take dynamic between the outsiders and the insiders. And what are the systems of aid administration? Are they used or bypassed? And all of that. Within state coherence, it was actually really great to hear David Karmant talk about capacity, authority legitimacy and capacity, because we've developed a parallel set of authority effectiveness and legitimacy. And they pretty much cohere with what he was talking about, except for when he says a capacity we say effectiveness. So the authority is basically a rule of law type of dynamic. Does the state have the ability to create decisions and enforce them? But effectiveness is in the arenas in which it chooses to be active. Is it able to be active effectively? Does it have capacity? And then legitimacy is more of a social dynamic. How does the average citizen view the institutions of the state? So something like if there's a problem, if there's a conflict at the local level, do individuals go to state authorities, to tribal authorities, to local elders? What mix of that? Are they always trying to bypass the state? Legitimacy is one of those fundamental dynamics of state, stateness is one thing we used to call this. Stateness that is hard to quantify, but is really important. So I tend to teach military students working at something called the Naval Postgraduate School. And they're there to learn about politics in other countries. And I often say to them, in the middle of the night, you come across a red light. What do you do? What do you guys do? I know this is audience participation. You're not used to this. How many of you stop? Depends exactly. Says the man from Brazil. Sir, sorry. But this gets into if I'm in South Africa, which is the country I know most about. It really depends where I am if I'm going to stop at that red light. I might slow down. But in the United States, I am always going to stop. And that's a reflection of both authority and legitimacy. Authority, because I'm afraid of getting a ticket. But legitimacy, because I kind of recognize that that red light means something. So we're trying to capture these different dynamics by which you internalize. I'm not going to go into depth of peace because we're not really focusing on it today due to time issues. And my little timer seems to have stopped. Where am I? Never trust your smartwatches. Okay. So but we're trying to basically disarticulate depth of peace also into your negative piece of absence of violence to some more dimensions of positive peace, post-conflict resilience, the ability to kind of short-term recovery after war, and a longer-term conflict recovery, which is that more longer-term economic development dynamic. So we're looking at three countries, Cambodia, Siles, and Ganda. I'll give some sort of anecdotal evidence from all of them. We're looking at three sectors, education, health, and public works. And we're basically, we've conducted a lot of interviews in all three countries looking at external actors. We've talked with international organizations, bilateral donors, international NGOs. We've also spoken with corresponding public officials. Mostly so far, we've done field work in capital cities. We've taken trips out to outlying areas to try to identify areas for future research. We're not 100% sure if we're going to be able to conduct the future field research due to human subjects considerations of who you are you allowed to talk to, which is unfortunate. So we are turning to a large-end data collection process in each of these sectors to kind of cull, which is why it's great to be here and see all the different data that people are collecting because we will probably be using your data in the future. A lot of content analysis of donor reports about how their things have been going. So we want to really drill down on aid dynamics and the causal implications for state coherence. We know a lot about aid effectiveness. We know a lot of piecemeal things about aid effectiveness. Aid in institution building, aid in fragile contexts. We have a whole set of aid can do these positive and these negative things. So what we tried to do was distill down from looking at the literature on this to and then also so deductively from literature and inductively from our research in these three countries. We've also added a shadow case of Rwanda, but we're not doing field work there. What we think of we've kind of identified these 11 different dynamics in terms of these are what we've identified as specific, 11 specific ways in which aid will affect state coherence and they can aggregate in various ways. So we basically have them listed as positive to negative, but in actual reality it is not linear and you may get things like you may get, I'll go through what these mean, systems enhancement, but also parallel systems, but also the creation of a rentier state because of high levels of aid. And so while each of these we think has individually positive to ambiguous to negative dynamics cumulatively and that's the phase we're moving into, the pathways aren't that simple. So after looking at kind of all of this different literature, we've come up with sort of four positive dynamics. And sometimes that was a stretch to come up with the four positive ones because innately as analysts who tend to be critical, we went to the negative ones first. And so we see that when properly organized, when sort of aid is given at the appropriate level to a specific country, when it's using the local systems or working with the local systems or helping to build the local systems and not bypassing them, when it coordinates well, you wind up with enhancement of local systems, positive resource mobilization on behalf of what a government has identified as its own goals. You can get to long-term human capacity building through carefully designed technical assistance, not technical assistance that replaces locals, but that kind of works with and or trains. And then this idea of skills transfer also goes together. On a more neutral level, you tend to see gap filling and parallel systems, which are when you get the international community saying, you know what, there's a problem with tertiary education, we're going to provide more education for girls or we're going to provide more education for underserved populations of various forms. We call it gap filling when they work with the existing development plans that maybe they helped to create, but they work, they see the gaps in what the government wants to do, what it can do, and they fill in. The parallel systems are something you find much more often with health, which is when you get the big donors coming in and saying, we want to work on AIDS. And the governments may say, we actually care a lot about malaria and tuberculosis. And the international government say, no, no, no, HIV AIDS. And they wind up setting entire parallel structures of delivering a service that may not work with, may bypass, may overwhelm indigenous structures. And sometimes, and this is when it leads then from, this is why it's ambiguous, it can just sit side by side or it can actively impair, and then you're moving into a negative trajectory. The negative dynamics are what we call substitution impairment competition. And then the last two, we're not quite sure, we know that they exist, but we're not quite sure where they fit in all this. Rante dynamics and regime maintenance, I'll go through those. So substitution is basically if the international community is coming in and doing four, it allows the government to substitute out of a sector, as often happens with education and health, where governments are choosing to invest in mining infrastructure, logging infrastructure, energy infrastructure, where they can gain greater rents. And they substitute out of health, education, and similar social sectors because they know that international partners are more likely to stay engaged in those regions. Impairment is one of these things that manifests very overtly and subtly from things like pulling the most capable out of the government into higher paying private sector in NGO or public sector in the World Bank or the IMF or DFID, USAID, the kind of pulling people out, you can impair the government. You could also impair the government. It's any time that any dynamic of aid interrupts service delivery or interrupts the building of government capacity. It can do this through aid that's not delivered on time and in the promised amounts. So for one example from Uganda, when aid was suspended in 2012, for two different reasons, but basically they had a lot of budget support and aid was suspended, that caused the government to stop functioning in entire sectors for months at a time until the aid was restarted. So delays and disbursements, underfunding can impair, especially if a country is very aid dependent. The competitive systems is basically what happens when gap filling and parallel starts to compete with the government. So the most common example across Laos, Cambodia and Uganda that we found was the creation of private health and private education that people opted into instead of using state services. So when you see the old trite comments that basically the provision of aid prevents governments from moving into a sector and or allows an opting out or does a four, we think you can have it in gap filling, parallel and then competitive dynamics, which are from moderate to tend to be negative. Rante and regime maintenance are basically when aid allows states to opt out of the social contract and instead put their own resources into creating rents for public officials, buying patronage, sorry, paying for the patronage system in various contexts. And regime maintenance is when they take money that they otherwise would have had to put into social sectors or highly aided sectors and instead put those into their militaries, which most international partners are not willing to fund. And so those are kind of second to third order dynamics that come from the other ones. So I kind of just talked through that chart instead of going through this. These are a couple slides that kind of break them out in more detail. So this may not sound groundbreaking. And the next phase we're looking into how does level and purpose and administration feed into when you get systems enhancement, resource mobilization, capacity building and skills transfer and all the others. And then we're tracing those through to concrete changes in legitimacy, capacity and authority over time. We see across our cases of Laos, Cambodia and Uganda, Laos tends to be the one that directs aid most, that forces external partners into its own development plans. Uganda and Cambodia tend to be less forceful as they engage with the development partner community. And so you see more of some of these positive dynamics in Laos and fewer of them in Cambodia and Uganda. But within specific sectors, it's not even. So in Uganda, they've graduated to be able to write their own educational policy as opposed to having external technical support writing it for them. But the health plan in Uganda is still written by outside agents. Literally while conducting this research, I saw a request for proposals from the World Bank to write the Ugandan health policy for the next five years. So it's uneven how this works across different sectors. I kind of went through these already. I always do this. Apologies. We think a lot of this is going to be contingent and interactive. And we also think it's important to be able to identify this set of 11 concrete dynamics that we can aggregate and disaggregate in different ways. Because it's not does aid help or does aid hinder, but how does aid help? And how does aid hinder? In what ways and in what context? And specifically within which different sectors? So we want to think about the staging of it and how things that start out positively may wind up being more positive or may wind up being somewhat negative. Our next phase is to move into the peace building. So we want to present to you as a thought something to think about. A state building, a peace building, whether they are complementary as an empirical question that we need to conduct more research on. And this is my last bit. State building can help to build more inclusive societies and legitimate political settlements centered on state apparatus and the state society interface. And this is what Graciana is talking about on the political side. What you do to attain the peace may actually not help the state build in the long run. And what you help to build the peace in the short term may actually endanger the peace in the longer term in terms of who you're bringing into the government. And we see a lot of examples with this when you have to bring spoilers into the peace settlements. We also want to look at do these 11 dynamics we see with aid and state coherence apply to aid in depth of peace? And how do they operate there? Do you see gap filling? Do you see parallel systems? Do you see substitution? Do you see positive dynamics of where the international community is able to support local initiatives for peace building or is the international community supplanting them? Ultimately, achieving greater state coherence may require a different form of a political settlement from deepening the peace. Do we need to see transitions from the post-conflict phase into this longer term politically? So that's kind of our preliminary thinking. Thank you. Hope you all have good questions for us. Thank you.