🔍 What Was Studied
This study asks how international intervention affects the rule of law after civil war in Liberia. Rule of law is defined to require both that state authorities obey legal limits and that citizens rely on state laws and institutions to resolve disputes.
🧾 How This Was Measured
- An original household survey and a list experiment conducted in Liberia captured citizens’ dispute-resolution choices and sensitive attitudes.
- Multiple identification strategies were used to support causal claims, including an instrumental-variables approach that exploits plausibly exogenous variation in the distribution of UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) personnel created by the killing of seven peacekeepers in neighboring Côte d'Ivoire.
- Effects were tracked over time and remain detectable two years after initial exposure, even in communities that report no subsequent contact with peacekeepers.
📌 Key Findings
- Exposure to UNMIL increased citizens’ reliance on state (vs. nonstate) authorities to resolve the most serious incidents of crime and violence.
- Nonstate authorities in exposed areas shifted toward legal mechanisms of dispute resolution and away from illegal means.
- These changes are robust across identification methods and persist at least two years after exposure.
- Short-term perceptions of state corruption and bias were not improved by UNMIL exposure and may have worsened temporarily; these negative perceptions dissipated over time.
💡 Why It Matters
The findings reveal a complex but overall beneficial impact of peacekeeping on postwar rule of law: international intervention can move citizens and local actors toward state-based, legal dispute resolution even when it does not immediately improve—and may briefly worsen—public views of state integrity. This suggests policymakers should weigh short-term reputational costs against longer-term institutional gains when designing postconflict interventions.
