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Do peacekeepers protect civilians in civil conflict? Securing civilian safety is a key objective of contemporary peacekeeping missions, yet whether these efforts actually make a difference on the ground is widely debated in large part because of intractable endogeneity concerns and selection bias. To overcome these issues, we use an instrumental variables design, leveraging exogenous variation in the rotation of African members of the United Nations Security Council and looking at its effects on African civil wars. We show that states that wield more power send more peacekeepers to their preferred locations, and that these peacekeepers in turn help to protect civilians. We thus demonstrate the robustness of many existing results to a plausible identification strategy and present a method that can also be applied to other diverse settings in international relations.

The "hearts and minds" model of combating rebellions holds that civilians are less likely to support violent opposition groups if the government provides public services and security. Building on this model, we argue that a political event that raises popular expectations of future public service and security provision increases support for the government and decreases sympathy for violent opposition groups. To test this argument, we leverage a unique research design opportunity that stems from the unforeseen announcement of the resignation of Iraq's divisive prime minister in August 2014 while an original survey was being administered across the country. We show that the leadership transition led Iraq's displeased Sunni Arab minority to shift support from the violent opposition to the government. In line with our argument, this realignment was due to rising optimism among Sunni Arabs that the new government would provide services and public goods-specifically security, electricity, and jobs.

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A large literature has emerged in political science that studies the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This article summarizes the lessons learned from this literature, both theoretical and practical. To put this emerging knowledge base into perspective, we review findings along two dimensions of conflict: factors influencing whether states or substate groups enter into conflict in the first place and variables affecting the intensity of fighting at particular times and places once war has started. We then discuss the external validity issues entailed in learning about contemporary wars and insurgencies from research focused on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars during the period of US involvement. We close by summarizing the uniquely rich qualitative and quantitative data on these wars (both publicly available and what likely exists but has not been released) and outline potential avenues for future research.

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In a world of societies ever more closely interrelating to each other, lawyers face the challenge of crossing the borders of their national legal system and looking beyond its fundamental source of identity – the constitution. Having this thought in mind, Harald Eberhard, Konrad Lachmayer and Gerhard Thallinger organized the First Vienna Workshop on International Constitutional Law held on 20 and 21 May 2005, bringing together members of the academic community, legal officers in International Organizations and law students. The Workshop offered eight lectures and fruitful discussions on the comparative analysis of constitutional law thus providing a new impetus to a field of law of steadily growing importance to which, so far, too little attention has been given.