The Political Legacies of Rebel Rule: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Côte d’Ivoire

• Author: Philip A. Martin,Giulia Piccolino,Jeremy S. Speight
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211047409
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(9) 1439–1470

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140211047409

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The Political Legacies of

Rebel Rule: Evidence

from a Natural

Experiment in C ˆ

ote

d’Ivoire

Philip A. Martin

1

, Giulia Piccolino

2

, and

Jeremy S. Speight

3

Abstract

How does exposure to rebel rule affect citizens’political attitudes after armed

conflicts end? We combine original survey data from C ˆ

ote d’Ivoire with a

natural experiment based on the arbitrary location of a ceasefire boundary

to estimate the effects of exposure to rebel rule by the Forces Nouvelles

(FN) on Ivorians’sense of democratic citizenship. Our findings show that

individuals in communities ruled by the FN held more negative attitudes

about local government institutions 7 years after the reunification of the

country, held weaker commitments to civic obligations, and were more

likely to condone extralegal actions. The effects of rebel rule are larger than

the effects of extreme lived poverty and appear among both rebel coethnics

and non-coethnics. Using qualitative and survey evidence, we propose three

theoretical mechanisms to explain why exposure to rebel rule weakened

citizen-state relations: disrupted norms of compliance with state-like authorities,

1

Assistant Professor, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, Fairfax,

VA, USA

2

Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Loughborough University, Loughborough,

England

3

Associate Professor, Political Science Department, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK

USA

Corresponding Author:

Philip A. Martin, Assistant Professor, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason

University, 4400 University Dr, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA.

Email: pmarti5@gmu.edu

the formation of local self-help institutions leading to negative assessments of

the redeployed state, and resentment dueto unmet expectations of economic

recovery. Our studyinforms debates about the links between war, citizenship,

and statebuilding.

Introduction

Millions of civilians in conflict-affected countries live under the de facto

control of non-state armed groups. Between 1945 and 2011, over 160 non-

state armed groups exercised at least some territorial control across 62

countries in over 100 conflicts (Cunningham et al., 2013). Despite a surge of

scholarly interest in “rebel rulers”(Arjona et al., 2015), however, little is

known about how insurgent control shapes the social and political attitudes of

civilians. There is particularly little evidence about how rebel rule shapes

citizen-state relations in postwar democratic contexts.

This article investigates how local exposure to territorial control by a non-

state armed group (“rebel rule”) impacts citizens’attitudes toward post-

conflict government institutions and civic obligations. Restoring civilian

confidence in state structures and democratic processes is widely recognized

as a central challenge of post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding (Paris

& Sisk, 2009), yet existing research offers little consensus about whether and

how wartime experiences of rebel rule might shape such post-conflict dy-

namics. According to one view, exposure to political control by non-state

armed groups can catalyze greater political participation and engagement

among civilians by triggering processes of mobilization (Huang, 2016;Wood,

2003). Other research, meanwhile, suggests that exposure to rebel rule and

rebel service provision can erode trust and the state-citizen social contract

(Kubota, 2017,2018). Systematic evidence to scrutinize these seemingly

conflicting claims is lacking.

Isolating the impact of rebel rule on civilian attitudes presents two main

challenges. First, one requires fine-grained survey data not only from areas

exposed to rebel rule, but also comparable areas not exposed to rebel rule.

Second, rebel rule is not, in general, randomly assigned. Insurgents conquer,

hold, and govern some areas and not others for reasons of both strategy and

opportunity. If we ignore this type of confounding and simply compare

outcomes in former rebel- and government-controlled areas, we risk intro-

ducing bias.

In this paper, we address both issues by leveraging data from an original

survey in Cˆ

ote d’Ivoire that permits us to evaluate civilians’political attitudes

in former rebel- and government-controlled areas that are highly comparable.

Our strategy is based on the arbitrary placement of a ceasefire boundary during

the Ivorian armed conflict (2002–2011). Weshow that the exact locat ionof the

1440 Comparative Political Studies 55(9)

partition line in several regions of western C ˆ

ote d’Ivoire was an artifact of the

timing of military mobilization by Ivorian rebels and French interposition

forces, and not the prewar characteristics of local communities. We then

compare individuals in communities that fell “just inside”the rebel-occupied

zone from 2002 to 2011 with those in very similar communities that fell “just

outside”and remained under government control. Importantly, C ˆ

ote d’Ivoire

represents a typical case of rebel rule in a contemporary civil war: a non-state

armed group seized de facto control over territory in a peripheral region, ruled

civilians for several years through a mixture of direct governance and local

power-sharing, and then demobilized and integrated into a unified postwar

state. Cˆ

ote d’Ivoire thus marks a highly relevant case for understanding

citizen-state relations in the aftermath of rebel rule.

We analyze respondent attitudes that pertain to a key element of citizen-

state relations: individuals’sense of “democratic citizenship.”Democratic

citizenship refers to a cluster of views held by citizens about the political

community to which they nominally belong, including both confidence in

government institutions as well as the inclination to perform actions that might

influence decision-making (Hoskins & Mascherini, 2009;Verba & Nie, 1987).

These kinds of citizen attitudes figure prominently in scholarly accounts of

post-conflict statebuilding (Karim, 2020) and are a focal point for peace-

building programs in many fragile states (Paffenholz & Spurk, 2006). We

assess three clusters of indicators to capture views about democratic citi-

zenship in post-conflict Cˆ

ote d’Ivoire: confidence in local state institutions,

views about civic obligations, and attitudes about extralegal actions.

Our central finding is that exposure to rebel rule had lasting, statistically

significant, and substantively meaningful negative effects on Ivorians’atti-

tudes regarding democratic citizenship. We find that respondents in com-

munities that fell under rebel control experience a decrease in favorable

attitudes about local state institutions like the police and municipal gov-

ernment, and an increase in their willingness to condone anti-state actions

such as refusing to pay taxes. Exposure to rebel rule also reduced respondents’

sense of civic duties, such as the duty to vote in elections. These findings are

especially striking given the political context of postwar C ˆ

ote d’Ivoire: the

regime that has controlled the country since 2011 is widely perceived as a

“government of Northerners,”sympathetic to the former constituency of the

rebellion (Piccolino, 2018).

What explains the apparent negative effects of exposure to rebel rule on

Ivorians’relationship with the postwar state? We present suggestive evidence

for three mechanisms (two of which are drawn from the existing literature, and

one that we formulated inductively). First, rebel rule may have disrupted

Ivorians’habitual compliance with the state. Prior norms of obedience to

formal institutions were weakened as a result of being cut off from official

state authorities for 9 years, which in turn diminished the perceived obligation

Martin et al. 1441