How Do Rebels Respond to Civilian Self-Protection Strategies in War Zones?

• In Event: Rebels and Civilians

Abstract

How do armed groups respond to campaigns of civilian resistance in conflict-driven zones? Under what conditions do they use repression to deter civilians from escalating or even organizing dissent? While the study of the emergence of different forms of civilian noncooperation in civil wars has been prominent in the last decade, the trajectory and decline of these campaigns are still understudied phenomena and only a few scholars of nonviolent mobilizations and grassroots self-defense groups have investigated the conditions under which each resistance strategy is effective against armed organizations. To date, the literature on civilian agency in civil wars still lacks a unified framework to assess the effectiveness of these types of mobilizations. This article aims to fill this gap and builds two signaling games of two-sided asymmetric information to explore the strategic interaction between dissident civilians and rebel groups in war zones. I use this theory to explain the conditions under which protests, violent self-protection, and nonviolent protection of territories (i.e., ‘sanctuaries’) are more likely to either compel rebels to confer concessions to civilians or to foster repression and the deterioration of security conditions in the territory. I examine these models’ implications with statistical matching based on time-series cross-sectional data on resistance campaigns and rebels’ violence in the Colombian civil war (1985-2005).

Author

• Pablo Alberto Ortega Poveda, College of the Holy Cross