Exposure to Rebel Governance and Preferences for Transitional Justice

• In Event: Alliances and War

Abstract

Sustainable peacebuilding after civil conflict depends in large part on the willingness of populations to reconcile with former rebel collaborators. However, experience with rebel rule and exposure to violence can be expected to affect perceptions of what to do rebel collaborators after conflict. Through two experiments embedded in an original survey of 1,409 residents of Mosul, an Iraqi city that experienced more than three years of control and governance by the Islamic State (IS) until 2017, we explore how experience with rebel rule and associated violence conditions preferences for punishment, forgiveness, and reintegration of former rebel collaborators. We find that “leavers” (those who left relatively soon after IS’s arrival in June 2014) prefer harsher punishments for all types of hypothetical IS collaborators than “stayers” (residents of Mosul who remained in the city for the duration of IS’s rule). Given the extent to which “stayers” were victimized by IS, including being used as human shields during the battle for Mosul and mass-executed as they were trying to flee, they may be more forgiving due to their personal experience with IS’s ability to induce collaboration through coercion and fear. The findings of this paper have important implications for the design of transitional justice mechanisms because they suggest that those who have been exposed to the highest levels of violence by a rebel group are not necessarily more vengeful toward collaborators. Moreover, justice mechanisms based on the preferences of populations who did not endure rebel rule may be perceived as overly harsh, offering tinder for a rekindling of rebellious attitudes in conflict-affected areas.

Authors

• Mara Revkin, Yale University

• Kristen Kao, University of Gothenburg