Essays on Civilian Protection: Risk and Safety During Peace Negotiations
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Wood, Elisabeth
Abstract
This dissertation explores three facets of civilian protection. I illuminate the promise and limits of conflict data about the civilian dead that comes from media and human rights reports. I develop and test a theory that predicts the conditions under which civilians perceive improvements and deteriorations in daily safety during elite peace negotiations – perceptions that may or may not reflect actual changes in safety in the midst of political turmoil. And I address how researchers can navigate risk and understand civilian harm to conduct rigorous research in crisis settings. The first essay, ‘The Problem of the Missing Dead’, examines what scholars can learn about civilian killings from published reports in situations of non-random missingness. It offers a unique view of the challenges of generating relevant data during the South Sudanese civil war. Drawing on 40 hours of interviews with 32 human rights advocates, humanitarian workers, and journalists who produce the evidence behind two prominent conflict datasets, the essay illustrates how nonrandom missingness leads to biases of inconsistent magnitude and direction. The essay finds that civilian fatality data drawn from media and public reports (report-based data) for contexts like South Sudan suffer from a self-fulfilling narrative bias, where journalists select stories and human rights investigators target incidents that conform to international views of what a conflict is about. This is compounded by the way agencies allocate resources to monitor specific locations and types of violence to fit strategic priorities. These biases have two implications: first, in the most volatile conflicts, reasonably-accurate point estimates about violence using report-based data may be impossible, and most claims of precision may be false; secondly, body counts reveal little if divorced from circumstance. The essay presents a challenge to political methodologists by asking whether social scientists can build better cross-national fatality measures given the biases inherent in the data-generation process. The second essay, ‘Making Peace Safe for Civilians’, explains the conditions under which elite peace processes manufacture political moments which stabilize the lives of some, while making others less safe. The essay focuses on these dynamics in patronage wars – environments characterised by extreme state weakness, where power holders trade in patronage, and multiple armed groups wage war with symmetric military capacities. I document how civilians in patronage wars experience different patterns of insecurity during milestone negotiation moments as elite pacts shift. I describe how national elites form horizontal alliances during peace negotiations while managing vertical alliances with subnational elites. These vertical alliances take the form of patronage, autonomy, domination and neglect. When peace negotiations create horizontal alliances that strengthen vertical patronage pacts, civilians feel safer. Counterintuitively, when horizontal alliances strengthen domination arrangements – often a condition where civilian killings fall – people perceive that their security fast deteriorates. Thus, I show not only that elite alliances during negotiations matter for local conflict but also how they matter. I built this theory inductively from participant observation, interviews and focus groups conducted in South Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia in 2018 and 2020 with 74 regional experts, peace mediators, human rights professionals, and South Sudanese elites and civilians. The second part of the essay tests the core hypotheses of the theory. I use evidence from a three-wave survey, implemented from 2021-2022 with 8,843 South Sudanese from towns, rural areas and displacement camps across 11 locations. The essay concludes with findings about how mediators and humanitarian officials can predict the risks civilians face when elites make deals during peace talks. The dissertation closes with the essay ‘Surveys in Crisis’. In the spirit of the first essay, I analyse the methodological choices and ground-level challenges my research team navigated to implement the survey underpinning ‘Making Peace Safe for Civilians.’ The survey captured the voices of thousands of South Sudanese during an active armed conflict, global pandemic and historic floods. The project used satellite imagery and remote sensing to sample populations in the absence of demographic data. Enumerators took motorboats across flooded marshes to reach randomly-drawn map coordinates. They used smartphone technology specially designed for humanitarian settings. They consulted chiefs to understand the structure of settlements. And my research team went to extraordinary lengths to navigate political obstructions to free movement. The resulting data have hot spots of insight and gaps that obscure some populations. Although social science is flush with survey research, the realities of how survey methods fare on the ground – particularly during crisis – rarely reach the page. This creates uncertainty about the rigor of some research in crisis settings, raising questions about what counts as science. By revealing the process of producing these data, I highlight methodological dangers while showcasing how scholars can tailor recent innovations in survey research to crisis settings.
Recommended Citation
Dawkins, Sophia, "Essays on Civilian Protection: Risk and Safety During Peace Negotiations" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 883.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/883
