Suchergebnisse

Civil wars and intrastate conflicts are characterized by the armed confrontation between the government of a sovereign nation state and at least one non-state group. Accordingly, conflict research has traditionally put an emphasis on analyzing the dynamics of violence between these actors. Recent findings yet suggest that civil war contexts are also increasingly characterized by another type of—mostly nonviolent—behavior: Non-combatants like social movement organizations and local communities, but also armed actors themselves occasionally rely on methods of civil resistance like street protests or general strikes. These behavioral patterns present a fundamental puzzle: Why do rebel groups that normally rely on armed tactics resort to these rather atypical forms of resistance? And how can we explain that civilians even in these highly threatening environments manage to organize collective action in order to articulate their demands? Although a nascent strand of research has examined the occurrence of wartime protests, the influence of conflict-endogenous factors on these phenomena has hitherto been largely neglected. This dissertation aims at addressing this gap and investigates the spatial and temporal dynamics of civil resistance in war contexts. In the course of four research papers, I analyze under which conditions both armed rebel groups and civilian actors use respective tactics. Moreover, I explore how wartime dynamics affect civil resistance both during and in the immediate aftermath of fighting. The results show a strong association between spatial and temporal conflict dynamics on the one hand and the occurrence of civil resistance on the other hand. With the examination of the influence of conflict-endogenous processes, these results contribute to a thriving strand of literature in conflict research that puts an emphasis on the investigation of civil resistance in war contexts.

Research on rebel behavior during conflicts has traditionally focused on the use of violent tactics. However, evidence from several intrastate wars suggests that armed groups also occasionally employ general strikes—a method of civil resistance that has typically been associated with nonviolent groups. But when do rebels resort to general strikes? I argue that these tactics have a particular function which can offset potential risks for rebels after they have suffered losses in previous battles: Through general strikes, rebels signal sustained authority to the local population. The argument is tested for districts in Eastern India using newly compiled, disaggregated data on contentious action during the Maoist conflict. The paper contributes to a burgeoning literature on wartime civilian activism in two ways: First, it shows that armed groups themselves rely situationally on civilian mobilization. Second, it investigates the effect of conditions endogenous to the conflict on these tactical choices.