Civilian Contention in Civil War: How Ideational Factors Shape Community Responses to Armed Groups

• Date: 01 September 2021
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414020912285
• Subject Matter: Articles

2021, Vol. 54(10) 1849 –1884

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020912285

Comparative Political Studies

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414020912285

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Article

Civilian Contention

in Civil War: How

Ideational Factors Shape

Community Responses

to Armed Groups

Juan Masullo1

Abstract

Why do some communities overtly declare their opposition to violent

groups, while others disguise it by engaging in seemingly unrelated activities?

Why do some communities manifest their dissent using nonviolent methods

instead of organizing violence of their own? I argue that ideational factors

are crucial to answering these questions: normative commitments can

restrict civilian contention to nonviolent forms of action, while exposure

to oppositional ideologies can push civilians toward more confrontational

forms of noncooperation with armed groups. Furthermore, I contend that

the role of political entrepreneurs activating and mobilizing this ideational

content is crucial for it to shape contention. I support this argument with

a wealth of microlevel evidence collected in various warzones in Colombia,

analyzed within a purposively designed comparative structure. My findings

support the growing conflict scholarship that stresses that ideology matters

in war, but extends its application beyond armed actors’ behavior to that of

civilian communities.

Keywords

civil war, civilian agency, civilian noncooperation, political entrepreneurs,

ideational factors

1University of Oxford, UK

Corresponding Author:

Juan Masullo, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Manor

Road Building, Office 162, Oxford OX1 3UQ, UK.

Email: juan.masullo@politics.ox.ac.uk

912285CPSXXX10.1177/0010414020912285Comparative Political StudiesMasullo

research-article2020

1850 Comparative Political Studies 54(10)

2 Comparative Political Studies 00(0)

Introduction

Why, when facing very similar war dynamics, do some communities overtly

declare their opposition to violent groups while others disguise it by engaging

and participating in seemingly unrelated activities? Why, in an already violent

context such as civil war, do some communities opt to manifest their dissent

through nonviolent methods instead of organizing violence of their own?

Answers to these questions will improve our understanding of how armed

conflict operates on the ground, how it transforms the lives of ordinary people

caught up in war, and how civilians manage to retain and activate their agency

when faced with the possibility of violent repression. This improved under-

standing can in turn inform ongoing policy debates on the protection of civil-

ians—in particular, civilian self-protection—and postconflict reconstruction.

Although recent studies have explored the conditions under which these

types of community level responses to violent actors are more likely to

emerge, and their potential effects on armed groups’ behavior (Arjona, 2016;

Kaplan, 2017; Masullo, 2017; Rubin, 2019), we still know little about why

they take different forms when they emerge. Grassroots responses range from

everyday forms of resistance (Scott, 1985) and disguised collective action

(Fu, 2017) to the creation of zones of peace (Hancock & Mitchell, 2007) and

the formation of community-initiated militias (Jentzsch, 2014; Schubiger,

2019). I argue that ideational factors help explain this variation in the form

that community responses to armed groups take.

Despite acknowledging that war is fundamentally a political enterprise

fuelled by ideas, theories of civil conflict tend to focus on structural condi-

tions, organizational characteristics, and/or situational factors. Until a recent

renewed interest in understanding how ideology affects armed groups’ behav-

ior (Costalli & Ruggeri, 2017; Gutierrez Sanín & Wood, 2014; Leader

Maynard, 2019), ideas had long been overlooked in the political science con-

flict scholarship. This new line of inquiry has provided a more complete and

sophisticated understanding of how armed groups behave, refining and some-

times challenging established theories of civil conflict. We have learned, for

example, that ideology can shape civilian targeting (e.g., in Mozambique and

Angola; Thaler, 2012), tactical escalation of violence (e.g., in Peru; Ron,

2001), systems of governance (e.g., in Greece; Kalyvas, 2015), and rebel

infighting and alliance formation (e.g., in Syria; Gade et al., 2019; Gade,

Hafez, & Gabbay, 2019). This increased attention to ideology has also yielded

important macrolevel findings. For example, Balcells and Kalyvas (2015)

show that rebel groups that embrace a socialist ideology are defeated at a

higher rate, and conflicts in which they are involved tend to be fought as

irregular wars, last longer, and result in more fatalities.1

Masullo 1851

Masullo 3

I contribute to this new strand of research by extending the examination of

ideational factors to civilian behavior. I focus on one possible way in which

civilians can respond to armed groups: noncooperation—that is, the refusal to

cooperate, either directly or indirectly, with armed organizations. Although

civilian support has long been central to the study of civil war (Johnson,

1962; Kalyvas, 2006; Wood, 2003), noncooperation has received scant atten-

tion. This omission is problematic: not only is noncooperation common

enough to be important in its own right, but it also has the power to shape war

trajectories and outcomes in consequential ways. Recent studies have shown

that it can affect the level of violence that armed groups inflict on civilians

(Kaplan, 2017), the distribution of territorial control and the establishment of

rebel governance (Arjona, 2016; Rubin, 2019), communities’ resilience to

communal violence (Krause, 2018), and communities’ capacity to engage in

postconflict reconstruction (Masullo, 2018).

Noncooperation campaigns can be violent or nonviolent, and may

involve different degrees of confrontation vis á vis armed groups, ranging

from oblique manifestations of disobedience to declaring entire areas off

limits to armed groups.2 I contend that ideational factors—in the form of

normative commitments and oppositional ideologies, and through the

workings of political entrepreneurs—are central to explaining variation in

the type of noncooperation.

This article bridges two areas of inquiry that are gaining increasing atten-

tion in conflict research: ideology and civilian agency.3 In doing so, it creates

a new complementary research avenue that recognizes civilians as agents—

rather than merely victims or resources to be plundered—and explores ide-

ational factors beyond the dominant armed group focus. Moreover, by

exploring organized civilian responses, this study also promotes a promising

dialogue between research programs on the microdynamics of civil war and

contentious politics, two strands of literature that despite exploring very simi-

lar phenomena have largely advanced in cordial indifference to each other’s

findings (Tarrow, 2007).

The Role of Ideational Factors in Civilian

Contention

Ideational factors, unlike structural variables and situational incentives, are

nonmaterial and related to the content of actors’ cognitions (Jacobs, 2014).

They account for different belief systems and cover various aspects such as

identities, ideals (that can be expressed as structured ideologies), narratives,

interpretative frameworks, and normative commitments. They give actors