Community-based armed group demobilization and local peace committee durability in Ituri, Democratic Republic of Congo: a difference-in-differences analysis of political violence recurrence

Local peace committees are frequently credited with sustaining demobilization in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, but the evidence base rests on before-after comparisons that cannot separate committee effects from concurrent stabilization. the present analysis characterizes the operating characteristics of a before-after-control-impact (BACI) design for evaluating whether community-based armed group demobilization reduces political violence recurrence in Ituri. No observational data are used or claimed. Under a declared variance structure with between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0, residual standard deviation of 4.5 and an intraclass correlation of 0.64, power was estimated across 2000 replications per design cell for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effects of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The design requires 56 clusters to detect a 5 percentage point reduction at 80 per cent power, a requirement that exceeds the number of peace committees typically available in a single Ituri territory. The analysis specifies the effect sizes and cluster counts at which BACI estimates become unstable, and it argues that the credibility of demobilization research depends less on additional case studies than on matching estimator to the clustered, serially dependent structure of local violence.