Description:

Please join the Comparative Politics Workshop as they host Ana Arjona, Associate Professor of Political Science, and Andrew Saab, Ph.D Candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University. With discussant Alisher Juzgenbayev.

Non-state armed groups are widely believed to thrive and govern local populations where the state is weak, especially where it fails to provide security, services, and infrastructure. We challenge this conventional wisdom by arguing, first, that it is governance quality—not state presence—that influences non-state armed rule; second, that dispute resolution institutions are as critical as security, services, and infrastructure; and third, that while state presence can prevent rebel and criminal governance, it can also facilitate it by disrupting pre-existing mechanisms for adjudication. Relying on original data on 75 localities in Colombia (1970-2021), we find that high-quality governance is associated with lower levels of non-state rule while state presence is not. We also find that the presence of police stations, schools, and health centers does not prevent rebel and criminal governance, while high-quality dispute resolution institutions consistently do, regardless of whether provided by the state, ethnic authorities, or peasant organizations. In addition, various forms of state presence are associated with more non-state armed governance when accompanied by poor dispute adjudication. These findings have important implications for research on state capacity and civil war, and challenge common approaches to counterinsurgency and crime prevention by highlighting the central role of non-state governance and dispute resolution mechanisms.

Ana Arjona is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. She was the Director of the Center for the Study of Security and Drugs at Los Andes University in Bogota, Colombia in 2018-2019, where she is now Associate Researcher. She obtained her PhD in political science from Yale University (with distinction), and has been a Fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her research investigates the dynamics and legacies of organized violence, especially civil wars and organized crime, local governance, state building, and the foundations of political order. She is the author of the award-winning book Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2016), co-editor of Rebel Governance in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and author of several articles and book chapters.

Andrew Saab is a Ph.D Candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University. His research interests include Political Economy; Institutions and Political Behavior; Policy-Making and Group Decision-Making; Armed Conflict and Violence; Computational Social Science.