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This study maps trends of humanitarian funding in the context of total aid at the coun-try level between 1969 and 2019 and estimates how these trends will change in the future. Historical trends show that the com-position of aid has changed significantly in the last two dec-ades: the humanitarian share of total aid to countries has increased from approxi-mately 5 per cent in the 1990s to 23 per cent in 2019. Humanitarian aid was originally intended to respond to short-term emergencies, how-ever, most of today’s humani-tarian financing goes to pro-tracted situations. Today many countries receive high levels of humanitarian assistance for a decade or longer, referred to here as ‘chronic’ cases. More than half of total global humanitarian assistance (59 per cent) in the decade 2010–19 went to chronic crises, typically synonymous with conflict-affected, fragile and refugee-hosting settings. These chronic crises have become more prevalent since 1995. Conservative forecasts suggest that 71 per cent of humanitarian assistance over the next decade will continue to go to countries receiving high levels of assistance today. The study concludes with open questions to policymakers regarding the use of the humanitarian financing instrument. In chronic crisis settings, the strategic balance between humanitarian, development and peacebuilding financing and the interplay between these streams will remain critical.

Local peacebuilding has been embraced in principle by many donors, but the practice of external support to local initiatives needs further systematic study. While previous research has exposed the weaknesses of externally supported peacebuilding, less attention has been given to alternative strategies that can be taken to scale. This article puts the focus on international nongovernmental organizations as key intermediary actors in peacebuilding, and how they deal with dilemmas attached to local peacebuilding support. It contributes to the research on external-local dimensions of peacebuilding practice by identifying constructive functions that can be fulfilled by INGOs in situations where local institutions and actors are not able to address conflict on their own. Specifically, it uncovers the role of INGOs as risk absorbers and enablers of local peacebuilding action through the accompaniment of local partners.

Abstract Some suggest that the fault lines of the WTO’s perceived failures actually lie in failures at the domestic level. This study examines the factors that can explain flexibility (and inflexibility) in multilateral trade negotiations within WTO member states. To shed light on the role of domestic factors in influencing WTO positions, we examine one member state in connection with a high-level meeting. India at the July 2008 Ministerial is selected primarily for methodological reasons. The empirical analysis provides preliminary support for the proposition that domestic policy-making structures marked by continuous information exchange and coordination are more likely to yield negotiation flexibility in multilateral talks. More specifically, the intense interaction that marks the relationships between actors involved in policy making on Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA) and services, where the Indian negotiation position was flexible overall, stands in contrast to what took place in the area of agriculture, where India took a manifestly inflexible stand. Competing explanations fail to fully account for the variation in these negotiating postures. A key insight from the analysis is that organized and regularized consultations, involving the same actors over time, are important. There is also a need for public outreach strategies in connection with high-level WTO meetings.

This article explores what strategies rebels use to prepare their ethnic community for negotiated peace. Proposed strategies are distilled from relevant theory and systematically investigated in case analyses of peace negotiations in Sri Lanka, Indonesian Aceh, and Senegal. The empirical findings indicate that although a coercive military capacity underpinned claims to ethnic representation, coercion did not dominate during the prenegotiation phase. During negotiations, noncoercive persuasion, as well as collective and selective incentives, clearly dominated. Moreover, the most important measures were internal to the negotiating rebel group. The successful rebel negotiator appeared to "mobilize in reverse" by initially targeting the core of military leaders followed by competitor groups and constituents. The article systematically examines across cases what measures rebel negotiators have used to "ripen" their own community, how these measures have been sequenced, and against whom they have been directed. The findings have important implications for the concepts of ripeness and prenegotiation and their requirements. The study underscores in particular the relevance of rebels' nonviolent commitment signals, something that has been largely overlooked in the research on nonstate armed actors. The policy implications suggest the possible benefits of third-party assistance to efforts to promote communication, public outreach, and procedural transparency on the nonstate side in connection with peace talks.

In some ethno-separatist wars, rebel groups direct a large share of violence against members of their own ethnic community. But why do rebels target the co-ethnics they claim to represent in the wa ...

Shields, Vanessa E & Nicholas D J Baldwin, eds, 2008. Beyond Settlement: Making Peace Last After Civil Conflict. Madison-Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 413 pp. ISBN 9780838641835

Why do rebels choose violence over non-violent methods to attain the cooperation of their constituency in the war against the government? This article assesses the importance of rebels' dependency on constituent support through a case study of the LTTE in Sri Lanka. The empirical findings suggest that dependency largely results in non-violent measures. However, a multitude of passive coercion methods – broadly unaccounted for by existing theory – evolve over time in the form of territorial and social entrapments. This implies that rebels do not need the hearts and minds of their people to wage war at later stages of conflict. Time pressure, however, appears to result in violence.

In a laboratory experiment, we create relationships between pairs of anonymous subjects through a Prisoners' dilemma game. Thereafter the same subjects play a private values (sealed-bid double auction) bargaining game with or without communication. Communication substantially increases bargaining efficiency among subjects who cooperated in the Prisoners' dilemma, but has no significant effect on bargaining outcomes when one subject defected. Subjects who cooperated in the Prisoners' dilemma bid more aggresively if their opponent defected. Cooperators also lie more about their valuations when their opponent defected: Compared to the case of mutual cooperation, the cooperators' rate of honest revelation decreases from 64% to 6% and the rate of outright deception increases from 7% to 53%. Our results provide qualitatively new evidence that many people are strong recipricators: They are willing to bear private costs in order to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior, even when the rewards and punishments are unobservable.