How can unarmed civilians defy armed insurgent or paramilitary groups that attempt to rule them? All rulers awaken opposition and rebel rulers are not the exception: civilians disagree with, disobey, and even openly confront armed combatants who rule their communities. Yet, academic research has largely ignored different forms of civilian resistance against armed groups, blinding our understanding of civilian agency, rebel behaviour, and civilian-combatant relations. In an effort to contribute to filling this gap, this paper investigates when, and why, different forms of resistance to rebel rule are more likely to emerge.
While support is often discussed as a key means for rebel survival and success, resistance is rarely theorised. This paper focuses on two forms of civilian resistance against rebel rule: partial resistance, which entails opposition to specific decisions or actions by the rebels; and full resistance, which entails opposition against rebel rule altogether. It will theorise when, and why, is each of these forms of resistance likely to emerge.
Key findings:
- Rebel or paramilitary governance limited to the spheres of public order and tax collection tends to trigger only partial resistance—that is, opposition to some aspects of rule, without demanding its removal. However, when rebel governance expands beyond public order and taxation, the response of local civilians depends on the quality of the local institutions in place prior to the arrival of the armed group to the area. Communities with high-quality institutions are more likely to engage in full resistance—that is, they oppose the group’s rule altogether, while communities with low-quality institutions are likely to engage in partial resistance only. Original evidence from the Colombian armed conflict illustrates the plausibility of this argument. The presence of resistance does not imply, of course, that it is always successful in securing autonomy or reducing victimization in the community. The internal organization of the armed group, competition with other organizations, and the strategic value of the territory are also likely to shape armed groups’ willingness to tolerate demands for autonomy.
- The phenomenon of civilian resistance against rebel or paramilitary rule brings to the fore several puzzles that have been neither tackled theoretically nor documented systematically. Yet, they warrant attention. To start with, the very existence of resistance (either partial or full) implies that the dominant approach in the academic literature that civilians are deprived of agency in areas where armed actors rule is flawed. Even though people are forced to cooperate with combatants and find it difficult and risky to defy them, civilians often find ways to influence, even if minimally, the new social order that emerges under the rule of these organizations. Understanding how civilians respond to the presence of armed actors can also illuminate rebel behaviour, as insurgent organizations are likely to take civilian responses into account when planning their strategies. Denying such agency not only obscures our understanding of what happens on the ground in war zones, but also reduces our capacity to identify and study the heterogeneous effects of war on communities and individuals.
- Second, the possibility of civilians uniting to defy a violent actor—and succeeding—is rarely taken into account when theorizing civil war violence, analysing counter-insurgent policies, or designing non-governmental wartime intervention to prevent violence or attend victimized communities. Yet, this phenomenon could have important implications on all three fronts.
- In terms of policy, strengthening local institutions and community mechanisms for working together could be a viable policy to protect communities. In fact, some have argued that resistance is a significant means to prevent violence and stop atrocities. Yet, others warn us that resistance can be futile heroism and often rather costly. It remains to be seen whether communities that engage in full resistance end up being more or less victimised, and how often they succeed in preserving their autonomy from warring sides. Both positive questions about the causes and consequences of resistance and normative questions about whether it should be promoted require further research.
- Moving beyond civil war, resistance to armed actors speaks to more general questions about risky collective action and organized political behaviour. It also sheds light on questions about the origins of political order and its stability. Civilian adaptation to a context of violence and rebel governance speaks directly to relations between ruler and ruled, as well as the creation and destruction of different forms of political order. Unarmed civilians committed to a collective effort to limit the intervention of an armed actor in their community can deeply influence how guerrillas and paramilitaries exert territorial control. These, often implicit, negotiations between ruled and ruler lie at the core of a central question about the conditions for political order.