The UBC Department of Political Science’s Distinguished Speaker Series hosts Professor Abbey Steele (University of Am sterdam)\, for her talk titled\, “Rebel Governance and Post-conflict Politi cal Participation" on Monday\, January 31\, 2022.
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Rebels\, militias\, an d criminal groups govern civilians\, in competition with or alongside the s tate. We argue that governing strategies adopted by armed groups during civ il war produce variation in how citizens in post-conflict environments part icipate 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 t hat anti-state groups that engage in shared governance are likely to lead i ndividuals to be more engaged in informal politics in the long term. Inform al politics include strikes and protests\, and participation in community c ouncils. In contrast\, we expect pro-state armed groups that engage in cent ralized governance to be associated with higher participation in formal pol itical 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 reporte d governance by either the FARC or the paramilitaries were also more likely to report participation in formal political channels\, and in informal cha nnels\, than those who did not report experiencing rebel rule. We then expl ore some potential explanations for these unexpected outcomes. Our study de monstrates 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.
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Abbey Steele is an associate professor of political science at th e University of Amsterdam (UvA)\, and the director of the Amsterdam Center for Conflict Studies. She holds a PhD in political science from Yale Univer sity (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\, Democrac y and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War (2017\, Cornell University Press)\, draws on nearly two years of fieldwork in Colombia and explains ho w democratic reforms led counterinsurgent groups to engage in political cle ansing. She is currently researching state-building and the peace process i n Colombia in collaboration with UNDP Bogotá\, and resettlement patterns of the displaced. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Jo urnal of Peace Research\, the Journal of Conflict Resolution\ , Conflict Management and Peace Science\, and the Ame rican Political Science Review.
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