The UBC Department of Political Science’s Distinguished Speaker Series hosts Professor Abbey Steele (University of Amsterdam), for her talk titled, “Rebel Governance and Post-conflict Political Participation” on Monday, January 31, 2022.
Abstract (based on joint work with Michael Weintraub):
Rebels, militias, and criminal groups govern civilians, in competition with or alongside the state. We argue that governing strategies adopted by armed groups during civil war produce variation in how citizens in post-conflict environments participate in politics. In particular, an armed group’s position relative to the state and its ideology of governance interact to influence individuals’ later choices about political participation. Armed groups are either anti- or pro-state, and engage in shared or centralized governance. We expect that anti-state groups that engage in shared governance are likely to lead individuals to be more engaged in informal politics in the long term. Informal politics include strikes and protests, and participation in community councils. In contrast, we expect pro-state armed groups that engage in centralized governance to be associated with higher participation in formal political channels, such as electoral politics and contact with politicians. We test our expectations with an original survey of 12,000 households from war-affected communities in Colombia. We find that respondents who reported governance by either the FARC or the paramilitaries were also more likely to report participation in formal political channels, and in informal channels, than those who did not report experiencing rebel rule. We then explore some potential explanations for these unexpected outcomes. Our study demonstrates the importance of exposure to wartime governance by armed groups and forms of post-war political participation, with implications for the health of post-war democracy and civic life.
Bio:
Dr. Abbey Steele
Abbey Steele is an associate professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and the director of the Amsterdam Center for Conflict Studies. She holds a PhD in political science from Yale University (2010), and was a post-doctoral fellow with the Empirical Studies of Conflict project at Princeton University and an assistant professor at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Her research interests include civil wars, civilian displacement, and state-building. Her book, Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War (2017, Cornell University Press), draws on nearly two years of fieldwork in Colombia and explains how democratic reforms led counterinsurgent groups to engage in political cleansing. She is currently researching state-building and the peace process in Colombia in collaboration with UNDP Bogotá, and resettlement patterns of the displaced. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Peace Research, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Conflict Management and Peace Science, and the American Political Science Review.