Peacekeeping mandate drawdown thresholds and local political violence in the Central African Republic: a spatial regression-discontinuity design

Peacekeeping drawdowns are typically triggered by quantitative benchmarks, yet the thresholds that govern exit are rarely evaluated for their local security consequences. Using a before-after-control-impact estimator under a declared variance structure (between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5, intraclass correlation = 0.64), power was estimated across 2000 replications per design cell for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The design requires 56 clusters to detect a 5 percentage-point effect at 80 per cent power; at 32 clusters, power at that effect size is materially lower, and the minimum detectable effect at 80 per cent power falls as cluster count rises. The discontinuity estimand at sector boundaries is identifiable in principle but fragile in practice, and that the credibility of any claim that premature exit intensifies local political violence depends less on the regression-discontinuity logic than on the number of sector boundaries available for comparison.