The Formation of Political Authority in Fragmented Conflicts: Civilian-combatant relations and the central influence of Traditional Leaders

Civilian-combatant relations are central to armed conflicts around the world. They are crucial to understand the onset of violence, conflict dynamics, civilian victimization, 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. While the importance of civilian-combatant relations is well-established in the literature, we still know little about how they are formed. Political authority is an especially relevant form of such relationships.

This gap is especially prominent in fragmented conflicts. Empirically, conflict fragmentation is eminently common, including some of the world’s most protracted and most deadly conflicts. Examples include the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Libya, or Myanmar. Existing theories of civilian-combatant relationship formation either focus on non-fragmented contexts or explicitly deny that armed actors with short time horizons establish lasting relations with civilians.

I argue that in fragmented conflicts, where high volatility induces a short time horizon on all actors, these actors do form lasting relations – which stands in contrast to the literature. However, the way these relations are formed differs from non-fragmented conflicts in two ways: First, the short time horizon requires all interactions between armed actors and the local population to induce immediate tangibility for relations to be formed. Second, traditional leaders critically influence this individual-level relationship formation. Due to their capacity to organize collective action, they can facilitate community support for but also resistance against armed actors.

This is a mixed-methods study that combines cross-case and within-case comparison, using both original and already existing data at different levels of analysis and that has both deductive and inductive elements. The study employs qualitative content analysis of interview data, statistical analysis of survey data and a survey experiment. The analyses use already existing survey data (Afrobarometer) for the cross-case comparison and original interview and survey data gathered during field research in eastern DRC’s South Kivu province for the (within-)case analyses.

Keywords: Political Authority, Fragmented Conflicts, Legitimacy, Field Research, Traditional Leaders