The study of civil wars has proliferated in political science. The most recent wave of research is distinguished by its microlevel focus, which relies on rich quantitative and qualitative subnational data in order to elucidate causal mechanisms, narrow the gap between concepts and metrics, and control for rival explanatory variables (Kalyvas Reference Kalyvas2008, 397). Sarah Zukerman Daly’s study exemplifies how this microlevel approach can yield new theoretical and empirical insights while laying the ground-work for an exciting new research agenda on the politics of peace and violence in postconflict settings.
Why do some armed organizations return to collectively organized violence after a civil war concludes, while other organizations eschew violence? This is the question at the center of this book. Daly tackles the question by marshaling a diverse array of data collected during extended fieldwork in Colombia. The book’s overarching focus on theorizing postconflict violence has important scholarly as well as practical implications. Existing civil war literature provides insights into the factors that shape the onset of conflict (Fearon and Laitin Reference Fearon and Laitin2003; Collier and Hoeffler Reference Collier and Hoeffler2004), its duration (Cunningham et al. Reference Cunningham, Gleditsch and Salehyan2009), and recurrence (Doyle and Sambanis Reference Doyle and Sambanis2000). Other studies unpack the nature, logic, and patterns of wartime violence across both space and time (Kalyvas Reference Kalyvas2006). Still others theorize empirical variation in forms of governance that rebel groups forge in wartime settings (Weinstein Reference Weinstein2006; Mampilly Reference Mampilly2011; Arjona Reference Arjona2016). Daly builds on and extends this research agenda by analyzing how the strategic interactions between armed actors, specifically militias, shape the potential for postwar peace. The findings should be of particular interest to scholars of politics in Latin America, where levels of violence in some countries, such as El Salvador, exceed those experienced during the region’s political conflicts and pose complex challenges for development and democracy. Systematic efforts to better our understanding of the factors that shape postwar violence are therefore both academically and substantively important.
To explain variation in the behavior of armed actors after a civil war ends, Daly draws our attention to the geography of recruitment that armed actors used during the war. The argument is developed in two moves. The first distinguishes armed groups by their recruitment strategy. Groups that rely on a local strategy of recruitment draw members from the areas where they operate, whereas organizations that use nonlocal strategies recruit people from areas other than those where they deploy.
This crucial distinction begins to account for postwar dynamics because the nature of the recruitment strategy shapes the potential institutional cohesion and coercive capacity of the organizations once the conflict officially ends. Groups that use local recruitment strategies are more easily able to reactivate their institutional structure because members are bound by strong social networks that predate the conflict and remain geographically clustered, given the overlap between their communities and the locales where they operated. By contrast, nonlocal organizations lack similarly high levels of social cohesion among members, who are also more likely to disperse following the war’s end. This effectively stymies the ability of nonlocal groups to accurately gauge former members’ commitment to the organization and the project of remilitarization, as well as their information-gathering capacity.
After making this conceptual move, Daly then develops the second component of the argument. She shifts to an interactive model that yields hypotheses regarding bargaining outcomes between armed nonstate actors. The nature of these outcomes will vary depending on the types of recruitment strategies the parties relied on during the war. In general, bargaining between groups that employed contrasting recruitment strategies is more likely to end in violence. This is precisely because nonlocal groups cannot draw on local networks and knowledge to clearly identify their own capacities, as well as those of their rival. Local groups, by contrast, count on these resources and thus emerge stronger in the postconflict scenario.
This variation in organizational capacity is key to the book’s argument, because for peace to hold, one of two scenarios must emerge. Either the balance of power between rivals must remain static, or both actors must concur on how the balance of power has shifted. Thus, postconflict peace endures only when both groups rely on local recruitment strategies and thus emerge from the conflict with an equal capacity to remilitarize and knowledge of the others’ capacity to do the same.
To gauge the analytic power of the argument, Daly develops a sophisticated mixed-methods comparative research design that focuses on variation in the trajectories of armed groups in Colombia. The Colombian case provides fertile terrain for this type of study, given the complex dynamics of violence associated with the country’s protracted civil war, which officially ended in 2016. The peace agreement followed a series of polarizing political debates, a national referendum in which a slim majority of the Colombians who cast votes rejected the peace deal with the FARC, and congressional proceedings that approved a revised peace deal. Between 2003 and 2006, the Colombian national government signed a peace accord with 37 paramilitary groups, but 17 of those remilitarized. Why? Daly shows that the geography of recruitment theory provides us with analytical traction to account for this puzzling variation.
The author derives a series of hypotheses from her general theory and then tests them using an impressive series of surveys, including an original survey of ex-combatants, as well as interviews with a wide range of actors, from political leaders to former members of armed groups. At several points in the empirical analysis, it is plainly evident that Daly traversed large stretches of Colombia to painstakingly collect data and, in the process, gained a deep understanding of postconflict politics in the country.
The empirical section then zooms in on three specific cases of the different trajectories that paramilitary organizations in the department of Antioquía took following peace accords with the central government: an ultimately weak attempt at remilitarization by the Bloque Catatumbo, successful remilitarization by the Bloque Elmer Cárdenas, and demilitarization of the Bloque Cacique Nutibara in Medellín, which, nevertheless, ended with the emergence of a powerful criminal organization that wielded significant power in the city. Through a logically structured combination of multiple methods, Daly provides readers with both nuanced and generalizable findings and insights into the complex dynamics of postconflict politics and violence.
This book represents a valuable contribution to the burgeoning literature on the microdynamics of civil war. And part of that contribution is providing researchers with a solid foundation on which to explore additional related questions. For example, how does the experience of war itself alter the individual commitments and collective preferences of members of armed organizations? How do these changes, in turn, weigh on the fortunes of these organizations in postconflict settings? The book suggests that neither socialization nor dynamics of indoctrination during the war shape the level of postwar cohesion among armed groups. But this point merits further research on how the emotional dynamics associated with waging and experiencing violence during civil war can shape subsequent patterns of both conflict and social cohesion (Wood Reference Wood2003; Balcells Reference Balcells2017).
Moreover, social networks can undergo important transformations in their scope, nature, and utility as a result of civil war violence (Wood Reference Wood2008). This observation underscores the need to consider how these transformations may also impact the outcomes that this book examines. These and other questions, however, do not in any way detract from the important theoretical and empirical contributions that this book offers, which will surely fuel fruitful discussion and debate across diverse audiences.
