CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C225
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

matanock@stanford.edu

Research Interests
Militant groups; conflict resolution; intervention in post-conflict states

Aila Matanock is a visiting scholar at CISAC, while she is also a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) at the University of California, San Diego. She will be joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley next summer as an assistant professor of political science. Her book project, based on her dissertation at Stanford, focuses on the role of electoral competition between militant groups and governments, especially as a component of negotiated settlements. In contrast to broadly pessimistic views of elections as a conflict resolution tool, her research finds that, when these inclusive elections are part of an agreement, the duration of peace between the signatories is longer. Specifically, international actors are able to engage in monitoring and sanctioning non-compliance with a peace agreement through the transparency that elections provide. The project draws on evidence from field interviews with former militant group, government, and civic leaders and on newly collected cross-national data.  

Her other projects focus on the role of international actors and armed non-state actors in governing weak and post-conflict states. She has designed and run several survey experiments in Colombia and Mexico that explore the levels of social support for armed non-state actors, as well as their strategies for gaining more support. Her research and teaching interests include conflict, especially terrorism and civil war; international intervention and assistance in post-conflict states; post-conflict peace-building and development; democratization; and, governance by and social support for militant groups and international actors. She is also interested in survey experiments and multi-method research design.