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Civil conflicts within oil-rich states tend to last longer but are less likely to be mediated and end in a peace agreement. This implies that oil-funded conflict is less likely to end through a mediated settlement, despite offering a greater opportunity for peaceful resolution. This article builds on this puzzle, focusing on the following research question: to what extent does the presence of non-lootable natural resources impact on the onset and outcome of civil war mediation? I argue that oil wealth raises the relative capacity of the incumbent, making it more challenging for insurgents to force mediation and gain the guarantees against defection that are needed to resolve the problem of credible commitment. This theory is tested on 319 civil conflict episodes between 1946 and 2004. The results support the argument that non-lootable natural resources exert a strong negative effect on both the onset and outcome of mediation. The analysis also reveals that the negative effect of petroleum wealth increases relative to a state's hydrocarbon revenue (per capita). This is an important contribution to conflict research focused on natural resources that has previously overlooked the relationship between resource wealth and civil conflict management efforts.

To what extent does the relative strength of a rebel movement impact upon the likelihood of a peace settlement in civil conflict? This article argues that relatively stronger rebels are more likely to overcome the strategic bargaining problems that can prevent the resolution of war. Relatively strong insurgents are better equipped to significantly challenge core government interests and fundamentally threaten the survival of a regime. The incumbent's fear of future violence therefore makes mediation more likely to be undertaken in high-stakes conflicts between states and strong rebel groups. Relatively strong insurgencies are also those with the greatest leverage to negotiate enforcement mechanisms and the best equipped to defend themselves in the event that the government reneges on an agreement. This reduces the scale of the commitment problem and increases the probability of relatively strong rebel groups agreeing to a settlement with an incumbent. This argument is tested using dyadic data that capture the relative position of insurgents in civil war from 1946 to 2004. This represents an important methodological shift within the mediation literature, which has in the past largely relied upon aggregate country-level data. The results suggest that relatively stronger insurgents are more likely to force the state to open a mediation process and eventually concede some form of settlement. This is further evidence of the need to capture the dyadic relations between actors with fine-grained disaggregated data.

This article introduces the Lynching in Latin America (LYLA) dataset. Lynching is a surprisingly prevalent form of collective violence, but the systematic study of this phenomenon has previously been hampered by a lack of cross-national event data. The LYLA data covers reported lynching incidents across Latin America between 2010 and 2019. In total, it includes 2818 lynching events in 18 countries. The data features information on the alleged wrongdoing that motivated the event, the type of violence deployed, the size of the mob, the exact date of the event and geo-coded coordinates capturing where the event took place at the street level. The LYLA data provides an empirical basis to assess questions concerning the conditions that give rise to lynching, the impact of lynching on communities and social processes, and policies to prevent this form of violence. This article introduces the rationale for the data collection, the coding rules and procedures, and offers an illustrative example of how this data can be used, focusing on state illegitimacy as a key condition for lynching.

Lynching is a surprisingly prevalent form of collective violence. We argue that two conditions can cause lynching: a shared morality based on salient collective threats, providing justification, and weak authority, creating opportunity. We examine this argument with the 2004 Indian
Ocean tsunami. In Aceh, the province most impacted, the tsunami was a shock to morality (producing a religious revival) and authority (creating a situation of institutional flux). Using World Bank data, we find that Aceh saw an increase of lynchings, while lynchings stayed on average the same
in other parts of Indonesia. Within Aceh, the increase was most pronounced where authority was most undermined and where locals had high levels of shared morality. These findings have implications for research on collective violence and the prevention of lynching.

How does the state's behavior in negotiations with one non-state group influence the behavior of other non-state actors? We argue that the dynamics of different conflicts within the same country are interdependent, and that a state develops a reputation through its interactions with each conflict party. This reputation provides a valuable source of information that other groups use to judge the state's cooperative intentions. When a state develops a reputation for cooperation, this increases the likelihood of (indirect) reciprocation from other groups. More specifically, we argue that when states enter into (and honor) a ceasefire with one rebel group, they demonstrate a credible reputation for cooperation. A credible reputation for cooperation, we posit, increases the likelihood that other conflict parties enter into ceasefires with the state, or that they de-escalate their military activities. We test our claims using the new civil conflict ceasefire dataset and find support for our argument.

Mediation and peacekeeping are commonly used tools to manage conflict. To what extent are they complementary and effective instruments for ending violent conflicts? Generally, they are seen as distinct tools: mediation aims to facilitate negotiated settlements, while the goal of peacekeeping is to prevent agreements from collapsing. However, peacekeeping and mediation regularly occur simultaneously. Arguably, peacekeeping operations rely on continuing political processes, while peacekeepers create a context favorable for mediation and provide a valuable source of independent information. Using a variety of model specifications, including selection models, empirical evidence supports that (a) mediation rather than peacekeeping is key to halting hostilities, (b) mediation and peacekeeping are largely complementary, but (c) this complementarity is conditional: in the post-Cold War period, transformative peacekeeping boosted the effectiveness of mediation to halt civil wars. There is no evidence that peacekeeping on its own matters for ending conflict. Finally, counterfactual analysis shows the substantial impact of mediation and peacekeeping on the frequency of conflict.

Mediation and peacekeeping are commonly used tools to manage conflict. To what extent are they complementary and effective instruments for ending violent conflicts? Generally, they are seen as distinct tools: mediation aims to facilitate negotiated settlements, while the goal of peacekeeping is to prevent agreements from collapsing. However, peacekeeping and mediation regularly occur simultaneously. Arguably, peacekeeping operations rely on continuing political processes, while peacekeepers create a context favorable for mediation and provide a valuable source of independent information. Using a variety of model specifications, including selection models, empirical evidence supports that (a) mediation rather than peacekeeping is key to halting hostilities, (b) mediation and peacekeeping are largely complementary, but (c) this complementarity is conditional: in the post-Cold War period, transformative peacekeeping boosted the effectiveness of mediation to halt civil wars. There is no evidence that peacekeeping on its own matters for ending conflict. Finally, counterfactual analysis shows the substantial impact of mediation and peacekeeping on the frequency of conflict.

Ceasefires play a role in almost all civil war peace processes. Yet existing studies undertheorize the ways in which different logics drive the design of ceasefire agreements, and the effect this has on violence suspension. Building on bargaining theory and existing ceasefire literature, we identify different bargaining problems conflict parties face over the course of a conflict, and three classes of ceasefire design they use to address these problems. We argue that the effect of ceasefires is driven both by these underlying logics and by the provisions they contain. Building on the PA-X data to capture the provisions included within all written civil war ceasefires between 1990 and 2019, and using Uppsala Conflict Data Program georeferenced event data, we estimate models of ceasefire survival, with conflict deaths as the main measure of whether a ceasefire remains in place. We find that definitive ceasefires (i.e., agreements with demobilization and incompatibility provisions), followed by preliminary ceasefires (i.e., agreements with compliance mechanisms), are associated with longer periods of violence suspension than cessation of hostilities agreements that lack such provisions. We discuss the implications of our results for conflict parties and third parties seeking to facilitate the transition from war to peace.

The United Nations Peacemaking Initiatives (UNPI) data compile information on the full range of instruments the UN employs to advance peace and stability. After briefly introducing the data, we will describe how they help us to identify different types of UN peacemaking instruments based on what they aim to achieve (tasks), when they are applied (trends) and to what conflicts (selection).

Governments often supplement the regular military with paramilitaries and progovernment militias (PGMs). However, it is unclear what determines states' selection of these auxiliary forces, and our understanding of how auxiliary force structures develop remains limited. The crucial difference between the two auxiliary types is their embeddedness in official structures. Paramilitaries are organized under the government to support/replace the regular military, whereas PGMs exist outside the state apparatus. Within a principal–agent framework, we argue that a state's investment in a particular auxiliary force structure is shaped by available resources and capacity, accountability/deniability, and domestic threats. Our results based on quantitative analysis from 1981 to 2007 find that (a) state capacity is crucial for sustaining paramilitaries, but not PGMs; (b) PGMs, unlike paramilitaries, are more common in states involved in civil conflict; and (c) although both paramilitaries and PGMs are associated with regime instability, there is no significant difference between them in that context.