Who's to Blame? Postconflict Violence and Public Attitudes towards Peace

• In Event: New Horizons of Violence, Peace and Instability Research

Abstract

A longstanding conventional wisdom in the peacebuilding literature holds that violence during and after a peace process undermines public support for peace. Yet the empirical record is ambiguous, and in a few high-profile cases public support for peace surged despite---or even in response to---incidents of violence. I argue that the effect of violence on attitudes towards peace may be moderated or exacerbated by political messaging about who or what is to blame. I test this argument in Colombia, a country that has seen persistent postconflict violence after a 2016 peace agreement, and where rival political camps offer competing messages that blame the government's implementation failures on one side, or noncompliance by rebel commanders on the other. I fielded a survey experiment with 1466 respondents in conflict and non-conflict zones, pairing recent news about postconflict violence with information supporting these competing political messages. I find that messaging that emphasized rebel culpability reduced respondents' support for future peace negotiations, but I do not find strong evidence that messages emphasizing poor government implementation had a countervailing effect. In a probe of the mechanisms, I find suggestive evidence that while the treatment emphasizing rebel culpability increased perceptions that rebels alone were to blame, citizens inferred from the treatment emphasizing government implementation failures that both parties were to blame, limiting the moderating effect of this message. These results suggest that political messaging during episodes of postconflict violence can influence what citizens learn from these episodes about the viability of peace processes, but that there may be an asymmetry in citizens' propensity to assign blame that advantages political opponents of peace.

Author

• Frank Wyer, Naval Postgraduate School