How Does International Intervention Work? | 2017 | Events

How Does International Intervention Work? Mechanisms for Securing Peace Settlements in Civil Conflicts
Aila Matanock
Aila Matanock
October 18, 2017
12:00-1:30pm
E40-496 Pye Room

Paper Summary

​There is emerging consensus that international intervention can secure peace by helping combatants overcome commitment problems following civil wars. But how do interveners accomplish this? Conventional wisdom suggests that intervention primarily works through military coercion. We theorize an alternative mechanism: monitoring and conditioning incentives on compliance with peace processes. Using United Nations peacekeeping data from 1989-2012, controlling for selection effects, we find these conditional incentives are more consistently correlated with reduced risk of conflict recurrence than military coercion.

​Brief Bio

​Aila M. Matanock is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research addresses the ways in which international actors engage in conflicted and weak states. She has worked at the RAND Corporation before graduate school, and has held fellowships at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UCSD. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and her A.B. magna cum laude​ from Harvard University.