Bankruptcy, guns or campaigns : explaining armed organizations' post-war trajectories

[摘要] This project seeks to explain what happens to armed organizations after they sign peace accords. Why do they dissolve, return to war, or form non-violent socio-political entities (political parties or civic associations)? To explain variation in post-war outcomes, my argument centers on the human geography of armed groups. Recruitment, deployment, and post-war migration patterns generate distinct configurations of a) collective capacity, b) relations with civilians, and c) inter-armed group dynamics. I propose that, if a rebel or paramilitary unit recruits in a geographically concentrated area and deploys its fighters in their home communities, the organization will persist and transform into a socio-political entity after disarming. If instead the organization recruits in a dispersed manner, deploys its soldiers away from their towns of origin, and the soldiers either return home or displace to a third locale, the group will disintegrate; it will lose its capacity for collective action. By bankrupting some organizations and preserving others, demobilization has differential effects on armed group capacity. Where it weakens a group, it destabilizes the territorial bargains between the ex-armed group and state and between the group and its contiguous, non-state armed actors. As a result, resumed war becomes likely. If instead, the distribution of power within the system is maintained, the groups will, over time, fully demilitarize and be brought into the state;;s legal framework. This dissertation is based on rich data collected during fourteen months of fieldwork in Colombia from 2006 to the present during which time I went inside each demobilizing organization to reconstruct and map its postwar trajectory. Exploiting Colombia;;s unparalleled comparative laboratory for this research, I test the effect of recruitment, deployment, and post-war migration patterns on organizational outcomes using two strategies. First, I conduct a detailed, controlled comparison of armed groups in three regions of Colombia based on interviews of over 200 ex-combatants, civilians, and victims. The second strategy combines these qualitative sources with quantitative ones to evaluate the proposed hypotheses on the entire universe of municipality-armed group dyads in Colombia (n=1040). For this analysis, I rely on municipal-level violent event data, interviews of nearly 100 Colombian experts on the armed conflict, a database of seven years of news articles, and statistical evidence from a series of surveys of former paramilitaries (n=31,472). The empirics provide strong support for the proposed model. The project has significant implications for debates on reintegration, state-building, consolidating peace, reconciliation, decriminalization, and transitions to democracy.

[发布机构] Massachusetts Institute of Technology