The Formation of Political Authority in Armed Conflict: Pervasive Insecurity, Protection by Armed Groups, and Civilian Attitudes

Political authority is a central feature of contemporary armed conflict. In conflicts around the world, civilians must navigate everyday life in areas controlled by armed groups and decide whether to recognise their claims to rule and how to engage with these groups. These decisions shape the evolution of political order during and after armed conflict. This dissertation examines how civilians come to accept the authority of armed groups and how local competition shapesthis process.

To answer these questions, the dissertation combines qualitative and quantitative methods in a mixed-methods research design centred on South Kivu province in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It draws on extensive qualitative fieldwork and an original face-to-face population survey incorporating a conjoint experiment. Combining both approaches makes it possible to examine authority formation from complementary perspectives, identifying both the causal effects of different drivers of civilian acceptance and the mechanisms through which they operate, while situating these within the wider process of civilian attitude formation.

The dissertation shows that civilian acceptance of armed groups is primarily shaped by their behaviour rather than by more static characteristics such as ethnicity. Under conditions of pervasive insecurity, civilian attitude formation follows a logic of survival in which protection becomes the dominant criterion for evaluating armed groups. It further suggests a two-stage model of civilian attitude formation that is shaped by the information available to civilians. When armed groups are new to an area and information is scarce, civilians rely on cues such as ethnicity or endorsements by community leaders to infer future protection. As information accumulates through continued interaction, these cue-based assessments are increasingly replaced by evaluations based on direct experience. Finally, the findings show that authority formation is embedded in a wider conflict environment in which community leaders, local competition, and broader conflict dynamics shape both armed group behaviour and civilians’ evaluations.

This dissertation advances existing research by developing a theory of authority formation that explains how civilians come to accept the authority of armed groups. The theory integrates insights from political psychology, political communication, sociology, and conflict studies to theorise the process through which civilian attitudes are formed. In doing so, it moves beyond existing explanations that focus primarily on individual drivers of acceptance and instead integrates these into a parsimonious explanatory framework. Methodologically, the dissertation demonstrates how conjoint experiments and qualitative fieldwork can be combined in ways that extend beyond conventional mixed-methods designs, using the different informational contexts of each approach to support theory development. The resulting framework provides a foundation for understanding how political order emerges and changes in armed conflicts, highlighting the central role of protection and civilian evaluations in shaping durable systems of rule in eastern Congo and beyond.

Keywords: Political Authority, Armed Groups, Field Research, Legitimacy, Survey Research, Community Leaders, Multi-Method Research