Publications

Under what conditions do rebels succeed in establishing functional institutions in state-dominated areas? Canonical theories of rebel governance and state formation insist that territorial control is a necessary precondition for the development of governing institutions. Yet despite growing recognition that this claim is empirically incorrect and theoretically limiting, we lack knowledge about the conditions under which rebels succeed in governing civilians in areas where the state dominates. We argue that low state governance responsiveness towards rebel constituencies enables insurgents to overcome the challenges associated with establishing institutions in state-dominated areas. Low state responsiveness increases popular demand for insurgent institutions, decreases the costs associated with governing, and enables insurgents to collude with civilians to hide their institutions. Case studies from Ireland, South Africa, and Algeria illustrate our propositions. Our findings deepen knowledge on how rebels govern and expand their territorial reach, and shed light on alternative trajectories of state formation.

Triangulation constitutes a key approach to analyzing data on political violence, which is sensitive and has many reporting biases. Nevertheless, the triangulation process whereby researchers move aggregate the underlying sources to produce event datasets on political violence remains under-theorized and under-documented. Building on recent calls to improve data transparency by collecting political violence data at the event report level and relying on systematic and replicable aggregation procedures, we discuss both benefits and challenges of this approach. We argue that aggregation procedures are more complicated than often assumed, and examine how both theoretical, empirical, and pragmatic considerations affect the choice of aggregation approach. Drawing on novel event report level data from the Modes and Agents of Election-Related Violence in Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya (MAVERICK) dataset, we further present descriptive evidence and two illustrative regression analyses that examine how sensitive descriptive and correlational inferences can be to aggregation choices.

Why do some election boycotts turn violent while others do not? Existing research primarily studies electoral violence in competitive elections. In consequence, we lack knowledge on the causes of violence when the opposition boycotts the election and competition is limited. This study addresses this gap by combining insights on clientelism, nonviolent campaigns, and electoral violence, and argues that political clientelism incentivizes opposition violence and undermines conditions for nonviolent action. A cross-national analysis of all election boycotts in 1945–2022 demonstrates that boycotts in more clientelist settings are more likely to experience opposition and citizen-perpetrated violence. Moreover, a process-tracing analysis based on interviews and original event data on electoral protest and violence during the opposition’s boycott of Côte d’Ivoire’s 2020 presidential election elucidates the causal mechanisms at play. The study contributes new knowledge on the drivers of electoral violence during uncompetitive elections and about the relationship between political clientelism and electoral violence.

Electoral violence is a serious threat to free and fair elections. Theoretical explanations of electoral violence increasingly move beyond the simplified incumbent-opposition dichotomy, and yet, there is a lack of nuanced actor data needed to fully test such explanations. This article introduces MAVERICK, an actor-centered geo-referenced event report dataset on electoral violence in Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya. MAVERICK covers the period 1995–2022, and includes two of Africa’s deadliest election crises: the Ivorian 2010–2011 post-election crisis and the Kenyan 2007–2008 post-election crisis. Given the dataset’s more granular information on actor characteristics, affiliations, and roles, as well as added indicators of violence severity, MAVERICK is ideal for testing nuanced theories on the causes, dynamics, and consequences of electoral violence. The article introduces the conceptual and operational definitions used, outlines the data structure and data collection approach, and provides a first analysis of the agents of electoral violence in the two cases. Moreover, we demonstrate the dataset’s added value by probing how security force involvement, and involvement by different security force branches, shapes electoral violence severity.

How does civilian protest shape civil war dynamics? Existing research shows that civilian protests against violence and war contribute to peace and restrain violence against civilians. There is less research on civilian protests that are at odds with peaceful conflict resolution, such as protests to salute armed actors, advocate against peace agreements, and oppose peacekeepers. This study develops a novel typology of wartime civilian protest that brings together protests to different ends, and theorizes the heterogeneous effects of protest on civil war dynamics. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence from new disaggregated and georeferenced event data from Côte d’Ivoire, the study demonstrates that—contingent on certain demands—protests were associated with violence against civilians, violence involving peacekeepers, and failed conflict resolution. These findings contribute new knowledge on how civilians shape the dynamics of civil war, and caution that nonviolent civilian action may not only be a force for de-escalation and peace.

Violent communal conflicts between identity-based groups are a severe threat to human security and development. While most communal conflicts take place in civil war-affected countries, communal conflict is not an inevitable byproduct of civil war. What explains communal peace in civil war? Existing research tends to overlook interlinkages between communal conflict and civil war, meaning that knowledge on how armed groups exacerbate or mitigate communal conflicts is limited. Combining insights from research on communal conflict and non-state armed groups, this study proposes that communal conflicts are less severe in areas controlled by legitimacy-seeking armed groups that seek acceptance for its political authority and right to rule from domestic and international audiences. Legitimacy-seeking armed groups have greater incentives to develop institutions and practices that prevent both communal conflict onset and escalation, which helps keep communal peace. The study examines the argument through a natural experiment in western Côte d’Ivoire, where more legitimacy-seeking and more legitimacy-indifferent armed groups came to control proximate and highly comparable communities because of an arbitrary ceasefire line. Using process-tracing to analyze unique interview and archival sources, the study demonstrates that communal conflicts were far deadlier in areas controlled by the more legitimacy-indifferent militias than in areas controlled by the more legitimacy-seeking Forces Nouvelles rebel group. These findings highlight that armed groups can be both agents of wartime disorder and order, and contribute new insights on communal peace in the shadow of civil war.

How, and under what conditions, does electoral violence influence voter turnout? Existing research often presumes that electoral violence demobilizes voters, but we lack knowledge of the conditions under which violence depresses turnout. This study takes a subnational approach to probe the moderating effect of local incumbent strength on the association between electoral violence and turnout. Based on existing work, I argue that electoral violence can reduce voter turnout by heightening threat perceptions among voters and eroding public trust in the electoral system, thereby raising the expected costs of voting and undermining the belief that one’s vote matters. Moreover, I propose that in elections contested across multiple local rather than a single national voting district, the negative effect of electoral violence on turnout should be greater in districts where the incumbent is stronger. This is because when the incumbent is stronger, voters have lesser strategic and purposive incentives to vote than voters in localities where the opposition is stronger. I test the argument by combining original subnational event data on electoral violence before Côte d’Ivoire’s 2021 legislative elections with electoral records. The results support the main hypothesis and indicate that electoral violence was associated with significantly lower voter turnout in voting districts where the incumbent was stronger, but not where the opposition was stronger. The study contributes new knowledge on the conditions under which electoral violence depresses voter turnout, and suggests that voters in opposition strongholds can be more resilient to electoral violence than often assumed.

Almost a decade after the 2011 post-electoral crisis, Côte d’Ivoire once again held elections marred by widespread violence. The third-term crisis revolved around President Alassane Ouattara’s controversial third-term bid and left at least 83 people dead and 633 people injured. This briefing draws on a new electoral violence dataset and field research to unpack patterns of violence during the crisis, and disentangles disruptive electoral violence related to the opposition’s campaign to thwart the election from incidental electoral violence related to the overall electoral tension. The findings show that incidental violence was far deadlier than disruptive violence, yet only tenuously related to the national political divide. This incidental violence was often driven by pre-existing local resource conflicts, revenge, rumours and disinformation, and elite manipulation. The briefing contributes new knowledge on the local drivers of electoral violence in Côte d’Ivoire, and cautions that viewing local communities only as victims of elite rivalries can make decision-makers overlook important risk factors.

How do urban environments shape the occurrence of wartime civilian protest? Wartime civilian protest in this chapter refers to instances of public, collective, and predominantly nonviolent action by which noncombatants make claims on a conflict party within the context of armed conflict. Building on a unique georeferenced database of protest events in rebel-held Côte d’Ivoire, as well as insights from eight months of field research and relevant secondary sources, this chapter interrogates the occurrence and dynamics of wartime civilian protest. Starting from the observation that civilian protest was predominantly an urban phenomenon, I argue that protest was a function of a broader process of competitive state-building between the government and the rebels. Competitive state-building in rebel-held cities in turn prompted civilian protest by generating both opportunities for the rebels to organize anti-government protests, and opportunities and incentives for civilians to challenge wartime governance through collective action. The chapter contributes new knowledge on how urban environments shape processes of competitive state-building in civil war, the urban dynamics of wartime civilian agency, and to our understanding of how armed insurrection in the bushes can trigger civilian protests in the street.

Under what conditions do states and insurgents cooperate in providing rebel governance? Scholars have explored why and how insurgents provide rebel governance. Less attention has been given the conditions that foster state-insurgent cooperation on governance in rebel-held areas. State-insurgent cooperation on rebel governance is puzzling because it can alienate hardliners, undermine legitimacy-seeking through governance, reveal sensitive information, and cause a loss of autonomy. We propose that the conflict parties are more likely to discount these costs when they have overlapping civilian constituencies that have high expectations for governance provision. Analysing state-insurgent cooperation on rebel governance in insurgent-controlled Côte d’Ivoire and Sri Lanka using original interview and archival data, we find support for the proposition that civilian expectations prompt state-insurgent cooperation, even when the parties appeal to separate constituencies. The study contributes to broaden our understanding of civil war dynamics and nuance existing theories of rebel governance, and concludes that civilians can play a critical role in shaping rebel rule.

Why do some city district experience more severe postwar violence than others? Existing research on postwar violence in urban areas proposes that strongholds are particularly violence prone. Nevertheless, existing research often overlooks the spatial character of postwar violence. We view postwar violence in cities as part of a struggle for political territorial control, where political actors seek to influence and control political dynamics within spatially delimited districts. Hence, while we also expect postwar violence to be more severe in opposition strongholds that threaten the postwar regime’s hold on power, we argue that violence will concentrate in territorial rather than electoral strongholds. We assess our argument in postwar Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and draw on unique georeferenced event data to examine patterns of violence across territorial and electoral opposition strongholds. The findings indicate a strong relationship between opposition strongholds and postwar violence, but only when strongholds are understood in spatial rather than political terms: opposition territorial control both subsumed and incentivized violence, whereas opposition electoral strength permitted nonviolent forms of contestation and violence prevention. The study highlights the close connection between space and postwar violence, and underscores the need for more spatial conceptualizations of strongholds in studies of political violence.

Violence after civil war is a challenge to sustainable peace. Many armed conflicts today are recurrences of previous wars and much of the literature on violence after war explains why armed groups return to the battlefield. But even if peace prevails, many other types of violence take place in postwar environments. This postwar violence is likewise subject to a growing multidisciplinary literature. Using citation network analysis, we show that research on war recurrence and postwar violence has developed in relative isolation from each other—although these phenomena are interrelated. This compartmentalization leads us to overlook important similarities and differences in the drivers of different forms of violence after war. We demonstrate this by reviewing the literature in both of these closely related fields. While war recurrence and postwar violence share a set of common risk factors, some factors can have opposite effects on the two outcomes. Because these insights only emerge when systematically comparing the two strands of literature, we propose a novel framework for the study of violence after wars that aims at overcoming the compartmentalization of research within these two fields. The framework serves both as a conceptual lens and an analytical tool to categorize and compare different forms of violence after war. We then outline how the framework aids scholars in pursuing an integrated research agenda, with concrete suggestions for research questions that should be studied to expand our understanding of violence after wars.

The ruling RHDP’s victory in legislative elections in March 2021 has tightened incumbent President Alassane Ouattara’s grip on political power in Côte d’Ivoire. Though Ouattara has taken a conciliatory stance towards the opposition since his re-election, his control of political institutions, low voter turnout, electoral violence and the president’s international status heighten the risk of further democratic backsliding in Côte d’Ivoire.

Why is rebel governance more responsive in some areas than in others? In recent years, scholars have started to examine the determinants of rebel governance. Less attention has been given to explaining variation in the responsiveness of rebel governance, that is, the degree to which rebels are soliciting and acting upon civilian preferences in their governance. This article seeks to address this gap by studying local variation in rebel responsiveness. I argue that rebel responsiveness is a function of whether local elites control clientelist networks that allow them to mobilize local citizens. Strong clientelist networks are characterized by local elite control over resources and embeddedness in local authority structures. In turn, such networks shape local elites’ capacity for mobilizing support for, or civil resistance against, the rebels, and hence their bargaining power in negotiations over rebel governance. Drawing on unique interview and archival data collected during eight months of fieldwork, as well as existing survey data, the study tests the argument through a systematic comparison of four areas held by the Forces Nouvelles in Côte d’Ivoire. The analysis indicates that the strength of local elites’ clientelist networks shapes rebel responsiveness. Moreover, it provides support for the theorized civil resistance mechanism, and shows that this mechanism is further enhanced by ethnopolitical ties between civilians and rebels. These findings speak to the burgeoning literature on rebel governance and to research on civil resistance. In addition, the results inform policy debates on how to protect civilians in civil war.

Close to one billion people live in conflict zones around the world, many of them in areas under rebel influence. Research on civil war shows that rebels often engage in governing localities under their control by creating institutions and practices intended to shape the social, political, and economic life of civilians. However, we lack knowledge about why rebel governance is more responsive to civilians in some areas than in others. This study addresses this research gap by developing and testing a novel theoretical framework for explaining local variation in rebel responsiveness. Rebel responsiveness refers to the degree to which the rebels are soliciting and acting upon civilian preferences in the way in which they govern. The empirical investigation focuses on rebel governance by the Forces Nouvelles in Côte d’Ivoire between 2002 and 2010. To assess and refine the theoretical framework, the study conducts in-depth case studies of four localities: Odienné, northern Man, southern Man, and Vavoua. While the four areas shared several characteristics and were all governed by the Forces Nouvelles, rebel governance was responsive in Odienné and northern Man, but unresponsive in southern Man and Vavoua. The case analyses build on original and extensive material collected through interviews and in Ivorian archives. The study also tests the argument through a complementary quantitative analysis of 162 rebel-held areas in Côte d’Ivoire. The main conclusion of the study is that rebel governance was more responsive in areas with strong local elites than in areas with weak local elites. Strong local elites have extensive control over access to resources and enjoy high levels of social authority, which enables them to mobilise local citizens to either cooperate with or resist the rebels. This combination of cooperation and civil resistance incentivises rebels to make their rule more responsive towards civilians. The study refines our conception of rebel governance, generates new knowledge on the causes of rebel responsiveness, and sheds new light on how local elites and citizens shape rebel rule. Taken together, the findings have important implications for the protection of civilians in civil war.

This study considers the concept of rebel governance responsiveness by the Forces Nouvelles (FN) in Côte d’Ivoire. Responsiveness refers to the degree to which a government’spolitical decisions correspond to its citizens’desires. The concept of responsiveness is vitalfor assessingregime types and constitutes an essentialmetric of democracy. However, the ideais rarely invoked in analyses of how rebel groups relate to civilian preferences in howthey govern citizens in rebel areas. The study makes three contributions. First, it develops a conceptualisation of rebel responsiveness across four domains:representation, security, taxation, and welfare. Second, it demonstrates the concept’s usefulness through acase study of two ethnic communities in Man, Côte d’Ivoire, using unique interview and archival data. The studyshows that while the FN governed both ethnic communities, rebel responsivenessdiffered in significantways. This finding highlights that focusing on the mereexistence, rather than the responsiveness, of rebel governance is insufficient for capturing the nature of civilian life under rebel rule. Third, the study showshow focusingon rebel governance’s responsivenesscan uncover new insights about civil war.

The unexpected death this summer of the front-runner in the upcoming elections and incumbent President Ouattara’s contested move to run for a third term in office have increased the risk of electoral violence in the ethnically divided Côte d’Ivoire. The threat of a return to armed conflict, as we saw after the 2010 elections, should not be excluded.

Many post-war states experience continuous low-intensity violence for years after the formal end of the conflict. Existing theories often focus on country-level explanations of post-war violence, such as the presence of spoilers or the nature of the peace agreement. Yet, post-war violence does not affect all communities equally; whereas some remain entrenched in violence, others escape the perpetuation of violent conflict. We argue that communities where wartime mobilization at the local level is based on the formation of alliances between armed groups and local elites are more likely to experience post-war violence, than communities where armed groups generate civilian support based on grassroots backing of the group’s political objectives. We explore this argument in a comparison of three communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, which have experienced different levels of post-war violence. The analysis supports the main argument and contributes to the research on the microdynamics of civil war by outlining the implications of certain strategies of wartime mobilization and how these may generate localized legacies.

Information communications technologies (ICTs) like laptops, smartphones and portable storage devices facilitate travel, communication and documentation for researchers who conduct fieldwork. But despite increasing awareness about the ethical complications associated with using ICTs among journalists and humanitarians, there are few reflections on digital security among researchers. This article seeks to raise awareness of this important question by outlining three sets of ethical challenges related to digital security that may arise during the course of field research. These ethical challenges relate to (i) informed consent and confidentiality, (ii) collecting, transferring and storing sensitive data, and (iii) maintaining the personal security and integrity of the researcher. To help academics reflect on and mitigate these risks, the article underscores the importance of digital risk assessments and develops ten basic guidelines for field research in the digital age.

How does climate change affect the risk and dynamics of violent conflict? Existing research shows that climate change can increase the risk of violent conflict and significantly alter the dynamics of existing conflicts. Less is known about the exact mechanisms through which climate change affects violent conflict. In this article, we address this lacuna in light of the first systematic review of both quantitative and qualitative scholarship. Through an analysis of forty-three peer-reviewed articles on climate-related environmental change and violent conflict in East Africa published 1989–2016, we evaluate to what extent the literature provides coherent explanations that identify relevant mechanisms, actors, and outcomes. In addition, we discuss the expected temporal and spatial distribution of violence and the confounding political factors implied in the literature. Against this background, we offer a number of suggestions for how future climate-conflict research can theorize and explore mechanisms. Future research should distinguish between explanations that focus on causes and dynamics of climate-related violent conflict, theoretically motivate when and where violence is most likely to occur, systematically examine the role of state policies and intervention, and explore the implications of each explanation at the microlevel.

There is growing consensus among researchers that climate change can increase the risk of violent conflict under certain circumstances. Researchers also agree on the need for a better understanding of why, how and when this might occur. These questions guided an analysis of research addressing the linkages between climate-related environmental change and violent conflict in East Africa. In this Policy Brief, we summarise the findings and outline the implications for policy.

This paper seeks to understand the relation between local and national conflict dynamics by looking at four arenas of conflict between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in South Africa in 1990. The analysis shows that what started off as local conflict often escalated when national actors were brought in, locating agency at both the centre and the periphery. These insights are in line with other research on the microdynamics of war, offer novel insights into civil war as a complex phenomenon, and have implications for how we design conflict resolution mechanisms.