Peer-Reviewed Publications
Contestation, Governance, and the Production of Violence Against Civilians: Coercive Political Order in Rural Colombia
(with Andrés Aponte and Andres Uribe, published online at the Journal of Conflict Resolution)
During civil war, which configurations of territorial control exhibit more or less violence against civilians? This is a deceptively tricky descriptive question, because armed group territorial control is so hard to measure. Most theories assume that territorial competition increases violence against civilians, while full territorial control decreases violence. We challenge this assumption through three empirical strategies with data from Colombia. First, we measure territorial control through qualitative codings based on interviews with civilians and former combatants and secondary sources. These codings are a major improvement on violence-based measures of control because they can differentiate between controlled areas with little violence and areas where armed groups are not present, and do not rely on theoretical inferences about what violence patterns should indicate particular arrangements of territorial control. Second, we use fine-grained violence event data from CINEP’s Noche y Niebla dataset that indicates the location, the perpetrator, the victim, and the type of violence that occurred. Crucially, these data offer information both on violence between armed groups and violence against civilians. Third, we use a combination of hand coding and machine learning to stratify the event data between urban and rural violence. We do this because urban areas in Colombia almost always have at least nominal state presence, whereas rural areas have a wider variety of territorial control dynamics. We find that the link between territorial competition and violence against civilians is far from straight-forward, and that armed groups commit significant “governing violence” in areas they control. Local histories of civilian organization, civilian-armed group relations, and repertoires of violence specific to certain armed groups are necessary to explain this variation, which territorial competition alone cannot. This study has two major theoretical implications. First, while territorial control is difficult to measure, future studies should refrain from assuming that control can be coded from violence data alone. Second, just as states regulate violence in their territory, armed groups commit violence against civilians not only due to competition with adversaries, but to create local political orders that accord with the groups’ visions of their desired societies.
Sowing the Seeds: Why do some armed groups socialise civilians more than others during civil war?
Published online in Civil Wars (2021)
What explains variation in the intensity with which armed groups seek to socialise civilians into their ideology? This paper seeks to expand the literature on rebel governance and ideology in war to consider the ideational interaction between armed groups and civilians. A paired comparison examines the Naxalite Rebellion in India (1967-72) and the Shining Path Insurgency in Peru (1980-1992), which exhibited puzzling variation in socialisation intensity despite holding similar ideologies. I argue this variation can be explained by differences in combatant socialisation, how groups value reading- and writing-based education, and whether groups understand civilian participation as crucial for achieving victory.
Working Papers (drafts available upon request)
"They Opened Our Eyes": Armed groups' influence on civilian political beliefs
What are the effects of armed group governance on civilian political beliefs? How does long-term interaction with armed groups that challenge the prevailing political order change the ways that civilians understand the political world? Answering these questions is particularly pressing to understand the long-term impacts of armed groups that do not succeed in seizing power. This paper draws on ethnographic evidence from three and a half months of on-site fieldwork in a municipality in Antioquia, Colombia that experienced decades of presence by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and interviews with FARC ex-combatants. Methodologically, I use interviews and participant observation to gather information about FARC socialization, governance practices, and civilians’ political beliefs. I then use oral histories to identify change in beliefs over time.
I argue that participatory FARC governance, even absent highly ideological socialization of civilians, produced political beliefs in line with the group’s ideology, compared to areas of non-participatory FARC governance and non-FARC presence. The experience of participatory governance allows civilians to see themselves as political actors and identify with the armed actor's vision for society. I find that pre-existing differences between areas within the municipality, local political economy, and victimization all cannot explain these findings. Further, I argue there is only a weak connection between civilians’ political beliefs and opinions about armed groups, suggesting that the formation of political beliefs is not simply a product of self-preservation calculations. My findings stress that even for armed groups unable to capture the state, under certain conditions they may induce long-term ideational change in civilians that alter political beliefs and expectations of government.
The Political Pedagogy of Governance: FARC territorial control and civilian socialization
For regular citizens, the everyday interactions with the state, like paying taxes and receiving services create expectations both about what states should do and how they should do it. These expectations are likely to be sticky, and inform beliefs about the functioning of politics under future administrations or regimes. But when people are ruled by non-state armed groups with ideologies opposed to the state, what beliefs about politics do civilians adopt? A growing literature examines the legacies of rebel governance on democratization, party performance, and political participation, but how the actual content of political ideas change after rebel governance ends is an important unanswered question.
To address these issues, this paper draws on observational quantitative evidence from Colombia. To measure the independent variable, rebel governance, I use an original dataset of armed group territorial control between 2000-2016, created by myself and coauthors. The dataset prioritizes the accuracy of codings and indicates both which armed actors were present in each municipality-year and how they related to one another. To measure the dependent variable, I use the MAPS dataset, which representatively surveyed more than 12,000 residents of Colombia’s PDET’s, which are the areas that were most heavily impacted by the armed conflict. While the results of the models are mixed, the data limitations are likely to understate the true effect of FARC socialization, meaning the results tentatively show that in municipalities in which the FARC governed, civilians are more likely to hold political beliefs close to the group’s Marxist ideology. These effects are more pronounced in areas where the FARC had stable territorial control, and through original qualitative evidence, I demonstrate that this was not due to selection effects. My findings stress that even armed groups that fail to capture the state may have long-term impacts on the political beliefs of those they ruled.
Tamil Film Culture and Political Attitudes: Descriptive and Causal Analysis
(with Deepika Padmanabhan)
K. Kamaraj, a politician in the Indian National Congress (INC) and former Chief Minister of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu once famously commented, ‘‘How can there be government by actors?’’ Not long after, in 1969, his party was defeated by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), making way for a Chief Minister who was also a film screenwriter. This set into motion the long relationship between film and politics in Tamil Nadu. Thereafter, various Tamil actors turned to politics with two actor-politicians collectively holding nine terms as Chief Minister and others becoming successful as opposition leaders and members of parliament.
Political messages in Tamil films serve two purposes: bolstering the popularity of aspiring actor-politicians and convincing the population of a specific Dravidian ideology. For actors who become politicians, film and non-news media function as heuristic devices for voters to discern their ideological and political positions. Beyond pure personalist politics, Tamil films have often served to popularize the basic tenets of Dravidian ideology, anti-elitism, anti-Brahminism, economic redistribution, and regional nationalism. In this working paper, we build a theory on the pathways through which film impacts political beliefs. We argue there are three potential pathways through which this occurs. First, in the direct pathway, viewers adopt the political content of film in their beliefs without mediation. Second, in the indirect pathway, it is the culture of film fandom and non-film media about film personalities that influences viewers' beliefs. Finally, in the political cues pathway, film does not straight-forwardly change beliefs, but offers political information about the conflicts and positions of aspiring actor-politicians in Tamil politics.
Empirically, we conduct thirty in-depth interviews with Tamil actor fan club members to understand how film influenced (or did not influence) their political beliefs, and analyzed YouTube comments on film clips to understand how Tamil film viewers understood film’s politics. Preliminarily, we find that the indirect and political pathways are stronger than the direct pathway. In an online survey experiment, currently under development, we test the strength of each of the pathways against each other.
Contestation, Governance, and the Production of Violence Against Civilians: Coercive Political Order in Rural Colombia
(with Andrés Aponte and Andres Uribe, published online at the Journal of Conflict Resolution)
During civil war, which configurations of territorial control exhibit more or less violence against civilians? This is a deceptively tricky descriptive question, because armed group territorial control is so hard to measure. Most theories assume that territorial competition increases violence against civilians, while full territorial control decreases violence. We challenge this assumption through three empirical strategies with data from Colombia. First, we measure territorial control through qualitative codings based on interviews with civilians and former combatants and secondary sources. These codings are a major improvement on violence-based measures of control because they can differentiate between controlled areas with little violence and areas where armed groups are not present, and do not rely on theoretical inferences about what violence patterns should indicate particular arrangements of territorial control. Second, we use fine-grained violence event data from CINEP’s Noche y Niebla dataset that indicates the location, the perpetrator, the victim, and the type of violence that occurred. Crucially, these data offer information both on violence between armed groups and violence against civilians. Third, we use a combination of hand coding and machine learning to stratify the event data between urban and rural violence. We do this because urban areas in Colombia almost always have at least nominal state presence, whereas rural areas have a wider variety of territorial control dynamics. We find that the link between territorial competition and violence against civilians is far from straight-forward, and that armed groups commit significant “governing violence” in areas they control. Local histories of civilian organization, civilian-armed group relations, and repertoires of violence specific to certain armed groups are necessary to explain this variation, which territorial competition alone cannot. This study has two major theoretical implications. First, while territorial control is difficult to measure, future studies should refrain from assuming that control can be coded from violence data alone. Second, just as states regulate violence in their territory, armed groups commit violence against civilians not only due to competition with adversaries, but to create local political orders that accord with the groups’ visions of their desired societies.
Sowing the Seeds: Why do some armed groups socialise civilians more than others during civil war?
Published online in Civil Wars (2021)
What explains variation in the intensity with which armed groups seek to socialise civilians into their ideology? This paper seeks to expand the literature on rebel governance and ideology in war to consider the ideational interaction between armed groups and civilians. A paired comparison examines the Naxalite Rebellion in India (1967-72) and the Shining Path Insurgency in Peru (1980-1992), which exhibited puzzling variation in socialisation intensity despite holding similar ideologies. I argue this variation can be explained by differences in combatant socialisation, how groups value reading- and writing-based education, and whether groups understand civilian participation as crucial for achieving victory.
Working Papers (drafts available upon request)
"They Opened Our Eyes": Armed groups' influence on civilian political beliefs
What are the effects of armed group governance on civilian political beliefs? How does long-term interaction with armed groups that challenge the prevailing political order change the ways that civilians understand the political world? Answering these questions is particularly pressing to understand the long-term impacts of armed groups that do not succeed in seizing power. This paper draws on ethnographic evidence from three and a half months of on-site fieldwork in a municipality in Antioquia, Colombia that experienced decades of presence by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and interviews with FARC ex-combatants. Methodologically, I use interviews and participant observation to gather information about FARC socialization, governance practices, and civilians’ political beliefs. I then use oral histories to identify change in beliefs over time.
I argue that participatory FARC governance, even absent highly ideological socialization of civilians, produced political beliefs in line with the group’s ideology, compared to areas of non-participatory FARC governance and non-FARC presence. The experience of participatory governance allows civilians to see themselves as political actors and identify with the armed actor's vision for society. I find that pre-existing differences between areas within the municipality, local political economy, and victimization all cannot explain these findings. Further, I argue there is only a weak connection between civilians’ political beliefs and opinions about armed groups, suggesting that the formation of political beliefs is not simply a product of self-preservation calculations. My findings stress that even for armed groups unable to capture the state, under certain conditions they may induce long-term ideational change in civilians that alter political beliefs and expectations of government.
The Political Pedagogy of Governance: FARC territorial control and civilian socialization
For regular citizens, the everyday interactions with the state, like paying taxes and receiving services create expectations both about what states should do and how they should do it. These expectations are likely to be sticky, and inform beliefs about the functioning of politics under future administrations or regimes. But when people are ruled by non-state armed groups with ideologies opposed to the state, what beliefs about politics do civilians adopt? A growing literature examines the legacies of rebel governance on democratization, party performance, and political participation, but how the actual content of political ideas change after rebel governance ends is an important unanswered question.
To address these issues, this paper draws on observational quantitative evidence from Colombia. To measure the independent variable, rebel governance, I use an original dataset of armed group territorial control between 2000-2016, created by myself and coauthors. The dataset prioritizes the accuracy of codings and indicates both which armed actors were present in each municipality-year and how they related to one another. To measure the dependent variable, I use the MAPS dataset, which representatively surveyed more than 12,000 residents of Colombia’s PDET’s, which are the areas that were most heavily impacted by the armed conflict. While the results of the models are mixed, the data limitations are likely to understate the true effect of FARC socialization, meaning the results tentatively show that in municipalities in which the FARC governed, civilians are more likely to hold political beliefs close to the group’s Marxist ideology. These effects are more pronounced in areas where the FARC had stable territorial control, and through original qualitative evidence, I demonstrate that this was not due to selection effects. My findings stress that even armed groups that fail to capture the state may have long-term impacts on the political beliefs of those they ruled.
Tamil Film Culture and Political Attitudes: Descriptive and Causal Analysis
(with Deepika Padmanabhan)
K. Kamaraj, a politician in the Indian National Congress (INC) and former Chief Minister of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu once famously commented, ‘‘How can there be government by actors?’’ Not long after, in 1969, his party was defeated by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), making way for a Chief Minister who was also a film screenwriter. This set into motion the long relationship between film and politics in Tamil Nadu. Thereafter, various Tamil actors turned to politics with two actor-politicians collectively holding nine terms as Chief Minister and others becoming successful as opposition leaders and members of parliament.
Political messages in Tamil films serve two purposes: bolstering the popularity of aspiring actor-politicians and convincing the population of a specific Dravidian ideology. For actors who become politicians, film and non-news media function as heuristic devices for voters to discern their ideological and political positions. Beyond pure personalist politics, Tamil films have often served to popularize the basic tenets of Dravidian ideology, anti-elitism, anti-Brahminism, economic redistribution, and regional nationalism. In this working paper, we build a theory on the pathways through which film impacts political beliefs. We argue there are three potential pathways through which this occurs. First, in the direct pathway, viewers adopt the political content of film in their beliefs without mediation. Second, in the indirect pathway, it is the culture of film fandom and non-film media about film personalities that influences viewers' beliefs. Finally, in the political cues pathway, film does not straight-forwardly change beliefs, but offers political information about the conflicts and positions of aspiring actor-politicians in Tamil politics.
Empirically, we conduct thirty in-depth interviews with Tamil actor fan club members to understand how film influenced (or did not influence) their political beliefs, and analyzed YouTube comments on film clips to understand how Tamil film viewers understood film’s politics. Preliminarily, we find that the indirect and political pathways are stronger than the direct pathway. In an online survey experiment, currently under development, we test the strength of each of the pathways against each other.