Special Feature Article

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2022, Vol. 66(9) 1547–1561
Citizens in Peace Processes © The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

[Link]/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00220027221089691
Felix Haass1 , Caroline A. Hartzell2 , [Link]/home/jcr

and Martin Ottmann3 

Abstract
Citizen engagement in and support for peace processes have been deemed important
for sustainable peace after civil wars. Yet much of what we know about peace pro-
cesses in civil wars centers on the interests of elite actors. This special feature aims to
advance a research agenda focusing on citizens in peace processes to address this
mismatch. In the introduction to the special feature, we first present empirical evidence
situating citizens in relation to civil war peace processes. We then trace the current
state of the literature on the roles of citizens in peace processes. Following that, we
introduce a conceptual framework designed to improve scholarly analysis of the
political behavior of citizens in peace processes. We also locate the individual con-
tributions to the special feature within the framework in order to demonstrate its
utility and as a means of helping to identify directions for future research.

Keywords
civil wars, peace agreement, negotiation, implementation, legacies, citizens, peace
process, political behavior

Introduction
Ordinary citizens typically bear the brunt of the destruction and violence in civil wars.
Their engagement in and acceptance of peace processes increasingly has come to be
considered a crucial ingredient for sustainable peace. In 2003, for instance, the protest

1
Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
2
Political Science Department, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA, USA
3
School of Government, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Corresponding Author:
Martin Ottmann, School of Government, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK.
Email: [Link]@[Link]
1548 Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(9)

movement Women for Liberia Mass Action for Peace played an influential role in
bringing Liberia’s warring factions to the negotiation table to strike a peace deal that
ultimately ended the country’s 14-year civil war. And in Mindanao, in the southern
Philippines, the Moro and Indigenous peoples felt that previous peace processes (e.g.,
those that produced the 1976 Tripoli Agreement and the 1996 Jakarta Accord) had
failed to address historical injustices in the region. This perception helped to shape the
content of the Bangsamoro Basic Law, the product of a long-drawn peace negotiation
between the Government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
However, despite the important roles that citizens play in waging war and making
peace, much of what we know about peace processes in civil wars centers on the
interests of elite actors and the groups that they lead (Hartzell and Hoddie 2007; Mason
and Mitchell 2016; Walter 2009).
An emerging literature has begun to address this gap by investigating more closely
how citizens’ political behavior shapes—and is shaped by—peace processes.1 Some
scholars have pointed to the importance of local agency in peace processes, using
qualitative and interpretive methods to critique the predominant focus on institutions
and elites (Autesserre 2010; Mac Ginty 2014; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013). Others
have used statistical methods and advanced research designs to study the causes and
consequences of citizens’ behavior during and after peace processes (Ditlmann et al.,
2017). Although these studies have helped to highlight the importance of individual
political behavior in conflict contexts, the disparate nature of these works, in com-
bination with the absence of an integrative framework, has thus far inhibited the
emergence of a research agenda focused on citizens in peace processes. As a result, we
have only a limited understanding of how peace processes shape citizens’ political
behavior and the opportunities peace processes provide for citizen action. We also do
not know much yet about how that behavior may be shaped by the peace process and
the effects that these factors may have on the nature of the peace itself.
The objective of this special feature is to advance a new research agenda on citizens
in peace processes that helps to foster an integrative analysis of citizens’ perspectives of
and roles in peace processes. Our hope is that a research agenda focused on developing
a better theoretical understanding of these issues will provide insights into why and how
some citizens advance, while others resist, efforts to build peace. To that end, we
construct a conceptual framework that focuses on citizens in relation to two dimen-
sions: the first, a temporal dimension, centers on the points during a peace process in
which citizen involvement may take place (i.e., during negotiations of a war-ending
agreement; agreement implementation; and/or as “legacies” of the peace process that
manifest themselves in the post-conflict period). The second, a behavioral dimension,
examines citizens’ political behavior as an input into the peace process (i.e., an ex-
planatory variable) and as an output of the peace process (i.e., an outcome variable).
Haass et al. 1549

Figure 1. Active armed conflicts and peace agreements. Note: Data on conflicts are from the
Uppsala Conflict Data Program (Gleditsch et al. 2002; Pettersson and Öberg 2020). Data on
peace agreements are taken from the PA-X database (Bell and Badanjak 2019). The number of
peace agreements can exceed the number of conflicts since multiple peace agreements can be
signed each year. Thin lines represent exact annual counts, thick lines display a smoothed
trend.

Civil Wars, Peace Processes, and Citizens

Peace processes are a ubiquitous feature of civil wars (Howard and Stark 2018). As
such, they have consequences for the lives and deaths of persons living in the shadow of
these conflicts. Figure 1 shows that attempts to negotiate an end to intrastate conflicts
closely follow the number of armed conflicts active each year. Peace processes are
therefore not single, isolated events that may or may not end civil wars. Instead, they are
a core feature of internal armed conflicts and an important political process with
tangible effects. This can be seen in Figure 2, which displays trends in battle and
civilian fatalities before and after the first full or partial peace agreement has been
signed. The plot shows that levels of fatalities drop considerably once an agreement has
been reached.2 Importantly, it is not only battle deaths that decline after a peace
agreement has been signed, but civilian deaths as well.
Figure 3 suggests that the signatories to peace agreements recognize the importance
of peace processes for the broader population, with provisions regulating topics on
citizens, such as social groups or civil society, featuring almost as frequently as topics
that are typically thought of as being “elite-focused,” such as security sector reform and
power sharing.3 Many, if not most, rebel groups claim to fight on behalf of a broader
population. Consequently, it is not surprising that peace agreement architects pay at
least lip service to these groups when signing peace agreements and advancing peace
processes. What is remarkable, however, especially given the almost equal distribution
of elite vs. citizen topics, is that the academic study of peace processes has mostly
focused on country-, group-, and elite-level explanations for the occurrence, nature, and
outcomes of those processes.
1550 Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(9)

Figure 2. Peace agreements and conflict intensity. Note: Data on conflicts are from the Uppsala
Conflict Data Program (Gleditsch et al. 2002; Pettersson and Öberg 2020). Data on peace
agreements are taken from the PA-X database (Bell and Badanjak 2019). To create the plot, we
normalized each year in a conflict with respect to the conflict’s first full or partial peace
agreement. We then computed the average fatalities for each year over all conflicts. Thin lines
represent exact annual counts, thick lines display a smoothed trend.

Literature
A large literature has investigated the conditions for peace after civil war at the an-
alytical level of countries or dyads between rebel groups and governments. This
scholarship focuses on the design of political institutions, international involvement
and peacekeeping, and domestic context factors, such as ethnic diversity, colonial
history, or demography (Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug 2013; Gates et al. 2016;
Hartzell and Hoddie 2007). What has remained unexplored so far, however, is the
interplay between citizens’ political behavior and these conditions of peace. The
analysis of this interplay is one that would bridge the micro-/macro-gap in existing
research and thus help to inform a more holistic understanding of post-war politics.
Given this challenge, recent research on citizens in post-conflict settings has
provided a first set of innovative and unique insights into peace processes. Three
distinct strands of inquiry have emerged from this literature, each with its associated
strengths and limitations. First, a number of studies explicitly examine citizen attitudes
towards ongoing peace processes and the support citizens are willing to lend in order to
make peace settlements a reality (Fabbe, Hazlett, and Sınmazdemir 2019; Haas and
Khadka 2020; Tellez 2019b). Thus far, most of these studies focus only on the im-
mediate aftermath of fighting. As a result, there is a need to explore the medium- and
long-term dimension of peace processes to build better theories of citizens’ actions and
attitudes in peace processes (Matanock 2021).
Second, several studies have their roots in impact evaluations of conflict prevention
measures and peacebuilding interventions funded by international donors (Blattman,
Haass et al. 1551

Figure 3. Citizen- and elite-focused topics within peace agreements. Note: Data on peace
agreements are drawn from the PA-X database (Bell and Badanjak 2019). The Y-axis displays
the annual share of peace agreements that mention at least one of the respective topics.
“Security sector reform” refers to at least one provision on SSR for armed forces, police, or rebel
forces. “Power sharing” refers to at least one provision on political, territorial, economic, or
military power-sharing. “Social groups” refers to at least one provision on any of the groups
listed as special social groups, for example, ethnic groups, in the PA-X database, and includes
gender. “Civil society” refers to provisions that regulate civil society organizations and/or
traditional leaders.

Hartman, and Blair 2014; King and Samii 2014). However, as Ditlman et al. (2017)
point out, research in this strand often fails to link perceptions and attitudes at the micro-
level and actual peacebuilding behavior on the meso- and macro-levels (Balcells and
Justino 2014).
Finally, scholars explore the extent to which war experiences can shape behavior.
One strand of research finds that affected individuals increase their participation in
social organizations and display more cooperative behavior (Bellows and Miguel 2006;
Fearon, Humphreys, and Weinstein 2009). Others have highlighted the “dark” side of
conflict legacies: there is evidence that increased prosociality might be driven by
cooperative behavior towards a people’s own in-group (Bauer et al. 2016), such as
ethnic or religious groups. This is consistent with the finding that conflict exposure
hardens attitudes toward the rival group (Grossman, Manekin, and Miodownik 2015).
At the same time, there is evidence from Colombia that conflict experiences do not
automatically translate into acceptance/rejection of a peace agreement (Liendo and
Braithwaite 2018). Thus, the implications of conflict experiences for peace processes
are not yet fully understood.
1552 Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(9)

How Do Citizens Shape Peace Processes? And How Are They Affected by
Peace Processes?
We define “citizens in peace processes” as encompassing the political behavior of non-
combatants in contexts where two or more organized actors engage in efforts to end an
armed confrontation in which they have been involved. This definition is deliberately
broad, including everyone from villagers to refugees, bureaucrats, children, urban
elites, and even close relatives of combatants. We are aware that, in practice, the
boundaries between who is a combatant and who is not are fluid and thus may not be
clearly drawn.4 Nevertheless, we believe this concept of citizens in peace processes
provides a useful starting point for efforts to theorize about the roles such actors play in
efforts to end armed conflicts.
We use the term “political behavior” to refer to the perceptions and actions of
citizens in these contexts. More specifically, we look at “any form of (individual or
collective) involvement in the political process, or any activity which has political
consequences in relation to government and policy” and at “political ideologies, values,
and attitudes as the basis of participation and non-participation in the political sphere”
(Scott and Marshall 2015, 571ff).5 In the context of peace processes, this definition
includes how peace processes shape citizens’ political belief systems, trust in political
institutions, and/or attitudes towards other religious or ethnic groups, while citizens’
actions refer to a range of political behaviors. Often studied outside of conflict pro-
cesses, such political behavior ranges from activism/volunteering, participating in
protests, to electoral choice.
We propose a conceptual framework that examines citizens’ political behavior in
peace processes across two dimensions (see Figure 4):

· Citizens’ political behavior as input into the peace process (i.e., an explanatory
variable) and as output of the peace process (i.e., an outcome variable).
· The temporal order of a peace process. The temporal order rests on a continuum
ranging from negotiation during/after fighting to implementation to long-term
implications.6

We combine both dimensions into a coordinate system that identifies four cate-
gories: (1) impact of citizens’ behavior and/or attitudes on peace negotiations (and,
subsequently, implementation); (2) impact of citizens’ behavior and/or attitudes on
peace process legacies; (3) impact of negotiations on citizens’ behavior and/or attitudes;
and (4) impact of legacies on citizens’ behavior and/or attitudes. Even though these
categories are conceptually distinct, we conceptualize them as continuous.
This conceptual framework has several benefits. First, the framework works as a
useful heuristic device. It helps us to sort existing research as well as the contributions
to this special feature into categories that capture the ways in which citizens can shape
and are affected by peace processes. Second, the framework helps us to identify
existing theoretical approaches that can be brought to bear when analyzing works
Haass et al. 1553

Figure 4. Input/Output and Temporal Dimensions of Citizens in Peace Processes.

within a particular category, for example, theories from related subfields regarding how
public opinion impacts political outcome (input dimension) or how policies shape
public attitudes (output dimension) (Kertzer and Zeitzoff 2017). By combining both the
framework’s heuristic function as well as its ability to identify theoretical approaches
that could be brought to bear in explaining the respective categories, the framework is
useful for detecting research gaps, either theoretical and/or empirical. We use the
framework in this fashion in the final section of this introduction.

Impact of Negotiations on Citizens. In the early stages of a peace process, citizens’

identities and beliefs are likely to be shaped by wartime cleavages, elite signaling and
grievances. Research questions relevant to this part of the framework address the ways
in which the peace process itself affects citizens’ propensity to become politically
active, for example, through strikes or protests. Other questions focus, for instance, on
how certain elements within peace processes, such as ceasefires, mediation, or ne-
gotiations, affect popular support for the fighting factions and resulting peace
agreements (Fabbe et al., 2019; Matanock and Garbiras-Dı́az 2018; Tellez 2019a). Two
contributions to the special feature directly address such questions with respect to two
1554 Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(9)

crucial areas: the effect of agreement design on citizen support and the acceptance of
transitional justice policies.
Loizides et al.’s “Citizens and Peace Mediations in Divided Societies: Identifying
Zones of Agreement through a Conjoint Survey Experiment” focuses on the extent to
which citizens from opposing sides of a conflict share a similar understanding of
particular agreement provisions and the concessions needed to reach a settlement. The
theoretical argument claims that each side can be compensated for compromises if the
available options are bundled together in balanced packages. Loizides et al. demon-
strate that the specific institutional design matters less for support among both groups
than do other peace deal elements such as territorial settlement, security, and com-
pensation. This is highly relevant as it indicates that elements of a deal that are crucially
important to many of the negotiating parties (e.g., who gets a seat at the table, veto
power) may not be as relevant to citizens themselves.
Mironova and Whitt’s “Due Process and Accountability under Transitional Justice:
Evidence from Mosul, Iraq” addresses a long-running debate in the peacebuilding
literature regarding the dilemma between peace and justice (Elster 2004). Mironova and
Whitt offer an original contribution to this debate through an explicit focus on citizens’
attitudes towards post-conflict justice. Their study investigates whether the public
supports government efforts to pursue justice through the punitive prosecution of
insurgents. To examine their argument, Mironova and Whitt focus on the case of former
Islamic State (IS) fighters standing trial in courts for their role in the 2014–17 occu-
pation of Mosul, Iraq. The analysis rests on a survey of Mosul residents and former IS
affiliates in camps outside the city and experimental survey vignettes involving trials of
IS detainees. The central finding is that citizens on each side of the main conflict have
widely differing understandings of the rule of law under transitional justice. Mosul
residents generally are supportive of capital punishment for former IS fighters, but they
are less likely to see harsh judicial outcomes as just or fair when due process has been
violated. Individuals with IS affiliations, however, primarily focus on judicial out-
comes. They do not see capital punishment as just or fair—irrespective of due process
violations.

Impact of Citizens on Negotiations. In the early stages of a peace process, when conflict
actors bargain over ceasefires and the conditions for initiating negotiations, some
individuals become politically active and participate in protests in order to attempt to
pressure conflict parties to sign and implement (or refuse to sign and/or implement) a
peace treaty. Once negotiations have wound down and an agreement has been reached,
the implementation period of a peace agreement begins. Citizens’ views and opinions
can play a crucial role at this stage, influencing whether and how agreements are
translated into political practice (Daly 2019; Hadzic, Carlson, and Tavits 2020; Tellez
2019a, 2019b; Wayne et al. 2016).
Garcı́a-Sánchez, Matanock, and Garbiras-Dı́az’s “Do Citizens’ Preferences Matter?
Shaping Elite Attitudes towards Peace Agreements” focuses precisely on this rela-
tionship between citizens’ attitudes and political practice. While citizens’ support for
Haass et al. 1555

peace negotiations is often pivotal to getting the process off the ground (and to keeping
it going), political elites make the actual decisions regarding specific agreement
provisions. Garcı́a-Sánchez, Matanock, and Garbiras-Dı́az therefore consider the extent
to which citizens influence these decisions as well as whether political elites at the
negotiating table are responsive to the concerns and preferences of citizens. Focusing
on the peace negotiations in Colombia, they investigate what members of Congress
think their constituents want out of the peace process and whether legislators change
their positions on specific components of the peace agreement in response to revealed
constituent preferences. The empirical findings indicate that legislators systematically
underestimate citizen support for a key provision of the peace agreement, and that this
misconception is shaped by the policy platforms of their respective political parties.

Impact of Legacies on Citizens. Legacies of peace processes encompass the lasting

political effects that stem from the ways in which conflict parties conduct peace
processes, civilian agency in those processes, and the relations between elites and
citizens during peace processes. While we have learned much about how direct war
legacies shape post-war political behavior (Bauer et al. 2016), our knowledge about the
drivers and effects of legacies of peace processes for citizens is more limited. A core
finding of existing research is that past events shape contemporary politics through
specific transmission mechanisms, one of which is the degree to which people and their
ancestors were directly or indirectly affected by violence (Walden and Zhukov 2020).
However, we do not know yet how these transmission mechanisms can be triggered by
peace processes themselves.
In light of this, Dyrstad, Binningsbø, and Bakke’s “Wartime Experiences and
Popular Support for Peace Agreements: Comparative Evidence from Three Cases”
explores the interplay between wartime experiences of violence, grievances, and how
the combination of both affects individual attitudes towards agreement provisions.
Dyrstad, Binningsbø, and Bakke rely on a set of comparative public opinion surveys
from Guatemala, Nepal, and Northern Ireland. Their analysis reveals that the peace
agreements in each case enjoy strong popular support years after the signing of the
respective agreements—albeit with substantive variation across specific provisions.
Dyrstad, Binningsbø, and Bakke also find that experiences of wartime violence and the
grievances that fueled the civil war in the first place exert a significant effect on attitudes
towards the settlement decades after the conflicts concluded.
In contrast, Carey, González, and Gläßel’s “Divergent Perceptions of Peace in Post-
Conflict Societies: Insights from Sri Lanka” investigate the quality of the peace in a
case resolved not by a negotiated settlement but by a government military victory: Sri
Lanka. Their original survey enables them to explore how perceptions differ across the
clear divide between the Sinhalese victors and the Tamils they defeated. The empirical
findings show that the Sinhalese are more likely to favorably rate intergroup relations,
personal security, freedom of speech and civil liberties in the aftermath of the conflict.
Remarkably, however, the results indicate that the Sinhalese are also more concerned
about the prospects for future peace and political stability than are the Tamils. This
1556 Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(9)

negative outlook appears to be partly the product of a lack of Sinhalese support for the
heavy-handed treatment of the Tamil minority by the Sri Lankan government and a
sense of weariness regarding political activism.

Impact of Citizens on Legacies. Finally, we turn to the input citizens can have on the long-
term legacies of peace processes. One important topic in this regard is the question of
how the inclusion of certain groups during peace negotiations affects the quality of
post-conflict peace. For example, does the presence of women’s groups at the ne-
gotiation table and during the implementation period lead to improved human rights in
the long term? Does public support during war and negotiations subsequently shape
elite strategies for voter mobilization and, ultimately, electoral outcomes (Daly 2019)?
While none of the special feature contributions speak directly to this dimension of our
conceptual framework, some of the contributors’ findings and their policy implications
do so indirectly.
The main finding of Mironova and Whitt’s “Due Process and Accountability under
Transitional Justice: Evidence from Mosul, Iraq,” for example, is that citizens from
opposing groups have very different understandings of the rule of law under transitional
justice. While this divide in the perceptions of post-conflict justice does not appear to
bode well for building peace, Mironova and Whitt still see potential for citizens to
shape the legacies of peace processes. In this instance, the value attached to the rule of
law by ordinary Iraqi citizens could be used to promote restorative and reconciliatory
transitional justice measures, thus offering incentives for IS followers to
surrender arms.
Similarly, Dyrstad, Binningsbø, and Bakke’s “Wartime Experiences and Popular
Support for Peace Agreements: Comparative Evidence from Three Cases” presents a—
at first glance—rather sobering conclusion. As they note, wartime grievances are likely
to persist long after a civil war has been resolved through negotiated settlements.
However, as Dyrstad, Binningsbø, and Bakke emphasize, these settlements can only
begin to transform the underlying root causes of the conflicts when citizens actively
begin to exert influence on the legacies of civil war and peace processes.

Conclusion
The emerging literature on citizens in peace processes can best be described as one
united primarily by its diversity. In this special feature, we propose a conceptual
framework that can help scholars contextualize existing studies as well as provide a
means for thinking theoretically about when, how, and why citizens engage in peace
processes and the effects their political behavior may engender. Our framework dis-
tinguishes between a temporal dimension and an input/output dimension of a peace
process. The contributions to the special feature illustrate the diverse political behavior
of citizens within the resulting categories.
The framework—and the findings of the special feature contributions—highlight a
number of avenues for future research. To begin with, scholars need to further explore
Haass et al. 1557

what the concept of citizens’ political behavior in peace processes entails and what it
does not entail. While citizens’ actions and perceptions are typically closely linked
(Dalton and Klingemann 2007), this might not directly translate to (post-)conflict
contexts. For instance, persons who hold grievances against one ethnic group might not
automatically also participate in public protests against this ethnic group. The reason for
this disconnect is what Timur Kuran (1995) has described as “preference
falsification”—a phenomenon that captures a situation in which citizens’ public be-
havior does not reflect true individual conviction. These situations can arise when the
public display of behavior comes with costs, such as repression in an authoritarian
system, or violence against civilians in conflict settings. Since the costs for public
display of certain behaviors might persist in post-conflict settings, there is also a chance
for a disconnect between attitudes and behavior. Several of the studies in this Special
Feature section suggest that individual grievances can persist long after the formal end
of a conflict, giving us reason to believe that the possibility of a disconnect between
behavior and beliefs needs to be taken into account in the future study of citizens in
peace processes.
Another overarching theme is the need to integrate the different phases of peace
processes into a coherent theoretical perspective capturing the role of citizen in-
volvement during the negotiation phase of a peace process and its effects on peace
agreement implementation. Existing theoretical approaches that could advance this
endeavor include the notion of so-called “two-level games,” bargaining situations in
which the negotiating partners’ positions and behavior depend on the policy prefer-
ences of a larger group to which they are accountable (Brutger and Kertzer 2018;
Putnam 1988). The core advantage of such an approach is the insights it can provide
into the interactions between elites and their constituencies and how these ultimately
shape the peace process, thus contributing to an explanation of the microfoundations of
peace stabilization (Matanock 2021).
To explore the impact of peace negotiations/implementation on citizens, on the other
hand, scholars could turn to the subfield of public policy and, in particular, the policy
feedback loop. Of relevance here is the idea that, unless citizens perceive the policy
changes in question as relevant to their lives, large reforms (which peace agreements
certainly constitute) do not always lead to measurable changes in public opinion (Soss
and Schram 2007). Such a finding has implications for the ways in which a peace
agreement design and its implementation can shape citizens’ acceptance of the
agreement and/or its implementation process.
Turning to the long-term implications of peace processes, our conceptual framework
also offers a starting point for a more systematic exploration of the effects of more
inclusive peace processes on citizens’ support for peace and—crucially—how citizens
can shape these legacies themselves. One example of these key legacies is the extent to
which the type of conflict termination—negotiated agreement or military victory—
creates perceived “winners” or “losers” of a war (and its subsequent peace process) and
whether, and if so, how, these outcomes then affect intergroup attitudes (Gibson 2004).
1558 Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(9)

Regarding the question of citizen agency, on the other hand, the idea of deliberative
democracy holds potential. Deliberative democracy denotes democratic practices that
involve citizens in the political decision-making process beyond simply voting, such as
citizen summits or town-hall meetings (Michels and Binnema 2019). While typically
analyzed in the context of Western democracies, the purported effects of such policies,
especially improved legitimacy of decisions, might be even more relevant in post-
conflict societies. Empirical findings from a field related to conflict resolution,
democratic transition, suggests that early deliberative practices and organizational
features of non-violent campaigns lead to higher rates of democratic survival after
successful regime transitions (Bayer et al., 2016). An exciting avenue for future re-
search is whether early inclusion of citizens in peace processes leads to longer survival
of peace in the long term. Connecting these windows of opportunity for citizen en-
gagement theoretically and empirically should enable scholars to build a more
comprehensive understanding of post-war peacebuilding. Such an understanding is
crucial if researchers are to play a role in helping to empower those who need it most in
the context of violence and destruction: the citizens themselves. Our hope is that this
work constitutes one step in that direction.

Acknowledgments
We thank all the authors in the special feature section as well as two anonymous reviewers for
helpful and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this introduction.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iDs
Felix Haass  [Link]
Caroline A. Hartzell  [Link]
Martin Ottmann  [Link]

Notes
1. This development coincides with an increased interest in public opinion in the field of In-
ternational Relations more generally (Kertzer 2017; Kertzer and Zeitzoff 2017).
2. The displayed trends are conservative estimates given that the plot masks variation in cases
where battle violence drops completely to zero and cases where there are multiple agreements.
Haass et al. 1559

3. Our distinction between “citizen” and “elite” topics is meant to illustrate the target of a peace
agreement provision. Of course, as we demonstrate in the articles collected here, citizens can
and do hold strong opinions regarding all of these topics.
4. The potential also exists for at least some individuals to be “citizens by day, and rebels by
night.” We thank Kristin Bakke for making this point.
5. For the purpose of our conceptual framework, this close link between attitudes and behavior is
a reasonable working assumption. However, we discuss the implications of disentangling the
beliefs-behavior nexus for future research in the conclusion.
6. It is important to note that these stages are not necessarily discrete in nature. Different stages
may take place simultaneously, for example, when a government is in the process of ne-
gotiating with one rebel group but has a peace agreement in place with another.

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