Oliver Kaplan’s new book, Resisting War, provides an important account of when and how civilians can take control of their own fate and protect their safety in the context of civil conflict. Even though a wealth of recent studies on insurgency point to civilian behavior as being central to conflict dynamics, Kaplan’s book is one of the first to ascribe civilians with true autonomy over their own actions. Rather than being passive receptors of the actions taken by governments or rebel groups, civilians can under certain conditions take actions that reduce their collective likelihood of being targeted with violence.
Kaplan’s argument starts with the assumption that “most civilians facing less-than-benevolent armed groups just want to be left alone” (p. 3), a sentiment that will ring true with most scholars of civil conflict. However, civilians wishing to stay out of the crossfire can only really do so if they implement “collective strategies for protection” (p. 9). These strategies may include developing norms of noncollaboration or strengthening civilian-led institutions that adjudicate disputes between civilians and help navigate accusations by armed actors. Through these strategies, all of which require a degree of community-level collective action, civilians are better able to resist armed group pressure to supply resources and information, affording them the autonomy needed to step back from the conflict.
What, then, allows certain communities to establish the norms and institutions that strengthen civilian autonomy? Kaplan posits that the key explanatory variable is the level of preexisting “social cohesion.” At its most basic level, this can be a general sense of cooperativeness shaped by informal social ties. In its more robust forms, social cohesion can include the presence of a vibrant civil society or institutionalized community governance organizations.
The book puts forth two complementary categories of evidence in support of its core argument, both drawing from laudably detailed data collection and fieldwork in Colombia. First, in Chapter 5, Kaplan pairs novel data on the municipal-level density of “junta councils” with annual conflict-related violence targeted at civilians from 1990 to 2005. Juntas are voluntary, civilian-led elected councils that help organize local public goods provision. Their presence is used as a proxy measure for underlying social cohesion—it takes local coordination to organize a junta—but juntas also play a direct role in implementing collective protection strategies. The data show that, after controlling for armed group contestation and a host of other potential confounders, areas with a high density of juntas experienced 25% less violence over the course of the conflict. One challenge to inference that Kaplan deals with in a particularly convincing way is reverse causality: perhaps areas with low violence are able to develop greater social cohesion rather than vice versa. To address this concern, Kaplan traces how communities that experienced greater violence during a previous bout of conflict were actually more likely to develop junta councils leading up to the period of the study (pp. 158–61).
Second, the book draws from several qualitative case studies conducted during nearly a year of fieldwork in the Colombian countryside. In what is perhaps the most compelling chapter of the book, Kaplan provides a detailed account of how a civilian organization called the ATCC negotiated with the military, paramilitaries, and guerrillas to gain the power to conduct its own investigations of citizens accused of being enemy collaborators, significantly reducing civilian-targeted violence in the process. This case, which serves as a “plausibility probe” (p. 173), vividly brings to life the theorized mechanisms by which civilians collectively establish autonomy. The chapter draws from an incredibly rich set of interviews with civilians, former rebels, and government officials, illuminating how the hard-to-grasp concept of social cohesion translates into tangible self-protection tactics.
After establishing proof of concept with the ATCC case, the author implements a second deductive case study design by systematically selecting “out of sample” villages with matched propensities for experiencing violence but that diverge in terms of their density of junta councils (pp. 167–73). This rigorous and transparent case selection methodology is a fantastic template for future research on microlevel conflict dynamics. The resulting case studies provide additional support for the main findings, although they do not track as cleanly to the theorized mechanisms as does the ATCC case.
Although Kaplan’s book makes tremendous progress in advancing both the theoretical and empirical understanding of civilian responses to civil conflict, one area that merits further discussion is whether it is fair to assume that autonomous civilian communities will always (or even most commonly) choose to withdraw from the conflict. An alternative explanation might be that greater collective action capacity affords civilians the autonomy to select from a broader menu of options, one of which is withdrawal, but another of which is unified support for one side. For example, Roger Peterson’s Resistance and Rebellion (2001) and Elisabeth Wood’s Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (2003) outline how strong social cohesion can create the collective action potential that affords civilians the ability to sustain support for resistance movements in the face of government repression.
More broadly, even though Kaplan carefully addresses the balance of military control as an alternative explanation for local violence, he treats contestation between armed actors as being orthogonal to civilian collective action capacity. If civilians are concerned primarily with mitigating risk to their long-term personal safety, the optimal strategy in some contexts may be to provide active and unified support to one of the sides. Doing so may tip the military balance of power and allow one side to establish dominant military control, a situation that is highly conducive to preventing violent acts against civilians (Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 2006). Examples of this dynamic appear to be present in some of the book’s case studies. For example, Kaplan states, “ATCC civilian leaders were able to brush off the dominant paramilitaries’ efforts to install a base in the town of La India by arguing that it would only cause them more problems with the guerrillas” (p. 193).
With this question aside, Resisting War makes a pioneering contribution to the study of civil conflict and insurgency. Kaplan’s book is an exemplary piece of research that provides a captivating and rigorous telling of how civilians in conflict zones protect their own safety. In a context where scholars increasingly view civilian behavior as being crucial to armed actors’ military success (see Eli Berman, Jacob Shapiro, and Joseph Felter, Small Wars, Big Data, 2019), Kaplan presents a sophisticated and transformative understanding of civilians’ actual incentives and available actions. The powerful combination of broad and deep evidence presented in support of this highly nuanced theory is a tremendous accomplishment, and the resulting piece of work should have broad appeal to a range of disciplines.
