This chapter emphasizes how the various steps in the process of disengagement from extremism are linked fundamentally to the nature of linkages between insurgency and society, thereby bringing civil society into the study of insurgency in a theoretically coherent way. In places where structural violence is pervasive and spectacular episodes of violence are also recurrent, this chapter shows how, from the perspective of local population, the conceptual lines between war and peace, legit and illicit, state and insurgency, lawful and lawless, crimes and political acts, police action and rebel resistance become blurred. Surrounded by violent specialists belonging to two warring sides, civilians in conflict zones learn to inhabit one foot in insurgency and one foot in the state, creating a sprawling gray zone of state-insurgency overlap. It is in these gray zones where grassroots civic associations nurture the first traces of informal exit networks, more successfully in the South than in the North.