The NSA Department presents the latest Global Connections speaker, Dr. Aila M. Matanock, University of California, Berkeley, at noon on 1 August 2018. Settlements to civil conflict sometimes contain clauses enabling the combatant sides to participate as political parties in post-conflict elections. In her 2017 book Electing Peace, Dr. Matanock presents a theory to explain both the causes and the consequences of these provisions. She draws on new cross-national data on electoral participation provisions, case studies in Central America, and interviews with representatives of all sides of the conflicts. She shows that electoral participation provisions, nonexistent during the Cold War, are now in almost half of all peace agreements. Moreover, she demonstrates that these provisions are associated with an increase in the chance that peace will endure, potentially contributing to a global decline in civil conflict, a result that challenges prevailing pessimism about post-conflict elections. Dr. Matanock’s theory and evidence also suggest a broader conception of international intervention than currently exists. She identifies how these inclusive elections can enable external enforcement mechanisms and provide an alternative to military coercion by peacekeeping troops in many cases.