Who Can We Trust with a Gun? Information Networks and Adverse Selection in Militia Recruitment

• Published date: 01 August 2015
• Author: Jonathan Filip Forney
• DOI: 10.1177/0022002715576752
• Date: 01 August 2015
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Who Can We Trust

with a Gun? Information

Networks and Adverse

Selection in Militia

Recruitment

Jonathan Filip Forney

1

Abstract

How do the leaders of nonstate armed groups recruit new members? Most studies

of recruitment of combatants focus on explaining the supply of fighters—who

fights and what kinds of people volunteer to fight depending on the incentives

offered. We know comparatively little about how the leaders of armed groups

manage influxes of volunteers to ensure their quality. This article examines the

questions of who recruits fighters, and how the capacities of recruiters affect the

quality of the individuals who they recruit. The histories of three understudied civil

militias in Sierra Leone are used to develop and refine a theory of screening in

nonstate armed groups. Evidence from intensive fieldwork suggests that access to

civilian information networks can allow the leaders of armed groups to successfully

screen recruits and exclude low-quality types even when the pool of volunteers is

flooded with oppor tunists.

Keywords

civil wars, conflict, social networks, internal armed conflict

1

Department of Politics, University of Virginia, VA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jonathan Filip Forney, 1027 Preston Avenue, Apt. B, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA.

Email: jon.f.forney@gmail.com

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2015, Vol. 59(5) 824-849

ªThe Author(s) 2015

Reprints and permission:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0022002715576752

jcr.sagepub.com

The hallmark of everyday life within civil warfare is not violence; it is uncer-

tainty. Armed actors, whether insurgents or counterinsurgents, face similar chal-

lenges of gathering reliable information about friends and foes. This article

explores the informational challenges that armed groups face when trying to

recruit trustworthy fighters who, usually under limited supervision, will faithfully

execute their duties. Studies of rebel recruitment (Weinstein 2005, 2007) suggest

that material resource endowments are the primary determinant of the severity of

adverse selection problems—that is, prospective fighters whose concealed oppor-

tunistic motives conflict with the goals of the organization. Weinstein has argued

that armed organizations with access to material resources (e.g., diamonds) have

the advantage of being able to offer incentives to entice new recruits. However,

this ostensible advantage is ultimately a curse because such incentives tend to

attract larger numbers of opportunists who crowd out more selfless or trust-

worthy individuals.

Inductively, the resource-curse theory is a poor fit for the cases of civil militias in

Sierra Leone. More generally, armed groups may operate for many years with access

to the same material resources, but undergo major changes in the quality of individ-

uals who they recruit. As Hegghammer (2013) has noted with regard to terrorist

recruitment, explaining differential recruitment in armed organizations requires con-

sideration not only of the supply of willing fighters (Petersen 2001; Wood 2003; De

Mesquita 2005; Humphreys and Weinstien 2008) but also of the strategies and tac-

tics that recruiters employ in order to manage influxes of volunteers. I argue that

recruiters can use social networks to ameliorate problems of adverse selection in

armed groups by proactively gathering private information about the motivations

and skills of prospective fighters.

1

Access to such critical information enables the

screening and exclusion of undesirable types of would-be fighters even when such

types are in relatively great supply. The successful vetting of militia recruits is of

significant practical importance because it has the potential to preempt downstream

agency problems, such as looting and abuse of civilian populations, that derive from

individual opportunism under conditions of minimal supervision.

This article uses the cases of civil militias that operated in Sierra Leone (from

1992 to 2001) to develop and test a theory of how recruiters in armed groups can

use information networks to screen recruits and exclude undesirable types. Given the

importance of loot-able diamond wealth and greed-based motives in shaping the

civil war in Sierra Leone (Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Lujala, Gleditsch, and Gilmore

2005), the conflict provides a challenging set of micro-level cases with which to

evaluate theories that focus on social networks rather than on material resources and

economic incentives.

As a political phenomenon, civil militias are an understudied category of nonstate

armed groups. At the national level, civil militias are typically distinguished from

rebel or insurgent groups by their relationship to the state. Civil militias, at their

inception, are allies or extensions of official state militaries and defenders of polit-

ical incumbents (Jentzsch, Kalyvas, and Schubiger 2015) However, this definition is

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