Organizing Violence With and Without Pre-War Organizations

• In Event: Rebel Group Organization and Formation

Abstract

How do peacetime organizational endowments in a community shape the likelihood, form, and initial intensity of organized political violence there? Several foundational and cutting-edge conflict studies stress the importance of pre-war organizational foundations in shaping subsequent political violence (e.g. Weinstein 2007, Zukerman-Daly 2014, Finkel 2015, Parkinson and Zaks 2018). However, these studies rely largely on evidence from middle income or wealthy countries. I argue that lower income countries have, on average, lower levels of formal, oppositional organizational life in rural peripheries and lower barriers to entry for new rebel groups than wealthier countries. As a result, the causes and character of organized, anti-state violence is different in lower income contexts: Rebel group formation there should be easier and thus more common, draw less frequently from pre-war formal organizations, draw from less politicized populations, and be lower intensity (less violent) at the outset. This paper finds support for these arguments in Sub-Saharan Africa using data from the Social Conflict Analysis Database (Salehyan et al 2012), the Foundations of Rebel Group Emergence (Braithwaite and Cunningham 2019), and a new dataset the author built on rebel group formation in Africa that overcomes many of the selection problems of standard conflict datasets. These arguments can help explain several divergent, micro-level findings about conflict onset from different contexts. It also shows that prior theories of civil conflict onset have been disproportionately influenced by conflict processes in higher income states.

Author

• Janet I. Lewis, George Washington University