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When state armed forces engage in violence against civilians during civil wars, why do some citizens continue to support the government? I argue that individuals' support for the state in such contexts is shaped by the interplay between their perceptions of violence, governance and ideology. Drawing on research concerning motivated reasoning, I suggest that ideological similarity with and effective governance from the state can alleviate the negative effect of military violence against civilians on support for the state and, conversely, augment the positive effect of insurgent abuse on attitudes toward the government. Analysis of seven years of surveys fielded by the Latin American Public Opinion Project in Colombia between 2005 and 2011 suggests that individuals' responses to victimization by the state's armed forces depend on whether the individuals are ideologically aligned with the state. More specifically, among people who have an ideology similar to that of the president, military victimization has a less negative effect on support for the armed forces and for the national government. There is also mixed evidence that the quality of state governance, particularly the provision of security from crime, shapes the ways people respond to victimization. While existing studies primarily focus on the effects of either violence or governance on attitudes toward the state, these findings indicate that a more complete theory of why people support governments which engage in violence against civilians requires an understanding of not only violence but also of governance and ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil conflicts typically end with negotiated settlements, but many settlements fail, often during the implementation stage when average citizens have increasing influence. Citizens sometimes evaluate peace agreements by voting on referendums or the negotiating leaders, and, almost always, they decide whether to cooperate. Yet, despite their role, we do not know much about how citizens form attitudes toward peace agreements. In this article, we assess how citizens form attitudes toward settlements, specifically the policy provisions that emerge from them, which are central in shaping the post-conflict context. These are complex policy changes, involving deeply factionalized actors, and the citizens evaluating them are often focused on rebuilding their lives. We therefore theorize that citizens use stark cues from political elites with whom they have affinity to form their attitudes. We test our theory using survey experiments in Colombia. We find that citizens rely on political elites' cues to decide their stance on the settlement's provisions. These cues appear to supply easily-accessible information that respondents use over other information. In contrast to work positing that peace agreements are exceptional and weary citizens are stabilizing forces, our results suggest that even these decisions are politics as usual, where divisions among political elites drive the outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Revista Colombiana de Psicología is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Departamento de Psicologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Broad political participation is widely accepted as a crucial element of transitions from armed conflict to peace. As such, reforms to increase access to participatory democracy are often written into peace accords. Yet despite this connection between peace and participation in policy, we know relatively little about how the two interact in practice. Who uses participatory institutions? Does civilians' experience during armed conflict affect how they participate after war ends? This article examines an unlikely case of post-conflict participation in Colombia to answer these questions: the activation and organization of local referenda from below – that is, by conflict-affected communities themselves – to contest the national government's mining and oil policy. Using an original dataset of 95 municipality-level attempts to organize these referenda (consultas populares), I find that both conflict intensity and insurgent group presence have significant and positive effects on consulta activation. The impact of insurgent group presence, however, is mediated by the timing of armed groups' consolidation of territorial control. I further explore this relationship through a qualitative case study. The results highlight the importance of considering the lingering impact that armed conflict may have on democratic participation beyond electoral politics. Even when communities explicitly avoid references to conflict or victim status in their discourse, experiences during armed conflict can still shape local dynamics of political participation during post-conflict transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent are legislators, responsible for the implementation of many peace agreements, responsive to citizens' preferences? Examining the 2016 Colombian peace agreement, we embed an experiment in the 2019 wave of a survey of all the members of Congress. We inform legislators about the attitudes of the general population and residents of conflict-affected regions on a provision included in the peace agreement: the creation of 16 special seats in the House of Representatives reserved for conflict areas. We find that legislators underestimate citizen support for this policy, and the magnitude of their misconception is correlated with the positions of their parties on the issue. Moreover, we find that providing information about citizens' support for the policy does not affect legislator support for the provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civic self-efficacy and trust are interrelated dimensions of citizenship that are important in adolescence and linked to educational contexts. Furthermore, they have been separately connected to corruption. However, the three factors are seldom looked at together and investigations of them using international education datasets are rarely contextualised within national histories and politics. The current study uses the 2009 and 2016 ICCS and multi-group multilevel confirmatory factor analysis to investigate differences in and relationships between adolescent Colombians' trust, civic self-efficacy, and acceptance of corruption. During these years, the government was involved in a peace process that sparked political polarisation and embroiled in several corruption scandals. Analyses revealed lower institutional trust, but higher civic self-efficacy and acceptance of corruption in the 2016 cohort. The results indicate that declining trust and rising acceptance of corruption may not dictate negative civic outcomes, while highlighting possible areas for refocusing peace education in Colombia and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Latin American Business Review is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Kavilando is the property of Kavilando and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista CS is the property of Rafael Silva Vega and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Simple Summary: Plant–microorganism associations date back more than 400 million years. Plants host microorganisms that establish many different relationships with them, some negative and others very positive for both organisms. A type of this relationship is established with microorganisms that live inside them, known as endophytic microorganisms; they can include bacteria, yeasts, and fungi. In this study, we isolate endophytic bacteria from maize plants, and we characterize them in order to check their potential for being used as biocontrol agents against Botrytis cinerea, one of the most important phytopathogenic fungi in the world. The endophytic bacteria showed this antagonistic effect during in vitro assay and also during in vivo assay in Phaseolus vulgaris. At the same time, they showed the capacity for promoting growth in Zea mays plants. Plant diseases are one of the main factors responsible for food loss in the world, and 20–40% of such loss is caused by pathogenic infections. Botrytis cinerea is the most widely studied necrotrophic phytopathogenic fungus. It is responsible for incalculable economic losses due to the large number of host plants affected. Today, B. cinerea is controlled mainly by synthetic fungicides whose frequent application increases risk of resistance, thus making them unsustainable in terms of the environment and human health. In the search for new alternatives for the biocontrol of this pathogen, the use of endophytic microorganisms and their metabolites has gained momentum in recent years. In this work, we isolated endophytic bacteria from Zea mays cultivated in Colombia. Several strains of Bacillus subtilis, isolated and characterized in this work, exhibited growth inhibition against B. cinerea of more than 40% in in vitro cultures. These strains were characterized by studying several of their biochemical properties, such as production of lipopeptides, potassium solubilization, proteolytic and amylolytic capacity, production of siderophores, biofilm assays, and so on. We also analyzed: (i) its capacity to promote maize growth (Zea mays) in vivo, and (ii) its capacity to biocontrol B. cinerea during in vivo infection in plants (Phaseolus vulgaris). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]