UC Conference Showcases New International Relations Research
On April 1 at UC Los Angeles, faculty from eight of the nine UC campuses gathered for the ninth meeting of the UC Conference on International Cooperation (UCCIC).
UCCIC was founded in 2016, to create a space where international relations scholars can share their research-in-progress, with a special focus on connecting younger scholars with veterans. With previous gatherings at Merced (2025), Santa Barbara (2024), Davis (2023), Riverside (2020), Berkeley (2019), San Diego (2018), and Santa Barbara (2017), over time, UCCIC has cultivated a close community of colleagues who share, not only their latest research, but also the challenges and opportunities related to funding, tenure, and fieldwork. Since 2019, UCCIC has been organized in cooperation with the IGCC, which provides funding to make the conference possible.
“This is one of my absolute favorite conferences of the year,” says IGCC research director Aila Matanock, an associate professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.
After a light breakfast and plenty of coffee, Daniel Masterson, an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara, kicked off the day, exploring a difficult tradeoff at the heart of post-conflict recovery: helping some people economically can both strengthen and strain the social fabric around them. His paper “Economic Recovery and Social Cohesion: A Field Experiment with Capital Grants in Post-War Iraq,” describes results from a randomized experiment in Iraq in which some small business owners received substantial cash grants while others did not. The results show that recipients clearly benefited—they expanded businesses, earned more, and even became more trusting and less resentful overall. The picture was more complicated for who didn’t receive grants: while their own economic situation didn’t significantly improve or worsen, they developed lingering feelings of unfairness specifically toward those who did receive aid. In other words, the program reduced hardship and tension for beneficiaries but simultaneously introduced new inequalities that sparked resentment among their peers. The study highlights a central challenge for development policy: economic aid can promote recovery and stability, but when its benefits are unevenly distributed, it may quietly sow new social divisions—even as it lifts people out of poverty.
In the next presentation, Aila Matanock explored whether foreign aid can be used to enforce peace agreements. Her paper with UC Berkeley PhD Chelsea Johnson, “Strategically Suspending Aid in Post-Conflict Contexts,” looks at UK Members of Parliament and finds that they are more likely to support cutting aid when governments break peace agreements—especially in cases like ceasefire violations, election fraud, or power-sharing breaches. But their reasoning isn’t purely about keeping the peace. Members of Parliament are also motivated by protecting the UK’s reputation and being seen to use aid effectively. In short, aid cuts may be done to signal disapproval and potentially to change ex-combatant behavior or prevent conflict, but they’re driven at least as much by domestic politics as by peacekeeping strategy.
After a coffee break, UC Merced assistant professor Andrew Shaver presented on “Measures of Insurgent Violence,” which argues that simply counting violent attacks is an incomplete way to measure insurgent strength. Instead, focusing on how violence is carried out—when and where attacks happen—can reveal much more about an insurgency’s capabilities and strategy. The authors introduce three alternative measures: how predictable or random attacks are across space and time, how quickly violence moves across locations (its “velocity”), and how close attacks occur to key centers of state power. Together, these measures capture strategic choices insurgents make as their strength changes, demonstrating that identical attack counts can reflect very different levels of capacity.
Juan Tellez, an associate professor at UC Davis presented “Who Deserves Blame? Peer Cues and Moral Judgment in Transitional Justice.” After periods of repression or conflict, societies often harshly condemn civilians who collaborated, even though their actions and motives may have varied widely. This research argues that such broad, uniform blame is not just the result of personal moral judgment, but of moral conformity: people tend to align their views with what they think others believe, especially when situations are ambiguous and hard to judge. Focusing on informants—whose actions often involve mixed motives and unclear responsibility—the study shows through an experiment in Taiwan that exposure to others’ opinions significantly increases how blameworthy and punishable people perceive informants to be. The findings suggest that public judgments of guilt are socially shaped and can amplify stigma, which helps to explain why, after conflict, societies often pursue sweeping punishments that may deepen divisions and destabilize recovery.
Constantine Manda, an assistant professor at UC Irvine presented on “Repression and Partisan Polarization over Sovereignty Delegation.” Using evidence from Tanzania, the paper shows that when people experience nearby violence against civilians, they become more concerned about who controls force, which in turn polarizes opinions along partisan lines. Supporters of the ruling regime grow more resistant to transferring coercive authority beyond the state, while opposition supporters become more open to supranational institutions as a potential check on domestic power. Crucially, these effects are selective: repression reduces support for political and security integration but leaves attitudes toward economic cooperation and free movement largely unchanged. The findings suggest that public support for deeper political integration depends not just on economic benefits or shared identity, but on how citizens perceive and experience state power at home.
Following lunch, UC Los Angeles professor Barry O’Neill presented “A Concept of Trust Involving Higher-Order Beliefs.” He describes his approach as being closer to a philosopher’s than to an economist’s, since it depicts trustworthiness as a goal in itself rather than induced by an aversion to feeling guilty or a hope for future gain. Trust, in his view, involves higher-order beliefs and reflexivity: “I trust you” means that I believe that you’ll help me and that part of your motive will be that you believe that I trust you. His analysis suggests that mutual trust, which is important to conflict resolution, can be reinforced through social cues that seem irrelevant to the parties’ goals. “The phenomenon is similar to coordinating on a focal point in Schelling’s sense,” he said.
Jana Grittersova, an associate professor at UC Riverside, presented “Fragmented Voices: The City of London and Post-Brexit Negotiations” This paper examines why the European Union–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement excluded key financial services provisions despite intense lobbying from the City of London. Using a new dataset of lobbying meetings, Jana finds that the financial sector was undermined by “dual fragmentation”: deep divisions both between subsectors (those favoring close EU alignment versus regulatory independence) and across geography (UK- versus EU-based firms with competing interests). These splits prevented the industry from presenting a unified position, diluted its influence, and allowed EU-based actors to dominate the policy space. As a result, even sustained and high-level lobbying failed to secure favorable outcomes, highlighting how internal divisions can weaken collective influence in high-stakes international negotiations.
UC San Diego assistant professor Mateo Vasquez-Cortes presented “Removing Barriers to Integration: Experimental Evidence on Cash and Information Support for Asylum Seekers.” The study reports results from a large, randomized experiment with 2,587 asylum seekers in Costa Rica testing whether temporary unconditional cash transfers and targeted information about government services improve integration into public programs. Preliminary results suggest that information provision is promising: recipients acquire more knowledge about some social programs and gain some confidence navigating institutions. Cash transfers, however, show no clear self-reported economic improvements, and the authors are exploring administrative records to provide a more complete picture.
Ryan Brutger, an associate professor at UC Berkeley, presented “When Win-Win Isn’t Enough: Pareto, Fairness, and Relative Gains in Public Economic Preferences.” As Ryan notes in the paper, governments and international organizations frequently justify trade and other forms of cooperation by promising win-win outcomes that benefit both or all sides. The idea is that if everyone is better off, cooperation “should be easy.” Using large survey experiments, however, Ryan and his co-author (Richard Clark, Notre Dame) find that citizens actually do not support “win-win” economic outcomes when the gains across countries are unequal. Instead, across partisan lines, people prioritize fairness when the other country is an ally and they prioritize relative gains when the other country is an adversary. Publics in other words are motivated by more than material gain, and often prefer outcomes that sacrifice substantial growth to the United States.
A distinguished group of discussants provided feedback to the presenters, including UC Santa Barbara associate professor Bridget Coggins, Heidi Hardt of UC Irvine, UCLA’s Connor Huff, Michael Joseph at UCSD, Steven Liao at UC Riverside, Saira Mohamed of UC Berkeley, Maggie Peters at UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego associate professor Lauren Prather, Branislav Slantchev of UC San Diego, and Etel Solingen of UC Irvine.
Stay tuned for information about next year’s UCCCIC.