Pre-Analysis Plan: Local Partners for Local Problems -- When Does Foreign Security Assistance Undermine Public Support for Local Combatants?

How does foreign security assistance affect civilian support for local combatants in fragile states? Can external statebuilders build the capacity of local security providers without undermining the perceived legitimacy of these groups in the eyes of the civilian population? This projects investigates how foreign security assistance affects civilian attitudes toward local combatants. Specifically, I am interested in how the attributes of the foreign security assistance — including the identity of the external statebuilder and local client, as well as the specific means of security assistance — affect public perceptions of legitimacy for local combatants. Toward that end, I focus on building and operationalizing concepts for measuring combatant support with the goal of better understanding what it means for local security providers to be viewed as legitimate by the general public. The empirical cornerstone of this project is an original survey experiment in Baghdad, where I leverage a series of embedded experiments to investigate how variation in external assistance shapes Iraqi attitudes toward local combatants. This pre-analysis plan includes a provisional theory and hypotheses, resign design, and analysis plan for implementing the survey experiment in the field.