Spatial and Temporal Dynamics of Civil Resistance in War Contexts

Civil wars and intrastate conflicts are characterized by the armed confrontation between the government of a sovereign nation state and at least one non-state group. Accordingly, conflict research has traditionally put an emphasis on analyzing the dynamics of violence between these actors. Recent findings yet suggest that civil war contexts are also increasingly characterized by another type of—mostly nonviolent—behavior: Non-combatants like social movement organizations and local communities, but also armed actors themselves occasionally rely on methods of civil resistance like street protests or general strikes. These behavioral patterns present a fundamental puzzle: Why do rebel groups that normally rely on armed tactics resort to these rather atypical forms of resistance? And how can we explain that civilians even in these highly threatening environments manage to organize collective action in order to articulate their demands? Although a nascent strand of research has examined the occurrence of wartime protests, the influence of conflict-endogenous factors on these phenomena has hitherto been largely neglected. This dissertation aims at addressing this gap and investigates the spatial and temporal dynamics of civil resistance in war contexts. In the course of four research papers, I analyze under which conditions both armed rebel groups and civilian actors use respective tactics. Moreover, I explore how wartime dynamics affect civil resistance both during and in the immediate aftermath of fighting. The results show a strong association between spatial and temporal conflict dynamics on the one hand and the occurrence of civil resistance on the other hand. With the examination of the influence of conflict-endogenous processes, these results contribute to a thriving strand of literature in conflict research that puts an emphasis on the investigation of civil resistance in war contexts