Explaining Civilian Support for Political and Criminal Armed Groups

Suny At Binghamton, Binghamton NY

Investigators

Abstract

General Summary What determines whether and how civilians support the armed groups that aim to govern their communities? Scholars have found that one of the most important determinants of civilian collaboration is the degree of control that an armed group has over a territory. Yet in many communities, multiple armed groups, including rebel groups, state security forces, drug trafficking organizations, and/or gangs compete for control. This project investigates how civilians in areas of contested control choose which groups, if any, to support. Doing so is important because civilian support can help tip a community towards one group or another and thereby affect conflict outcomes. We focus in particular on the role of exposure to violence, connections to elites, and the public goods that armed groups provide in determining civilian support. In drawing connections between individual- and community-level characteristics that may influence civilian support, this project helps address the disjuncture many scholars have identified between master cleavages of civil wars (what they are "about") and violence on the ground. In uniting the study of political and criminal armed groups, the project also seeks to uncover common logics in civilian decision-making when facing prototypically political actors versus those commonly considered criminal actors. The findings will give scholars and policymakers new tools with which to better predict (and prevent) civilian collaboration with armed groups, improve counterinsurgency and anti-crime efforts, and facilitate the demobilization of combatants in post-conflict settings. Technical Summary The research team will survey civilians in Colombia about their attitudes and behavior towards political and criminal armed groups. The country provides an ideal setting in which to answer our research questions: in addition to its ongoing civil war, which features multiple rebel groups, Colombia is also affected by high levels of organized criminal and gang activity. Surveying civilians in violence-prone areas is complicated by safety concerns, preference falsification, and the potential for non-random participation. To mitigate these concerns, our surveys will employ indirect methods of questioning, including list experiments to measure respondents' behaviors and endorsement experiments to capture attitudes towards competing groups. Although the project surveys civilians in a single country, most conflicts today involve multiple armed actors with the capacity to control territory and as a result we expect the results to generalize well beyond Colombia.