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
"They Opened Our Eyes": Armed groups' influence on civilian political beliefs
What are the effects of armed group governance on civilian political beliefs? Answering this question is particularly pressing to understand the long-term impacts armed groups that do not succeed in seizing power. This paper draws on ethnographic evidence from 3.5 months of on-site fieldwork in a municipality in Antioquia, Colombia that experienced decades of presence by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Methodologically, I use interviews, oral histories, and participant observation, and also analyze voting data at the polling station level. I argue that participatory FARC governance, even absent highly ideological socialization of civilians, produced political beliefs in line with the group’s ideology. Additionally, areas that experienced more participatory FARC governance produced more leftist vote share. The 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.
Coercive Social Orders: How armed groups govern through violence
(with Andrés Aponte and Andres Uribe)
Armed groups’ regulation of civilian populations under their control is a central activity, which allows them to prevent challenges to their rule, enforce their own vision of society, and respond to popular demands for the provision of security and social order. These tasks revolve not around combating an opponent or protecting civilians from external threat, but rather on mediating conflicts among civilians, between civilians and combatants, and on enforcing social order. What forms does this coercive governance by armed groups take? What determines the processes through which armed groups make governance decisions and mete out punishments?
In this paper, we offer a typological framework that outlines three key dimensions of variation in governing violence: who makes the rules, the formality of the process to adjudicate rule violations, and how infractions are punished. We draw on illustrative examples from five continents to explain how governing violence varies across time and space within conflicts. We show that groups fall into three general categories, in which each category is a distinct combination of rule creation type, formality of justice, and orientation toward specific punishments.
Tamil Film Culture and Political Attitudes: Descriptive and Causal Analysis
(with Deepika Padmanabhan)
How does film change the way viewers think about politics? Regular citizens are likely to spend far more time consuming film and other non-news media than news itself, and when these films contain political messages, they have the potential to change voters’ ideological preferences and political information. In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, political messages in films serve two basic purposes: bolstering the popularity of aspiring actor-politicians, who are plentiful, and convincing the population of a specific Dravidian ideology. Theoretically, we evaluate two pathways of political influence, direct and indirect, and two outcomes, voter preferences on politics, and political information voters discern from watching film. To evaluate these pathways, we conduct in-depth interviews with members of fan clubs of Tamil actors to understand how film influences their political beliefs and information on politics in general. Additionally, we conduct an online survey experiment on Tamil film fans to test the proposed causal pathways.
We argue that the direct pathway, in which viewers adopt the political messages of film, is relatively weak, and instead film’s influence flows more through engagement in media about film and communities of film fandom. Furthermore, the political ideas that viewers do adopt from film are often not the issues directly portrayed on screen, casting doubt on the perspective of film as propaganda. Instead, certain political film traditions prime viewers to connect the specific messages of individual films to broader political movements and ideologies that are associated with those film traditions (in this case, Dravidian politics). Our paper also demonstrates that viewers see film as providing useful political information about the political positions of parties and actor-politicians through the characters depicted on-screen.
Never High on Your Own Supply: The origins of anti-drug consumption attitudes in rural Colombia
In many peripheral regions of Colombia, communities have long relied on the revenues from illicit crop production. Particularly in colonization (colonización) zones, in which peasants (campesinos) settled previously uninhabited areas in search of land, illicit crops were often the only opportunity to access a cash economy. Paradoxically, in many of these areas, there are also extremely strong norms against drug consumption, and drug users are thought of as morally equivalent to thieves, rapists, and murderers. In areas with (often drug-trafficking) armed groups drug users were frequently the target of violence, and assassination and displacement were common penalties for even minor drug use. This envisioned moral order often has at best a weak connection to actual effects of drugs.
What explains this apparent contradiction? In this paper, I first estimate the descriptive differences in anti-drug attitudes between drug-producing and non-drug-producing communities through survey data. Second, I consider three potential explanations across both types of communities: more politically conservative communities are more likely to oppose drug use, those with more armed group presence have stronger anti-drug norms, and finally, areas without indigenous communities that have traditional practices involving coca have stronger anti-drug attitudes. I close the paper by comparing the differences in drug beliefs in Colombia and Bolivia, in which coca-chewing is an accepted social practice, and emphasizing how ideas about social order and social cleansing are prevalent throughout Colombia. In general, I argue that the moral beliefs of those involved in the drug economy are more complex than commonly-believed, and reflect specific commitments linked to specific roles in the supply chain. This paper contributes to literature on the political beliefs of marginalized populations, ideas about the drug trade, and the legacies of rebel governance in Colombia.
The Societal Impacts of the FARC’s Rebel Gender Governance
(with Katherine Mann)
This mixed-methods paper examines how civilian interaction with the FARC’s institutions of rebel gender governance impacted civilians’ views of gender norms and their relationship to political change. These gender governance institutions included policing domestic violence, shaming adulterers, executing rapists and homosexuals, and holding town meetings about gender equality. Empirically, we draw on 106 interviews with FARC ex-combatants, ethnographic research and interviews with civilians under FARC occupation, and the Mapping Attitudes, Perceptions, and Support (MAPS) dataset. Descriptively, this paper illustrates how armed groups (re-)construct gendered social and political orders that produce durable ideational legacies through a combination of coercive and non-coercive governing institutions. We argue that the FARC’s participatory forms of rebel gender (co-)governance served as an expression of moral authority that consequently altered the formation of political beliefs about gender. Where the FARC governed in a more coercive manner, the impacts were weaker. Additionally, we see that the FARC socialized both a progressive vision of gender equality alongside the reification of the nuclear family and the exclusion of certain sexual identities from its moral order. The piece contributes to a relatively new literature on the logics, strategies, and impacts of rebel gender governance, while incorporating insights from research on participatory models of democratic governance. It also advances emerging work on the link between rebel governance and civic identity formation.
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
"They Opened Our Eyes": Armed groups' influence on civilian political beliefs
What are the effects of armed group governance on civilian political beliefs? Answering this question is particularly pressing to understand the long-term impacts armed groups that do not succeed in seizing power. This paper draws on ethnographic evidence from 3.5 months of on-site fieldwork in a municipality in Antioquia, Colombia that experienced decades of presence by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Methodologically, I use interviews, oral histories, and participant observation, and also analyze voting data at the polling station level. I argue that participatory FARC governance, even absent highly ideological socialization of civilians, produced political beliefs in line with the group’s ideology. Additionally, areas that experienced more participatory FARC governance produced more leftist vote share. The 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.
Coercive Social Orders: How armed groups govern through violence
(with Andrés Aponte and Andres Uribe)
Armed groups’ regulation of civilian populations under their control is a central activity, which allows them to prevent challenges to their rule, enforce their own vision of society, and respond to popular demands for the provision of security and social order. These tasks revolve not around combating an opponent or protecting civilians from external threat, but rather on mediating conflicts among civilians, between civilians and combatants, and on enforcing social order. What forms does this coercive governance by armed groups take? What determines the processes through which armed groups make governance decisions and mete out punishments?
In this paper, we offer a typological framework that outlines three key dimensions of variation in governing violence: who makes the rules, the formality of the process to adjudicate rule violations, and how infractions are punished. We draw on illustrative examples from five continents to explain how governing violence varies across time and space within conflicts. We show that groups fall into three general categories, in which each category is a distinct combination of rule creation type, formality of justice, and orientation toward specific punishments.
Tamil Film Culture and Political Attitudes: Descriptive and Causal Analysis
(with Deepika Padmanabhan)
How does film change the way viewers think about politics? Regular citizens are likely to spend far more time consuming film and other non-news media than news itself, and when these films contain political messages, they have the potential to change voters’ ideological preferences and political information. In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, political messages in films serve two basic purposes: bolstering the popularity of aspiring actor-politicians, who are plentiful, and convincing the population of a specific Dravidian ideology. Theoretically, we evaluate two pathways of political influence, direct and indirect, and two outcomes, voter preferences on politics, and political information voters discern from watching film. To evaluate these pathways, we conduct in-depth interviews with members of fan clubs of Tamil actors to understand how film influences their political beliefs and information on politics in general. Additionally, we conduct an online survey experiment on Tamil film fans to test the proposed causal pathways.
We argue that the direct pathway, in which viewers adopt the political messages of film, is relatively weak, and instead film’s influence flows more through engagement in media about film and communities of film fandom. Furthermore, the political ideas that viewers do adopt from film are often not the issues directly portrayed on screen, casting doubt on the perspective of film as propaganda. Instead, certain political film traditions prime viewers to connect the specific messages of individual films to broader political movements and ideologies that are associated with those film traditions (in this case, Dravidian politics). Our paper also demonstrates that viewers see film as providing useful political information about the political positions of parties and actor-politicians through the characters depicted on-screen.
Never High on Your Own Supply: The origins of anti-drug consumption attitudes in rural Colombia
In many peripheral regions of Colombia, communities have long relied on the revenues from illicit crop production. Particularly in colonization (colonización) zones, in which peasants (campesinos) settled previously uninhabited areas in search of land, illicit crops were often the only opportunity to access a cash economy. Paradoxically, in many of these areas, there are also extremely strong norms against drug consumption, and drug users are thought of as morally equivalent to thieves, rapists, and murderers. In areas with (often drug-trafficking) armed groups drug users were frequently the target of violence, and assassination and displacement were common penalties for even minor drug use. This envisioned moral order often has at best a weak connection to actual effects of drugs.
What explains this apparent contradiction? In this paper, I first estimate the descriptive differences in anti-drug attitudes between drug-producing and non-drug-producing communities through survey data. Second, I consider three potential explanations across both types of communities: more politically conservative communities are more likely to oppose drug use, those with more armed group presence have stronger anti-drug norms, and finally, areas without indigenous communities that have traditional practices involving coca have stronger anti-drug attitudes. I close the paper by comparing the differences in drug beliefs in Colombia and Bolivia, in which coca-chewing is an accepted social practice, and emphasizing how ideas about social order and social cleansing are prevalent throughout Colombia. In general, I argue that the moral beliefs of those involved in the drug economy are more complex than commonly-believed, and reflect specific commitments linked to specific roles in the supply chain. This paper contributes to literature on the political beliefs of marginalized populations, ideas about the drug trade, and the legacies of rebel governance in Colombia.
The Societal Impacts of the FARC’s Rebel Gender Governance
(with Katherine Mann)
This mixed-methods paper examines how civilian interaction with the FARC’s institutions of rebel gender governance impacted civilians’ views of gender norms and their relationship to political change. These gender governance institutions included policing domestic violence, shaming adulterers, executing rapists and homosexuals, and holding town meetings about gender equality. Empirically, we draw on 106 interviews with FARC ex-combatants, ethnographic research and interviews with civilians under FARC occupation, and the Mapping Attitudes, Perceptions, and Support (MAPS) dataset. Descriptively, this paper illustrates how armed groups (re-)construct gendered social and political orders that produce durable ideational legacies through a combination of coercive and non-coercive governing institutions. We argue that the FARC’s participatory forms of rebel gender (co-)governance served as an expression of moral authority that consequently altered the formation of political beliefs about gender. Where the FARC governed in a more coercive manner, the impacts were weaker. Additionally, we see that the FARC socialized both a progressive vision of gender equality alongside the reification of the nuclear family and the exclusion of certain sexual identities from its moral order. The piece contributes to a relatively new literature on the logics, strategies, and impacts of rebel gender governance, while incorporating insights from research on participatory models of democratic governance. It also advances emerging work on the link between rebel governance and civic identity formation.