Informal Armed Groups in the Shadow of Civil War

The PhD project uses network analysis to explain how civil war interacts with other forms of armed conflict. Scholars in the field of empirical conflict research have widely acknowledged that civil wars are complex phenomena, in which a variety of armed groups struggle over government control. However, only limited attention has been paid to the link between civil war and other forms of armed conflict like communal conflict, electoral violence, and serious organized crime. This lack of attention is problematic as the interaction between different types of armed conflict poses a serious challenge to effective peacebuilding.

The project assumes that informal and formal armed groups involved in conflicts like communal conflict or civil war respectively are part of one overarching social network. Building on this assumption, the project applies a mixed-methods research design to the case of Nigeria (2000–2021) to develop a theoretical argument. The design combines interview data and network drawings by study participants from field research in northern Nigeria with a country-level quantitative network analysis of ACLED data.

Preliminary findings suggest that the civil war between violent extremists and the government in Northeast Nigeria led to a decrease in violence between informal armed groups in areas directly affected by the civil war violence because the war fundamentally disrupted everyday life. In contrast, violence between informal armed groups increased in areas not directly affected by the civil war violence because the government allocated most of its security resources to the civil war areas. This leaves conflicts between informal groups elsewhere unaddressed, creating a power vacuum and security dilemma. Formal groups can exploit this allocation problem of the government in their favour by intentionally escalating violence among informal groups. This conscious escalation can divert government attention away from the formal groups and creates a pool of potential alliance partners.

The framework and argument constitute a theoretical advancement of social network theory in the field of conflict studies, which has been dominated by methodological innovations and data-driven applications. Methodologically, the project applies graphic elicitation, i.e., the drawing of networks by study participants, in the realm of political science – a data generation method more commonly used in sociology and anthropology. In the quantitative analysis, the project proposes a new technique to identify informal armed groups based on violent event patterns in existing conflict data sets. Empirically, the project generates new data on the armed conflict in Nigeria’s Northwest, a region that has received far less attention than the Northeast and Northcentral regions.