Civilian loyalty and agency in insecure spaces

Abstract

This dissertation examines how civilians, as a diverse category of people, influence political, social and economic environments around them and relate to futures during armed conflicts characterised by multiple competing authorities of the state and different non-state armed groups (NSAGs). It draws on a six-year ethnographic study, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, to investigate the dynamic interactions between the state, non-state armed groups and civilians during a decade armed conflicts in Lake Chad Basin region. The seven studies presented therein offer novel insights on civilians’ entanglements with armed conflicts through an emphasis on loyalty, risk preference, political (dis)content, mobility practices and futures in insecure spaces. Insecure spaces are not just ungoverned spaces in the sense of statelessness or a complete absence of state in conflict-torn areas as advanced in many studies on fragile states. Rather, this dissertation characterises insecure spaces as a territory and a society governed by overlapping and competing authorities. In this regard, the state has no monopoly of control over territory, civilian population and civilian behaviours, because non-state actors organically and historically co-exist and function as an alternative to the state due to the permanent incompleteness of statehood within a given state territory prior to and during armed conflicts. <br /> Despite co-evolution of state and non-state (traditional) institutions in post-colonial states within the Lake Chad Basin (LCB) region, statehood appears enduringly incomplete and unfinished because the process of building, integrating and enforcing the Weberian institutions continuously fails to run in parallel with socioeconomic, cultural and political development at local scale. The incomplete permeability of statehood into the society reinforces the subsistence of non-state actors with overlapping and competing authorities within given state territory, and this arguably explains why armed conflicts last longer than expected in the region despite the local and international counterinsurgency efforts. As a result, where state presence appears too weak, different NSAGs assume the functions of the state in complementary or contradictory manners. This, in many instances, slows down the permeability of statehood at local scale, thereby making a conflict resolution through state-recognized channels futile and unattainable. The state’s ineffective control of the frontline areas encourages civilians’ self-organised strategies outside formal security arrangements. This leads to the proliferation of civilian militias whose functions overlap and compete with the state. The influence of NSAGs over civilian behaviours within state-controlled jurisdictions and beyond the frontline areas capture the depth of hybrid governance in operation in the LCB region. <br /> This dissertation advances that civilian loyalty is always incomplete, hence overlapping and multiple, in conflict-affected states organically governed by hybrid political orders. Such overlapping and multiple loyalties affect how civilians develop strategies to navigate the evolving security scene during insurgency and counterinsugency in the LCB region: that is, how civilians exercise agency to relate to uncertain and unpredictable futures. Based on this, civilian risk preferences, adaptive strategies, mobility choices and future practices embed and are constitutive of the multiple competing orders of the state, NSAGs and other non-state actors with a varying degree of influence and control in the frontline areas. This dissertation offers valuable insights into emerging trends on civilian loyalty and agency in armed conflicts that deserve further research.