(iPoster) From Coercion to Brokerage: Informal Access and Armed Group Restraint

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Protest, Repression, and Democratic Erosion & Peacebuilding, Conflict Resolution, and Post-Conflict Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Peacebuilding, Conflict Resolution, and Post-Conflict Politics

Abstract

Why do some armed groups excluded from formal post-conflict processes remain restrained after war while others return to violence? Existing explanations emphasize ceasefires, territorial control, or conflict orders, but these approaches overlook a critical dimension of post-war order: informal institutions through which armed organizations regulate access between external actors and civilian populations as brokers. These brokerage arrangements include humanitarian aid, political liaison mechanisms, and cross-border governance systems and are rarely captured in standard conflict datasets.

I argue that armed organizations are less likely to use violence when they become embedded in post-conflict systems of access that link external actors to civilian communities. These brokerage roles generate renewable political and economic benefits through repeat interaction, but only as long as armed groups maintain restraint. Violence risks shutting down aid delivery, closing borders, ending political dialogue, and provoking outside intervention. When political shocks disrupt these brokerage arrangements, the renewable material benefits collapse and the constraints on violence weaken.

I develop this argument through theory-building fieldwork on the post-conflict activity of the Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil in Guatemala and a shadow case of the Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, and test it using an original study of Myanmar’s Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) surrounding the 2021 military coup. I construct a novel EAO–month panel dataset combining conflict event data with an original archive of independent media and humanitarian reporting to measure pre-coup exposure to institutionalized brokerage arrangements and post-coup disruption. Using a difference-in-differences design, I examine whether EAOs embedded in these brokerage systems prior to the coup experienced different post-coup violence trajectories than organizations that lacked such positions.

Author

• Kylie Smith, University of Texas at Austin