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Humanitarian aid has rapidly emerged as a core component of modern peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction. However, some practitioners and policymakers claim that humanitarian assistance may actually prolong conflict. The current debate about the effect of humanitarian aid on conflict underspecifies causal mechanisms and takes place largely through case studies. I use a bargaining framework to argue that aid can inadvertently increase each combatant's uncertainty about the other side's relative strength, thereby prolonging civil war. I test my argument using panel data on cross-national humanitarian aid expenditures. From 1989 to 2008, increased levels of humanitarian assistance lengthen civil wars, particularly those involving rebels on the outskirts of a state. This result suggests that policymakers need to carefully consider whether the specific benefits provided by humanitarian aid outweigh the risk of prolonging civil conflicts, and to look for methods of disbursement that reduce that risk. Adapted from the source document.

The provision of humanitarian assistance has rapidly become a core component of modern peacebuilding and post- conflict reconstruction. Yet, despite the normative appeal of providing humanitarian assistance to the victims of violent conflict, aid workers and analysts frequently claim that humanitarian assistance can inadvertently prolong war. If such claims are true, the very treatment that the international community has been employing to address the consequences of violent conflict may actually be prolonging war and increasing the amount of suffering over time. To date, however, the evidence to support these claims is mostly anecdotal, and a satisfying theoretical link between humanitarian aid and the duration of war has yet to be specified. This dissertation explores the link between humanitarian aid and the duration of war both theoretically and empirically through a series of four papers, with each paper serving as a chapter. I show how humanitarian aid can inadvertently prolong civil war when disbursed during conflict (Chapter 3) and how humanitarian aid can undermine peace when disbursed in the aftermath of civil conflict (Chapter 4). I also show that - as a result of these effects - combatants strategically respond to aid provisions by violently attacking aid workers (Chapter 5). In each paper, I test propositions econometrically using observational data to estimate the relationship between the level of aid and political violence at the macro and micro levels

The UN. has intensified efforts to recruit female peacekeepers for peacekeeping missions. From 2006 to 2014, the number of female military personnel in UN peacekeeping missions nearly tripled. The theory driving female recruitment is that female peacekeepers employ distinctive skills that make units more effective along a variety of dimensions. Yet skeptics argue that deeper studies are needed. This paper explores the theoretical mechanisms through which female military personnel are thought to increase the effectiveness of peacekeeping units. Using new data, we document variation in female participation across missions over time, and we explore the impact of female ratio balancing on various conflict outcomes, including the level of female representation in post-conflict political institutions, the prevalence of sexual violence in armed conflict, and the durability of peace. We find evidence that a greater proportion of female personnel is systematically associated with greater implementation of women's rights provisions and a greater willingness to report rape, and we find no evidence of negative consequences for the risk of conflict recurrence. We conclude that the inclusion of more female peacekeepers in UN peacekeeping does not reduce the ability to realize mission goals.