Traditional approaches to international aid deal with post-conflict risks focusing on external safeguards for peacebuilding, leaving local social enhancers playing a subsidiary role. Trust has long been highlighted as a key factor that can positively affect sustainable peace efforts by reducing intergroup hostility. Surprisingly, most post-conflict studies deal with trust as a dependent variable. Using a cross-sectional multi-method field study in Colombia, we assess the impact of trust on prospective reconciliation in the midst of an ongoing peace process. We find that trust in ex-combatants and in government increases the likelihood of having positive attitudes towards future reconciliation and willingness to support not only the peace process but reconciliation activities after war. We offer evidence supporting the idea that rather than drawing exclusively on economic and military capabilities, investing in local governance infrastructures that promote prosocial behaviour and positive belief management in the pre-reconciliation face offers a complementary alternative to help societies exit civil wars while tackling barriers to peacebuilding efforts in the initial stages of a post-conflict.

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This article contributes to the literature on the impact of transitional justice measures using behavioral evidence from experiments. We argue that there is a distributional dilemma at the heart of transitional justice programs, given that the State must allocate goods and services both to victims and excombatants. Individual and social preferences over these processes matter, given that they are likely to scale up to undermine or increase public support for transitional justice programs. We offer evidence from the Colombian case, to show what we call the hidden face of justice effect, which occurs when in the transition from war to peace distributional dilemmas arise and generate a social sanction function that creates negative incentives that can affect the achievement of reintegration of ex-combatants and jeopardizes the maintenance of peace. In order to explore the microfoundations that underlie the differences between allocations to victims and ex-combatants, we use data from field experiments and find that ex-combatants expect lower transfers from public officers and citizens and indeed receive lower transfers, if compared to the victims and the control groups included in the study, despite the fact that third-party observers have the power to punish senders when making offers seen by the third-party as unfair.

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