Govinda Clayton | Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) (original) (raw)

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Papers by Govinda Clayton

Mediation is now the most popular form of conflict management, and it has proven to be an effecti... more Mediation is now the most popular form of conflict management, and it has proven to be an effective means of resolving inter-and intrastate disputes. This article offers an overview of mediation in foreign policy. We first highlight which actors tend to perform mediatory roles, emphasizing the relative strengths and weaknesses of individual, state, and international organization mediators. Next we discuss the supply and demand of mediation, identifying the key conditions that promote third parties' efforts to offer mediatory assistance and belligerents to accept the help of an intermediary. We then discuss the process and varying methods used by mediators, highlighting the range of actions from relatively soft facilitative mediation, up to more manipulative approaches. Finally we discuss the outcomes that mediation tends to produce and the conditions that influence the effectiveness of this preeminent foreign policy tool.

Governments often supplement the regular military with paramilitaries and pro-government militias... more Governments often supplement the regular military with paramilitaries and pro-government militias (PGMs). However, it is unclear what determines states' selection of these auxiliary forces, and our understanding of how auxiliary force structures develop remains limited. The crucial difference between the two auxiliary types is their embeddedness in official structures. Paramilitaries are organized under the government to support/replace the regular military, while PGMs exist outside the state apparatus. Within a principal-agent framework, we argue that a state's investment in a particular auxiliary force structure is shaped by available resources and capacity, accountability/deniability, and domestic threats. Our results based on quantitative analysis in 1981-2007 find that (1) state capacity is crucial for sustaining paramilitaries, but not PGMs, (2) PGMs, unlike paramilitaries, are more common in states involved in civil conflict, and (3) although both paramilitaries and PGMs are associated with regime instability, there is no significant difference between them in that context.

This article examines how civilian defense militias shape violence during civil war. We define ci... more This article examines how civilian defense militias shape violence during civil war. We define civilian defense forces as a sedentary and defensive form of pro-government militia that incumbents often use to harness the participation of civilians during a counterinsurgency campaign. We argue that civilian defense forces reduce the problem of insurgent identification. This leads to a reduction in state violence against civilians. However, we also claim that these actors undermine civilian support for insurgents, which leads to an increase in rebel violence against civilians and overall intensification of conflict. A statistical analysis of government and rebel violence against civilians from 1981 to 2005 and a qualitative assessment of a civilian defense force operating in Iraq from 2005 to 2009 offer strong support for our theoretical claims. These findings provide further insight into pro-government militias and their effects on violence. They also have wider ethical implications for the use of civilian collaborators during civil war.

This paper assesses the effect that leveraging civilian defense force militias has on the dynamic... more This paper assesses the effect that leveraging civilian defense force militias has on the dynamics of violence in civil war. We argue that the delegation of security and combat roles to local civilians shifts the primary targets of insurgent violence towards civilians, in an attempt to deter future defections, and re-establish control over the local population. This argument is assessed through an analysis of the Sunni Awakening and ancillary Sons of Iraq paramilitary program. The results suggest that at least in the Al-Anbar province of Iraq, the utilisation of the civilian population in counterinsurgent roles had significant implications for the targets of insurgent violence.

There has recently been huge expansion in the availability of systematic data on peacekeeping mis... more There has recently been huge expansion in the availability of systematic data on peacekeeping missions. Data capturing the size and composition of peacekeeping operations has improved in depth and breadth, and is now complemented by a collection of disaggregated and geo-coded data. This means that rather than simply measuring the presence or absence of peacekeeping within a conflict or state, data is now available on a range of more specific indicators such as the location and response to specific peacekeeping events (cf. Dorussen and Ruggeri, this issue). The rapid growth in the range and quality of peacekeeping data has produced new insights, and offers greater opportunities for researchers attempting to analyse a range of policy-relevant questions. Yet despite the burgeoning collection of peacekeeping work, there remain areas in which understanding is weak or deficient. Moreover, while the community of peace scientists that regularly engage in quantitative research are often familiar with the existence of new (and existing) datasets, the broader community of peace and conflict researchersin particular those from the policy worldare often unaware of the significant progress that has been made in this field. As a result, the potential for systematically collected and analysed peacekeeping data to have a real impact on policy debates often remains unrealized. This special data section was conceived as a means to address these inadequacies: firstly by providing a forum for those leading the development of quantitative peacekeeping data to communicate the current state-of-the-field to the broad academic and policy readership of International Peacekeeping; and secondly, as an opportunity for researchers to highlight some of the areas in which future data collection efforts should be focused.

Civil conflicts within oil-rich states tend to last longer but are less likely to be mediated and... more Civil conflicts within oil-rich states tend to last longer but are less likely to be mediated and end in a peace agreement. This implies that oil-funded conflict is less likely to end through a mediated settlement despite offering a greater opportunity for peaceful resolution. This article builds on this puzzle, focusing on the research question: to what extent does the presence of non-lootable natural resources impact on the onset and outcome of civil war mediation? I argue that oil-wealth raises the relative capacity of the incumbent, making it more challenging for insurgents to force mediation and gain the guarantees against defection that are needed to resolve the problem of credible commitment. This theory is tested on 319 civil conflict episodes between 1946 and 2004. The results support the argument that non-lootable natural resources exert a strong negative effect on both the onset and outcome of mediation. The analysis also reveals that the negative effect of petroleum wealth increases relative to a states hydrocarbon revenue (per capita). This is an important contribution to conflict research focused on natural resources that has previously overlooked the relationship between resource wealth and civil conflict management efforts.

Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars, Feb 24, 2014

This chapter provides an overview of the quantitative study of civil war, focusing on the develop... more This chapter provides an overview of the quantitative study of civil war, focusing on the development of quantitative conflict studies, the basics of the quantitative method, the prominent sources of civil conflict data, and the strengths and weaknesses of using quantitative methods to analyse civil war.

We examine whether features highlighted as important for mediation in existing research allow us ... more We examine whether features highlighted as important for mediation in existing research allow us to predict when we will see mediation and likely success out-of-sample. We assess to what extent information about the characteristics of the conflicting dyads and conflict history can be evaluated ex ante and improve our ability to predict when conflicts will see mediation as well as when peaceful solutions are more likely to follow from mediation. We justify that the information used to generate predictions through the model can be assessed ex ante, using the ongoing conflict in Syria as an example. Our results suggest that a two stage model of mediation and success seems to do relatively well overall in predicting when mediation is likely to occur, but notably less well in predicting the outcome of mediation. This may reflect how ex ante observable structural characteristics are likely to influence willingness to mediate, while the outcome of mediation to a large extent will be influenced by unobservable characteristics or private information and how these are influenced by mediation. We discuss the usefulness of out-of-sample evaluation in studying conflict management and suggest future directions for improving our ability to forecast mediation.

To what extent does the relative strength of a rebel movement impact upon the likelihood of a pea... more To what extent does the relative strength of a rebel movement impact upon the likelihood of a peace settlement in civil conflict? This paper argues that relatively stronger rebels are more likely to overcome the strategic bargaining problems that can prevent the resolution of war. Relatively strong insurgents are better equipped to significantly challenge core government interests, and fundamentally threaten the survival a regime. The incumbent’s fear of future violence therefore makes mediation more likely to be undertaken in high-stakes conflicts between states and strong rebel groups. Relatively strong insurgencies are also those with the greatest leverage to negotiate enforcement mechanisms, and the best equipped to defend themselves in the event that the government reneges on an agreement. This reduces the scale of the commitment problem and increases the probability of relatively strong rebel groups agreeing to a settlement with an incumbent. This argument is tested using dyadic data that captures the relative position of insurgents in civil war from 1946 to 2004. This represents an important methodological shift within the mediation literature, which has in the past largely relied upon aggregate country-level data. The results suggest that relatively stronger insurgents are more likely to force the state to open a mediation process and eventually concede some form of settlement. This is further evidence of the need to capture the dyadic relations between actors with fine-grained disaggregated data.

Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars, Feb 24, 2014