Subnational Nonstate Actor Governance

• In Event: Networked Peace? Network Approaches to Peace and Conflict

Abstract

Under what conditions do rebels control territory, and provide governance, during conflict? How do rebel governance systems vary? How does rebel governance shape conflict violence and state development? The “Subnational Nonstate Actor Governance” (SNAG) project advances this research agenda by mapping belligerent actors’ networks within conflict zones to generate spatially and temporally disaggregated data on rebel territorial control and governance, comparable across countries and conflicts. Existing approaches to measuring territorial control focus on (primarily violent) conflict events, which represent areas of contested rather than complete control and indicate changes in control without tracking where it remains stable. SNAG addresses these issues by developing a measurement strategy that emphasizes both static and dynamic conditions of territorial control and governance at the local level in conflict zones, and leverages the political and economic networks linking areas to one another. We employ text analysis methods on a corpus of news and other reporting to extract mentions of rebel presence and control, along with location and timing, which we use alongside events data in a measurement model to estimate the areas of rebel control and forms of governance. This article introduces the measurement strategy and validates these estimates against “ground truth” data on rebel control in two cases: the Syrian Civil War and post-coup Myanmar.

Authors

• Michael A. Rubin, University of Connecticut

• Andrew Halterman, Michigan State University

• Nina McMurry, Vanderbilt University

• Benjamin J Radford, University of North Carolina at Charlotte