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In environments of seemingly intractable conflict, how should we understand the role of state capacity building and security-sector reform in transitions to peace? Prevailing wisdom suggests that a strong state security apparatus mitigates cyclical violence and aids in transitions to predictable, rule-governed behavior. Yet growing attention to police brutality in institutionalized democracies calls this assumption into question. Drawing on a multiyear study of war making and state making in eastern DR Congo, this article interrogates logics of police capacity building, analyzing how and why reform efforts intended to bolster the state’s monopoly on violence frequently fail to curb the unrest they seek to disrupt. I argue that enhancing the coercive capacity of the police can entrench a wartime political order that makes peace more elusive; when police deploy the image of the state toward destabilizing ends they reinforce the institutions of everyday war, undermining the stability a monopoly on violence is intended to build.

Postwar recovery efforts foreground gender equality as a key component of building more liberal democracies. This review explores the burgeoning scholarship on women's rights after war, first grappling with war as a period of possibility for building new gender-inclusive institutions. We review efforts in three arenas: increasing women's political representation in postwar democratic transitions; improving access to justice for women through the extension of property rights and bodily autonomy within systems of carceral justice; and integrating women into labor markets and security sectors through various components of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. Yet these inclusionary efforts have too often sought to dismantle one form of oppression (gender inequality) without challenging others. We document how projects to center women in liberal democratic reforms following war inadvertently overlook other manifestations of violence at the core of these institutions.

How do personal encounters with legal institutions shape citizens’ confidence in those institutions throughout sub-Saharan Africa? Using Afrobarometer’s cross-national citizen survey, we show that negative first-hand experiences with government courts and police erode citizens’ trust in those state institutions but do not tend to disrupt citizens’ perceptions of their authority to arbitrate or enforce the law. Individuals from diverse demographic backgrounds imbue state institutions with the right to perform their governance and law-enforcement duties, even after experiencing institutional incompetence or injustice. This article advances existing comparative research on legal institutions, which tends to conflate trust and legitimacy and overlooks the distinction between de facto performance and de jure authority. We suggest that rule-of-law institutions have deeper roots than some scholars have previously supposed.

Increasingly, academic research in conflict-affected contexts relies on support from humanitarian organizations. Humanitarian organizations constitute sites of study in and of themselves; they partner with academics to roll out surveys or randomized program interventions; and they frequently facilitate security, logistics and transportation for independent researchers. We use a research partnership between IRC, the World Bank, and academic researchers in the UK, the US and eastern DR Congo, to explore the effects of humanitarian affiliation on conflict field research. In investigating when, how and under what conditions humanitarian identities are adopted by researchers (and how these affiliations shape research dynamics) we identify three paradoxes. First, “wearing humanitarian clothes” to facilitate research logistics can both facilitate and constrain access. Second, humanitarian affiliations invoked by researchers to ensure security and protection in volatile research sites can undermine the “insider” status of local staff. Finally, working through humanitarian organizations allows local and international researchers to benefit from the protections and privileges afforded to humanitarian employees without providing any of the services on which privileged access rests. In this article, we map out decisions faced by local and international researchers concerning when to adopt and discard humanitarian identities, and the fraught logistical, ethical and methodological consequences of these decisions.

Grounded in social-contractual ideas about relationships between the governed and those who govern, the provision of social benefits to citizens has historically been predicated on expectations of acquiescence to state authority. However, the rapid expansion of noncontributory social assistance in sub-Saharan Africa, often supported by global donors through technical assistance programs, raises myriad questions about the relationship between social protection and the social contract in fragile and low-capacity contexts. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, but drawing on the theoretical and empirical literature on social protection from around the world, this review parses out the redistributive, contractual, and reconstitutive effects of social protection programming on citizen–state relations. We argue that program features—including targeting, conditionality, accountability mechanisms, bureaucratic reach, and the nature and visibility of state–nonstate partnerships—interact dialectically with existing state–society relationships to engender different social contract outcomes for differently situated populations.

Why do governments and militaries publicly condemn and prosecute particular forms of abuse? This article explores the Sri Lankan government's decision to promote limited legal accountability for state-perpetrated rape committed in a country otherwise renowned for widespread impunity. We argue that rather than representing a turn against impunity, the symbolic stance against conflict-related sexual violence in a small number of high-profile cases served an explicitly politico-military agenda. The state deployed legal accountability in specific cases to garner political legitimacy among key domestic audiences. The Sri Lankan government drew on the symbolism of female victimhood to mobilize support at a time when support for military counterinsurgency was waning. We show that governments can uniquely instrumentalize sexual violence cases to establish moral authority and territorial legitimacy. Through an examination of the domestic legal response to state-perpetrated human rights abuses, we illustrate the many ways in which women's bodies—and the law—can be mobilized in war to serve military ends.

The diversity of political spaces, availability of cheap labor, ease of access to powerful figures, and safety net of a foreign passport attract researchers to the developing world. However, environments of extreme state weakness and ongoing conflict permit research behavior that would be frowned on in the global north. We suggest that weak regulatory authority in conflict-affected states offers foreign academics opportunities that are not available when states have greater reach or capacity. Qualitative researchers may find requests to interview victims or perpetrators of wartime violence granted with ease. Experimenters can coerce under-resourced NGOs to pursue interventions at odds with their organizational mandates. We posit that conflict contexts can constitute permissive environments in which researchers can engage in conduct that would be considered deeply problematic at home. Because studying political violence can require firsthand research on aspects of political life not easily observed elsewhere, this article offers a set of guidelines to foster more ethical and responsible research practices.

Why have peace-building and reconstruction efforts so frequently failed to create durable institutions that can deter or withstand resurgent violence in volatile sites of cyclical conflict? Extant theory predicts that new institutions can help overcome violence and mitigate commitment problems in postconflict contexts by reducing uncertainty in inherently uncertain environments. By contrast, this article argues that postconflict institutions often prove limited in their abilities to contribute to durable peace because they offer wartime elites new venues in which to pursue conflict-era agendas. Through a micro-analysis of efforts to build the rule of law in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, I demonstrate that wartime elites capture and instrumentalize new legal institutions to maximize their intra- and inter-organizational survival; to pursue economic, military, and political agendas behind the scenes; and, in some cases, to prepare for an imminent return to war.

IntroductionIn the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), victims of sexual violence are turning to the courts in greater numbers than ever before. To the casual observer, it might seem unlikely that vulnerable victims of sexual abuse would turn to the law in the aftermath of violence, particularly when they face possibilities of retribution from perpetrators or family members. This should be especially true in a country like DR Congo, where the state is frequently described as "collapsed" (Herbst and Mills 2013; Trefon et al. 2011) and the justice system has been characterized by corruption, nepotism and mismanagement since the early years of independence (Baaz et al 2013; Vlassenroot and Raeymaekers 2004). Furthermore, sexual crimes are deeply stigmatized across much of central Africa, mitigating chances that victims will report incidents of their own volition (Bartels et al. 2013; Kalonda 2013; Palermo et al 2014; Verelst et al. 2014).However, in spite of a dilapidated legal system and a seemingly inhospitable social environment, victims of sexual violence have turned to DR Congo's courts to seek legal remedy in increasing numbers in recent years. A growing international emphasis on building the rule of law in the aftermath of conflict, as well as an increasing humanitarian focus on gender issues, have meant that global donors have invested heavily in improving access to justice for women. Programs designed to promote legal accountability for gendered crimes have been implemented across North and South Kivu and the result has been that, over the past 5 years, the vast majority of cases passing through criminal courts in the east have involved sexual offenses (Askin 2011; Douma and Hilhorst 2012; Lake 2014b). This represents a radical break from earlier patterns of nonreporting. However, to date, we know very little about why victims of sexual crimes are choosing to opt for formal legal remedy.How vulnerable individuals come to see their particular struggles as matters relevant to state law, and when they decide to address their grievances through formal legal channels, have been crucial questions for scholars and human rights activists (see, e.g., Massoud 2006; McCann 2006, 2014; Widner 2004). While recent work has shown that prosecuting violence is important in its own right-and necessary for ensuring the transition from cyclical instability and violence to stable and durable peace (Sikkink 2011; Sikkink and Walling 2007)-criminal justice is most immediately intended to provide accountability, recognition, and healing to victims (ABA 2014; Me^ndez 1997; O'Connell 2005; UNDP 2013). It is thus surprising that so little attention has yet been paid to the intended beneficiaries of legal outreach efforts.Without local buy-in, and without victims and witnesses willing to come forward to report crimes to the police or provide testimony in court, efforts to strengthen legal systems and build public confidence in new forms of dispute resolution will surely fail. Furthermore, without input from local participants, we remain illequipped to evaluate the potential for legal development aid to contribute to its overarching program objectives of empowering women and building respect for the rule of law. The perspectives of first-time participants in legal processes are especially salient in postconflict settings, where international resources are channeled toward institution-building in large sums and where local communities often have little prior experience with state law.To begin to understand how increased legal accountability for gender-based crimes has been experienced on the ground, not least by those it is most directly intended to benefit, we conducted in-depth interviews with 50 individuals at various stages in the pursuit of criminal justice. Through these interviews, we analyzed how women involved in legal processes conceptualized criminal justice, what motivated their decisions to seek formal legal remedy given their limited prior experience with the law, and how they reflected, post hoc, on their experiences as legal subjects. …

This is the summary of Qualitative Transparency Deliberations Final Report on Research on Vulnerable and Marginalized Populations, Working Group number IV.3.

This report discusses research transparency – its forms and benefits, costs and risks, and recommendations for practice – as it pertains to qualitative research projects involving vulnerable and marginalized populations. In the first section of the report, we draw from the QTD deliberations to first explain that "marginalization and vulnerability" are not fixed or given categories in political science research. Relying on university Institutional Review Board (IRB) definitions of these terms is insufficient, as they do not account for the range of research participants that political scientists may encounter, and IRBs are often not familiar with the contexts in which political science research is conducted. Therefore, rather than positing a universal or all-encompassing definition of vulnerability and marginalization, we suggest that these terms are constituted vis-a-vis specific research questions and contexts.

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. This essay is the introduction to a symposium that crystallizes the central findings of a three-year deliberative process – the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD) – involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. The symposium’s centerpiece is a series of summaries of the QTD Working Group’s final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate – as understood by relevant research communities – to the forms of inquiry being assessed.

Efforts to promote gender equality often encourage changes to interpersonal interactions as a way of undermining gender hierarchy. Such programs are premised on the idea that the gender system can be undone when individuals behave in ways that challenge prevailing gender norms. However, scholars know little about whether and under what conditions real changes to the gender system can result from changed behaviors. The authors use the context of a gender sensitization program in the Democratic Republic of Congo to examine prospects for transformative change at the interactional level of the gender system. Over nine months, the authors observed significant changes in men’s quotidian practices. Further, the authors identified a new commitment among many men to a more equal division of household labor. However, participants consistently undermined the transformative potential of these behavioral changes through their dedication to maintaining control over the objective, process, and meaning of change, resisting conceptions of equality that challenged the gender system. Because quotidian changes left gender hierarchy intact, they appear unlikely to destabilize the logics that legitimate women’s subordination.

This chapter examines the promotion of human rights, the rule of law, and democracy by external actors in areas of limited statehood. It begins with the definition of key terms and a brief overview of the historical trajectory in which contemporary interventions by external actors unfold. We then discuss cross-cutting issues and introduce the key actors involved in the promotion of human rights, the rule of law, and democracy. Analysing each of these issue areas in turn, we make three overarching arguments. Firstly, we highlight the multiplicity of outcomes that result from external interventions, whose impacts prove highly unevenly and spatially dispersed. Secondly, we emphasize the crucial influence of local actors and pre-existing institutions in shaping the outcomes of any governance intervention. Finally, we note that external actors have tended to rely on state-centric conceptualizations of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights.

Research over the past decade has made considerable progress toward achieving a holistic understanding of the myriad actors, interests, and relationships shaping labor rights in global supply chains, but numerous obstacles remain to building a more cumulative research program. In this essay we outline two major challenges and several fruitful directions forward. First, we review the different outcomes of interest in research on labor rights and highlight several tensions that lead to difficulty comparing findings across studies, inappropriate data choices, and unexamined causal assumptions. Second, we highlight a failure to adequately integrate the findings of research in two different subliteratures, one focusing on the incentives of states and firms to adopt reforms, and a second focusing on the implementation of those reforms with monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. We conclude by highlighting the important questions raised by a clearer integration of these two literatures and identifying several recent studies that begin to answer them.

Building state capacity has often been hailed as a cure-all for the ailments of the developing world and has been linked to human rights improvements, economic development, and the enforcement of property rights. Low state capacity, on the other hand, has been viewed as one of the primary impediments to improvements of labor rights and other social justice issues. We examine the relationship between state capacity and the protection of labor rights in panels of 85 developing countries, and 34 “supply-chain-relevant” countries. We find that changes in state capacity are only associated with changes in labor rights in countries where workers’ interests are better represented in the political system – measured alternately as left party power, democracy, union density, and potential labor power. Our findings highlight the importance of combinations of state capacity and political will in leading to improved rights of workers in global supply chains.

In recent years, courts in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) have produced some of the most progressive judicial decisions against perpetrators of gender violence of anywhere in the world. Yet, DR Congo is often described as the archetypal collapsed state. This article uses a case study of domestic courts in Eastern DR Congo to analyze how and why complex functions of domestic governance—such as the production of frequent and high-quality judicial decisions by domestic courts—are able to persist, even flourish, in an area where the state is characterized by extreme fragility and weakness. I argue that, rather than a decoupling of law and practice as previous approaches might predict, state fragility in DR Congo has created openings for domestic and transnational actors to exert direct influence over judicial processes at multiple levels of governance. The involvement of external actors in the domestic authority structures of states has resulted in surprisingly progressive human rights outcomes in certain issue areas. However, the article also documents some of the unintended consequences of human rights developments that occur at the very peripheries of broader state-building projects.

As apparel manufacture moves from the developed to the developing countries, global brands have increased their bargaining power in the garment industry and often fail to uphold the international standard of labor rights. Coalitions of unions, NGOs, and activists have conducted campaigns to educate, influence and organize end consumers to pressure powerful global brands to improve labor conditions in garment production. Most campaigns have limited success. Using in-depth studies of the cases, this paper investigates one campaign that represented a significant victory for labor rights. We find that success depended on: means for acquiring and disseminating credible information about the violation and its corrective and an effective and multi-pronged coalition that includes university actors. Our research reveals that universities are well positioned to overcome various challenges associated with labor rights campaigns; universities have leverage as institutional purchasers, they provide a venue for organized student activism, and they are an important locus for debating and then educating publics about ethical practice.