The Formation of Political Authority in Armed Conflicts: Civilian-Combatant Relations, Community Leaders, and Local Competition

Civilian-combatant relations are central to armed conflicts around the world. They are crucial to understanding the onset of violence, conflict dynamics, civilian victimisation, and socio-political legacies of war in post-conflict societies. These relationships can take a wide range of forms, from extraordinarily violent and exploitative to peaceful and cooperative. Different subfields and literatures, such as state building, rebel governance, armed orders, and civilian agency, have substantially improved our understanding of civilian-combatant relations. Yet, critical aspects remain largely unexplored.

Existing literature on civilian-combatant relations largely overlooks civilian attitudes, focusing instead on civilian behaviour. Studies that address attitudes often emphasise static factors such as group identity or specific behaviours, neglecting the dynamic, context-dependent nature of civilian attitudes. While community leaders’ influence on attitudes toward peace agreements is acknowledged in the literature, their role in shaping views on armed groups remains underexplored. Additionally, how local competition between armed groups affects civilian attitude formation is still poorly understood, despite its well-established impact on wider conflict dynamics. The goal of this project therefore is to answer the following research questions: Which factors influence the acceptance of armed groups’ authority by civilians, and how? And how does local competition between armed groups change this process of armed groups’ authority formation?

I argue that civilians form their attitudes towards armed groups and make decisions about whether to accept these groups’ authority based on the interplay of two factors: armed group behaviour and community leaders’ positions towards these armed groups. As such, I introduce two new main independent variables. In isolation, these variables are not completely new in the literature, but they have not yet been considered at this level of aggregation (behaviour broadly speaking instead of violence or service provision) and in their interaction. While this argument applies to armed conflicts in general, it has a context-sensitive element: Local competition between armed groups makes it more difficult for armed groups to gain acceptance and shifts the relative weight of the mechanisms underpinning authority formation.

I assess the argument in a nested multi-methods study of the conflict in eastern DRC’s South Kivu province that uses original data gathered during field research. The study employs qualitative content analysis of interview data, statistical analysis of two original surveys, including a survey experiment. A population survey in selected rural areas allows to zoom in on opinion-formation in a few selected places. A survey of students at universities in the provincial capital provides a broader overview of the situation in South Kivu: university students who grew up in rural areas before coming to the provincial capital for their studies report on their home villages. As such, they provide information on how civilians form their attitudes towards armed groups across the province. Both surveys include the same conjoint experiment, in which participants are presented with different pairs of hypothetical armed actors competing for authority.

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