Three Essays on the Mobilization and Transformation of Social Ties During Civil War

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the role of civilians’ social ties in transforming wartime and postwar local order. Leveraging advanced methodological tools for causal inference and original sub-national, cross-national, and qualitative data, the project improves our understanding of the relationship between local social landscapes and conflict processes.The first essay in this dissertation develops and tests a theory of the conditions under which insurgent conscription—a distinct type of forced recruitment whereby rebels use their administrative capacity to mandate military service in areas under their control—can ensure community compliance by forging social ties between civilians and insurgents. I argue that when state violence against armed groups’ civilian constituencies isolates civilians from the state, armed groups can use insurgent conscription to forge direct social ties between every civilian and the rebellion. I test the argument using a matching approach for time series, cross-sectional data and a novel data set documenting the use of insurgent conscription across 1,415 armed group-year observations between 1946 and 2008. The second essay explores the influence of gendered societal norms and women’s net- works on the governance of armed groups. Through process tracing and qualitative analysis of more than 50 interviews with high-ranking rebel leaders, local officials, and civilians in Nepal who experienced rebel rule, I illustrate that when armed groups mobilize women into rebel governing structures, women insurgent governors can use their roles within their families and communities to provide and build trust in direct armed group social services. The final essay shines an empirical and theoretical spotlight on the conditions under which women’s networks are resilient to conflict and armed group incursions. I argue that in- vestments in local women service providers improve service providers’ ability perform three functions critical to collective action: gathering information about the needs of women in their communities, deepening interpersonal ties between women in their communities, and building the institutional knowledge necessary to assert and advocate for collective de- mands. Moreover, I argue that the effects of resource allocation to women service providers on collective action are likely to be resilient to shocks because, due to the private, intimate nature of their work, women service providers are practiced in cooperating under difficult conditions and build particularly durable social ties. Utilizing newly gathered data on over 13,500 wards in Nepal, and both difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity de- signs, I illustrate how state allocation of resources to women service providers before the war contributed to the formation of channels for women’s collective action through a nearly 20 year period, including active conflict and immediate post-conflict years.