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The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the United Nations' most powerful institutional body, charged with the "primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security." The main instrument through which the Council asserts this power is its resolutions, specifically by using resolution text to attribute responsibility. The UNSC uses responsibility language to assign tasks, identify accountability under international law, or reflect the Council's normative interpretation of political principles. Yet we lack a comprehensive empirical description of responsibility attributions in UNSC resolutions. We address this gap by providing an original dataset of the full text of all UNSC resolutions between 1946 and 2020. We use this data to show that the Council has significantly increased responsibility attributions since the end of the Cold War, but only for a very specific subset of terms, targeting predominantly states and individuals. We further demonstrate how the data can inform debates about the timing and status of the "responsibility to protect" as an international norm. The data and findings provide a helpful starting point for many future research endeavors, including the role of member states in the UNSC, quantitative and qualitative research on UNSC decision-making processes, or topic development of the UNSC agenda in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nature protected areas are hailed as an institutional solution to the global biodiversity crisis. However, conservation entails local economic costs for some communities and benefits for others. We propose that the establishment of protected areas in Africa follows an ethno-political logic which implies that governments distribute protected areas such that their ethnic constituencies are shielded from their costs but enjoy their benefits. We test this argument using continent-wide data on ethnic groups' power status and protected area establishment since independence. Difference-in-differences models show that political inclusion decreases nature protection in groups' settlement areas. Yet, this effect is reversed for protected areas that plausibly generate tourism income. We also find that ethno-political inclusion is linked to legal degradation of protected areas. Our findings on the ethno-political underpinnings of nature protection support long-voiced concerns by activists that politically marginalized groups carry disproportional costs of nature conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can wars breed nationalism? We argue that civilians' indirect exposure to war fatalities can trigger psychological processes that increase identification with their nation and ultimately strengthen support for nationalist parties. We test this argument in the context of the rise of the Nazi Party after World War 1 (WW1). To measure localized war exposure, we machine-coded information on 7.5 million German soldiers who were wounded or died in WW1. Our empirical strategy leverages battlefield dynamics that cause plausibly exogenous variation in the county-level casualty fatality rate—the share of dead soldiers among all casualties. We find that throughout the interwar period, electoral support for right-wing nationalist parties, including the Nazi Party, was 2.6 percentage points higher in counties with above-median casualty fatality rates. Consistent with our proposed mechanism, we find that this effect was driven by civilians rather than veterans and areas with a preexisting tradition of collective war commemoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizen engagement in and support for peace processes have been deemed important for sustainable peace after civil wars. Yet much of what we know about peace processes in civil wars centers on the interests of elite actors. This special feature aims to advance a research agenda focusing on citizens in peace processes to address this mismatch. In the introduction to the special feature, we first present empirical evidence situating citizens in relation to civil war peace processes. We then trace the current state of the literature on the roles of citizens in peace processes. Following that, we introduce a conceptual framework designed to improve scholarly analysis of the political behavior of citizens in peace processes. We also locate the individual contributions to the special feature within the framework in order to demonstrate its utility and as a means of helping to identify directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elections are cornerstones for societies transitioning from civil war to democracy. The success or failure of these elections is shaped by the strategies former rebels employ to mobilize voters. Of those strategies, clientelism is particularly important as it represents improved voter-elite relations over dysfunctional wartime politics but, if pervasive, also risks undermining long-term democratic consolidation. We argue that the organizational legacies of rebellion shape how rebels engage in electoral clientelism. We expect that former rebels target preelectoral benefits to areas of wartime support, rely on wartime military networks to deliver those benefits, and exploit discretionary control over peace dividends when allocating electoral benefits. We combine original geospatial data on the timing and location of over 2,000 tsunami aid projects with village-level surveys in post–civil war Aceh, Indonesia, to test these hypotheses. Results from difference-in-differences models and detailed tests of causal mechanisms are consistent with our theoretical expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do rebel elites who gain access to political power through power-sharing reward their own ethnic constituencies after war? The authors argue that power-sharing governments serve as instruments for rebel elites to access state resources. This access allows elites to allocate state resources disproportionately to their regional power bases, particularly the settlement areas of rebel groups' ethnic constituencies. To test this proposition, the authors link information on rebel groups in power-sharing governments in post-conflict countries in Africa to information about ethnic support for rebel organizations. They combine this information with sub-national data on ethnic groups' settlement areas and data on night light emissions to proxy for sub-national variation in resource investments. Implementing a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, the authors show that regions with ethnic groups represented through rebels in the power-sharing government exhibit higher levels of night light emissions than regions without such representation. These findings help to reconceptualize post-conflict power-sharing arrangements as rent-generating and redistributive institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of natural resources makes civil conflicts more likely to erupt, last longer, and more difficult to end. Yet rebels do not always exploit resources wherever they are present. Why? I argue that rebels extract more resources when they compete with governments over territorial authority. Territorial competition facilitates black market access, generates financial pressure, and produces governance incentives for rebels to extract natural resources. I test this proposition in a two-tiered research design. First, I show globally that moderate territorial control predicts more resource extraction by rebels. Subsequently, I focus on the example of ivory poaching which offers a rare glimpse into the usually hidden resource extraction process. I match spatially disaggregated conflict event data to subnational poaching data in conflict-affected African countries. Results show that rebels seeking territorial control substantially increase poaching rates. These findings highlight the strategic conditions under which territorial competition shapes rebel criminal behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does development aid shape democracy after civil conflicts? I argue that political aid conditionalities and the economic utility that recipient elites gain from office give rise to a rent-seeking/democracy dilemma: recipients can initiate democratic reforms but also risk uncertainty over office and rents. Or they can refuse to implement such reforms, but risk losing aid rents if donors reduce aid flows in response to failed democratic reforms. This dilemma is strongest in power-sharing cabinets. By granting rebel groups temporally limited access to the state budget, such cabinets intensify elites' rent-seeking motives. Thus, aid-dependent power-sharing elites will hold cleaner elections, but also limit judicial independence and increase particularistic spending to simultaneously reap aid benefits and remain in power. I find statistical support for this argument using data on aid flows and power-sharing governments for all post-conflict states between 1990 and 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do similarly sized peacekeeping missions vary in their effectiveness to protect civilians in conflicts? We argue that peace operations with a large share of troops from countries with high-quality militaries are better able to deter violence from state and non-state actors and create buffer zones within conflict areas, can better reach remote locations, and have superior capabilities – including diplomatic pressure by troop contributing countries – to monitor the implementation of peace agreements. These operational advantages enable them to better protect civilians. Combining data from military expenditures of troop contributing countries together with monthly data on the composition of peace operations, we create a proxy indicator for the average troop quality of UN PKOs. Statistical evidence from an extended sample of conflicts in Africa and Asia between 1991 and 2010 supports our argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]