AbstractSince 2014, Russia's Wagner Group has gained prominence, expanding its role from driving Russian foreign policy across many African and Middle Eastern countries into an integral part of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In this paper, we first draw on the one-sided violence (OSV) literature to show how organizational incentives explain Wagner's violence against civilians pre-November 2021. Despite the static context of organizational incentives, Wagner's OSV lethality increased dramatically after the initial invasion. While prior research on this topic assumes organizations to be unitary and rational, we use personnel composition as an additional explanatory factor to explain OSV. Situated within research on combat psychology and health sciences, we introduce pre-combat experience (PCE) as key to understanding how training contributes to the use of OSV. By clarifying the role of PCE on OSV, we provide novel theoretical logic and empirical evidence explaining how individual-level experience aggregates to unit-level violence.

AbstractPeacekeeping operations (PKOs) have consistently been shown to reduce violent conflict. However, more recent work has begun to disaggregate these impacts. How do the entrance and exit of peacekeepers affect rebel and government violence against civilians? We argue that PKOs have divergent impacts on rebel and government violence based on their ability to diminish operational and organizational capacity. This paper uses fine-grained geolocated data on PKO deployment across all of Africa from 2000 to 2017 to examine the impact of PKOs on rebel and government violence. By leveraging a difference-in-differences approach with 2.3 million observations, we account for unobserved confounders and more closely approximate the effect of PKOs on violence. We find that peacekeepers increase local state violence and displace it, while likely diminishing rebel capacity and rebel violence against civilians. Taken together, our results suggest that scholars and policymakers should carefully consider how and when PKOs can effectively protect civilians.

A chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Interpreting UN Peacekeeping, edited by Vanessa Newby and Chiara Ruffa (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2027).

A chapter in the Handbook on Gender and Development: Critical Engagements with Gender and Social Justice, edited by Rao, Gideon, Theuerkauf, and Philip (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2027).

Published online as an advance article in International Studies Perspectives.

Current draft and replication materials available below.

AbstractPrincipal-agent scholars rarely go past the second level on the delegation chain, especially for delegation from international organizations to private security contractors (PSCs). I argue that delegating authority a second time to PSCs operating outside the direct control of IOs like the UN harms UN authority derived from local actors while increasing state delegation costs. I build the concept of double delegation and assemble a descriptive database of PSC use in UN missions.

Available upon request.

Available upon request.