This paper investigates the effect of the deployment of United Nations Blue Helmets on economic activity in South Sudan with a special focus on agricultural production Since UN troops are predicted to improve security, in particular, we expect a positive relationship between deployment of UN blue Helmets and cereal production. We test our hypothesis using an original dataset including all the 78 South Sudanese counties over the period 2009-2011. We control for the non-random assignment of UN troops through an Instrumental Variables approach. Our empirical results show that a 10% increase in the size of the troop allows the production of additional 600 tonnes.

Successful management of combatants through disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) remains one of the main challenges of post‐conflict peacebuilding. While DDR is meant to contribute to a secure post‐conflict environment conducive to economic and political development, the success of DDR efforts remains mixed. Unlike previous work focusing on procedural aspects or post‐conflict reconstruction and development, we shift the focus to understand microlevel conditions—economic, security, and ethnic concerns—that influence ex‐combatants' satisfaction with DDR. We argue that ex‐combatant satisfaction with DDR should increase as individual‐level economic conditions increase, as security situations improve, and as ethnic tensions decrease. We test our expectations using an original data set collected with field interviews and surveys from 122 ex‐combatants in South Sudan in 2011–2012. We find that participants are more satisfied when their income‐generating activity is based on DDR job training and when the UN has a large presence in their area. Concerns about political instability and an abundance of firearms make ex‐combatants less satisfied with DDR.

Civil wars are a greater source of violence than any other type of conflict, yet little is known about one of the key determinants of civil war peace settlement success: civilian support. We evaluate how a core component of nearly all peace settlements, leader endorsements, affects public support. We predict that individuals in conflict settings will view settlements endorsed by outgroup leaders as less trustworthy and that they will become less supportive. We conduct an endorsement experiment with nearly 1,000 respondents in South Sudan in 2016, taking advantage of a brief cessation in a devastating civil war. Public support for a tentative settlement drops precipitously when it is endorsed by an outgroup leader but does not increase when it is endorsed by an ingroup leader. We find suggestive evidence that effects are strongest for individuals with the greatest reason to fear outgroup leaders: those whose communities were targeted most violently by that outgroup.

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