Violent Social Control of Civilians by Armed Groups

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In the last twenty years, scholars have written extensively on why and how armed groups victimize civilians and why and how they govern. However, there is often a bifurcation of the scholarship on these two phenomena. Victimization of civilians is frequently described as an essentially external process, in which civilians suffer because of the competition between armed groups. Governance on the other hand is an essentially internal process, through which armed groups gain resources from civilians under their control to better combat opponents and consolidate territorial domination.

These papers break down that bifurcation by showing that logics of coercive social control fit neatly into neither category. While the targeting of civilians does often increase the power of armed groups, the logic for this targeting varies substantially by ideology, illicit economies, and community histories, and cannot be entirely explained solely through processes of contestation. Furthermore, the panel’s theme asks what shape these coercive social orders take, and how they change over time due to popular mobilization, violent competition, and armed group capacity. The papers pay special attention to how armed groups interact with marginalized groups within the communities they govern, and how armed groups frequently seek to exploit or intensify social cleavages to solidify their rule. The panel’s papers have a non-exclusive focus on Colombia due to the immense variation in armed group violence and governance in the country’s decades-long civil war.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• Anti-LGBT Violence and Brutality as Mechanisms for Social Control in Colombia - Samuel Ritholtz, University of Oxford

• Imposed Social Orders? A Typology of Armed Groups’ Governing Violence - Andrés Felipe Aponte, Universidad del Rosario; Daniel Raoul Hirschel-Burns, Princeton University; Andres Uribe, Stanford University

• Unintended Consequences of the War on Drugs: Eradication & Violence in Colombia - Luis L Schenoni, University College London; Camilo Nieto-Matiz, University of Texas at San Antonio; Juan Felipe Campos-Contreras, University College London

• “Subversives” and “Delinquents”: Disappearance as a Form of Social Cleansing - Madeleine I Stevens, University of Chicago

• Armed Conflict, Blood Feuds, and Social Peace - Mehmet Gurses, University of Central Florida; Ayse Betul Celik, Sabanci University

Chair

• Abbey Steele University of Amsterdam

Discussant

• Consuelo Amat Johns Hopkins University