Locating the “Local” in Peacebuilding

Drawing on an extensive literature review and four case studies from leading examples of post-conflict local peacebuilding in sub-Saharan Africa, this report argues that the “local” in local peacebuilding is best defined as local knowledge of conflict drivers and dynamics and locally defined, contextually specific definitions of peace. This does not necessarily mean working through or empowering “traditional” actors and institutions (a highly contested category, in any case). Nor should it mean a narrow focus on subnational conflict drivers and peace actors to the detriment of assessing how national and international dynamics shape local peace challenges (and vice versa). International donors and peace actors are most successful when they operate with a keen awareness that all potential peacebuilding actors (national and local actors, but also external donors, "experts," and implementers) have their own agendas and that peacebuilding efforts that work at the sub-national level and engage local actors are not automatically endowed with legitimacy and community buy-in just because of their "localness." International actors must also be flexible and open to partnering with a wide range of local actors, including those that don’t meet preconceived international expectations about what an effective local partner looks like (often, old, male, and "traditional").

Pastoralism, Ethnicity, and Subnational Conflict Resolution in the Middle Belt

This chapter explores the problem of rising pastoralist–farmer and ethnic (religious and tribal) violence in the pluralistic Middle Belt region of Nigeria over the past thirty to forty years. In particular, it highlights the underlying issues and conflicts associated with these different categories of communal intergroup violence, the human and material costs of such conflict, and the broader implications for the Nigerian state. The federal government, states, local governments. and communities have not been passive in addressing the considerable challenges associated with preventing and resolving such conflicts. It is clear, however, that they face significant hurdles in resolving the underlying grievances and drivers of conflict, and their efforts have not always furthered the cause of conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Greater attention to patterns of inclusion and exclusion and to the allocation of rights and resources will be necessary, particularly at the state and local government levels, to create a more stable and peaceful Middle Belt.

Dynamics Of Hydropolitics Sustaining Conflict And Catalyzing Cooperation

As noted in the Introduction, it is far from clear why subnational jurisdictions like states and provinces would choose to fight over water, especially for prolonged periods of time. Enmeshed in deep political, social, and economic relationships, these jurisdictions and the politicians who lead them would seem to have much more to gain from cooperation than conflict. In this chapter, I explain the emer¬gence and persistence of subnational conflict and cooperation over water in terms of two oppositional factors, sectional identity and political opportunity structure. As I describe further in this chapter, persistent interjurisdictional water conflict usually results from the conflation of shared water resources and sectional identity. In particular, subnational political leaders often seek to gain political support from geographically concentrated ethnic, linguistic, or other groups by alleging that neighboring groups are effectively stealing water at their constituents’ expense. Because of the unique economic importance and emotional resonance of water, such allegations are highly effective in mobilizing political support, and successive subnational politicians can find it expedient to engage in confrontational rather than cooperative behavior. Using water as a tool for political mobilization can also help subnational politicians achieve other objectives, including enhancing their autonomy, distracting from other political challenges, and outflanking opposition parties. On the other hand, where the political opportunity structure in a given country enables third parties to form alliances with national political elites, these alliances create a constituency for strong interjurisdictional institutions that can prevent and resolve conflicts over shared water resources. This chapter proceeds in three sections. First, it explains how the conflation of sectional identity and shared water resources sustains interjurisdictional conflict over long periods of time. The desire of subnational politicians and geographically concentrated water user groups to seek broader support for their objectives leads them to link water-sharing issues to sectional identity. The second section describes how, provided they enjoy access to the political process, third parties can help to induce collective action in shared river basins.

Deconstructing the State: Subnational Conflict and Cooperation over Water

The concept of hydropolitics outlined in the Introduction defines conflict and cooperation over water as part of a set of interactions that occur at both international and subnational levels. On this definition, conflicts between states, provinces, or municipalities differ in degree from those that occur between countries but not necessarily in kind. Indeed, as this chapter details, there are many more similarities than differences between international and subnational hydropolitics. But reconceptualizing hydropolitics as a continuum rather than a dichotomy between international and subnational levels requires considerable elaboration, which this chapter attempts in three sections. The first seeks to better define subnational hydropolitics by comparing and contrasting it with its international equivalent, noting in particular a long-term trend toward greater institutionalized cooperation at the international, but not necessarily the subnational, level. The second explains this divergence by exploring the many constraints that central governments face in attempting to manage water resources, especially when political power is decentralized. As this section demonstrates, contrary to popular belief, shared water resources can be difficult to manage even when they are contained within the same country. Finally, the third builds on this conceptual foundation by adding an empirical survey of subnational hydropolitics in ten countries, in the process sketching its three basic dimensions: interjurisdictional, intergovernmental, and state–society relationships. In reconceptualizing hydropolitics along these lines, this chapter attempts to address the first of the key questions raised in the Introduction, namely why interjurisdictional collective action in shared river basins can be equally or even more difficult at the subnational than the international level. The answer has much to do with the often unappreciated limits of the state in managing shared water resources—and the likewise unrecognized role that subnational political elites can play in hindering its involvement. But states are not without their advantages: as Chapter 3 details, they can offer third parties opportunities to support cooperation instead of conflict.

Measuring the landscape of civil war

Subnational conflict research increasingly utilizes georeferenced event datasets to understand contentious politics and violence. Yet, how exactly locations are mapped to particular geographies, especially from unstructured text sources such as newspaper reports and archival records, remains opaque and few best practices exist for guiding researchers through the subtle but consequential decisions made during geolocation. We begin to address this gap by developing a systematic approach to georeferencing that articulates the strategies available, empirically diagnoses problems of bias created by both the data generating process and researcher-controlled tasks, and provides new generalizable tools for simultaneously optimizing both the recovery and accuracy of coordinates. We then empirically evaluate our process and tools against new micro-level data on the Mau Mau rebellion (colonial Kenya 1952–60), drawn from 20,000 pages of recently declassified British military intelligence reports. By leveraging a subset of these data that includes map codes alongside natural language location descriptions, we demonstrate how inappropriately georeferencing data can have important downstream consequences in terms of systematically biasing coefficients or altering statistical significance and how our tools can help alleviate these problems.

Where Rebels Dare to Tread

This analysis illustrates how violence patterns are shaped by local power concentrations. Disaggregated conflict analysis has led to major advances into understanding conflict trends, agents, and dynamics of violence but has not been matched by studies of disaggregated politics, in particular on the subnational level. This analysis details how conflict event location, frequency, and intensity is largely determined by levels of customary authority and development; while armed group bases and control networks are established in areas characterized by weak, co-opted local authorities, wealth generation possibilities, and proximity to other network nodes. This demonstrates that dominant opposition groups co-opt local elites and target those who cannot be easily co-opted or belong to alternative networks. Manifestations of conflict are therefore not well explained by the typically static resource, poverty, or state capacity measures. Local politics and customary authority determine where government, rebels, and militias dare to tread. Sierra Leone Local–Location Event Dataset—a new disaggregated data set on the Sierra Leone war and local source feature of Armed Conflict Location and Event Data—provides substantial evidence for our subnational conflict explanations.

From Loss to Looting? Battlefield Costs and Rebel Incentives for Violence

Research into the causes of civilian abuse during civil conflict has increased significantly in recent years, yet the mechanisms responsible for changes in actors' tactics remain poorly understood. I investigate how the outcomes of discrete conflict interactions influence subsequent patterns of rebel violence against civilians. Two competing logics suggest opposite influences of material loss on violence. A stylized model of rebel-civilian bargaining illustrates how acute resource demands resulting from recent severe conflict losses may incentivize insurgent violence and predation. I also identify several factors that might condition this relationship. I evaluate hypotheses based on these expectations by first analyzing the behaviors of the Lord's Resistance Army using subnational conflict data and then analyzing a cross-sectional sample of post–Cold War African insurgencies. Results from both the micro- and macrolevel analyses suggest that rising battlefield costs incentivize attacks on civilians in the period immediately following the accrual of losses. However, group-level factors such as effective control over territory and the sources of rebel financing condition this relationship. The findings suggest potential benefits from examining the interaction of strategic conditions and more static organizational characteristics in explaining temporal and geographic variation in rebel violence.