Aiding and Abetting: The Role of Non-Combatants in Conflict Zones

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel explores the way that non-combatants shape and are shaped by conflict. The papers focus on two types of non-combatants: humanitarian aid workers and ordinary civilians. Campbell and Spilker examine whether experts working for international aid organizations perceive aid to be effective at buying political influence in post-conflict states. Using an original survey experiment administered to experts working for these organizations, they find that more experienced workers perceive their political influence to be limited, undercutting what many scholars and practitioners believe to be a central role of aid. Parkinson, De Koeijer, and Smith provide further treatment of the impact of conflict on humanitarian aid workers, highlighting conditions that lead to widespread sexual violence within these communities. Drawing from extensive interviews in Iraq and Uganda, along with text analysis of aid workers’ memoirs, the authors argue that certain conditions such as the intensity of local conflict shape an environment that normalizes sexual violence. Wright, Shapiro, and Condra shift the focus to the perceptions of ordinary civilians affected by conflict, using a 3-wave survey of civilians in Afghanistan to test how public goods provided by conflict actors shape civilian perceptions of violence committed by these actors. Finally, Haim, Nanes, and Ravanilla test the effects of an SMS hotline experimentally rolled out in a conflict-affected area of the Philippines. They find that this method of reducing search costs resulted in increased civilian crime-reporting but did not translate to higher satisfaction with security personnel or improved public safety.

Together, these papers examine the important role that non-violent participants play in violent conflict. All four papers build on recent literature which identifies the critical impact of non-combatants on conflict outcomes by bringing new micro-level evidence from a wide range of contexts. The papers also collectively draw on a distinctively diverse body of evidence when examining the role of non-combatants, including surveys of hard-to-reach populations, field experiments, in-depth interviews and text analysis. Finally, a collective focus on secondary but longer-term outcomes ties these papers together. Rather than limiting their exploration to determinants of who wins and who loses the war, they acknowledge the far-reaching impacts of conflict on sexual violence, development aid, and ordinary crime.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• Agents of Aid: Who Believes Aid Influences Post-conflict States and Why? - Susanna Campbell, American University; Gabriele S. Spilker, University of Konstanz

• Sexual Violence Among Humanitarian Aid Workers - Sarah E. Parkinson, Johns Hopkins University; Valerie de Koeijer, Johns Hopkins University; Sofia Inez Smith, Nothing

• Fire Alarms for Police Patrols: Evidence on an SMS Tip Line for Crime Reporting - Dotan A Haim, Florida State University; Matthew Nanes, Saint Louis University; Nico Ravanilla, University of California San Diego

• Support for Counterinsurgencies: Experimental Evidence from a Survey in Iraq - Saurabh Pant, University of Essex; Christoph Mikulaschek, Harvard University

Chair

• Jessica Stanton Temple University

Discussant

• Jane Esberg Princeton University