The Political Legacies of Rebel Rule: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Côte d’Ivoire

Abstract

How does exposure to rebel rule affect citizens’ political attitudes after armed conflicts end? We combine original survey data from Côte d’Ivoire with a natural experiment based on the arbitrary location of a ceasefire boundary to estimate the effects of exposure to rebel rule by the Forces Nouvelles (FN) on Ivorians’ sense of democratic citizenship. Our findings show that individuals in communities ruled by the FN held more negative attitudes about local government institutions 7 years after the reunification of the country, held weaker commitments to civic obligations, and were more likely to condone extralegal actions. The effects of rebel rule are larger than the effects of extreme lived poverty and appear among both rebel coethnics and non-coethnics. Using qualitative and survey evidence, we propose three theoretical mechanisms to explain why exposure to rebel rule weakened citizen-state relations: disrupted norms of compliance with state-like authorities, the formation of local self-help institutions leading to negative assessments of the redeployed state, and resentment due to unmet expectations of economic recovery. Our study informs debates about the links between war, citizenship, and statebuilding.

Rebel Governance and Development: The Persistent Effects of Guerrillas in El Salvador

“…Qualitative and quantitative evidence suggests civilians have lived under the control of non-state armed groups in countries with civil war. These cases span the globe and include highly developed governance systems like that of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka (Kubota, 2017), mixtures of direct and local power-sharing in C ôte d'Ivoire (Martin, Piccolino and Speight, 2022), and centralized, hierarchical governmental structures under communist rebel control during the Greek Civil War (Kalyvas et al, 2015). In most of these territories, rebels create autonomous governing institutions that seek to emancipate civilians from the state and out-groups.…”

“…Local norms of cooperation and solidarity can reinforce distrust of external authorities if the state is negatively viewed by individuals in the postwar era relative to local alternatives. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence of inter-group distrust across territories controlled by the state and rebels in the aftermath of conflict, provoked by disruptions in ordinary interactions, to legitimize the rebels' cause or due to security concerns (Kubota, 2017;Martin, Piccolino and Speight, 2022). Norms of distrust can have significant long-term effects, including precluding economic cooperation among groups.…”

The Legacies of Rebel Rule in Southeast Turkey

“…We control for education level and age, and include dummy variables for two provinces whose residents display unusually low levels of trust in the judiciary (e.g., İstanbul and İzmir). 21 Furthermore, rebels are often more successful in extending their governance to areas where civilian constituents are already distrustful of the state governance institutions (Martin et al, 2022). In other words, rebel governance areas may be selected by rebels for reasons that may be endogenous to trust in the judiciary.…”

Civil Wars as Critical Junctures: Theoretical Grounding and Empirical Applications

“…Blattman's qualitative evidence, however, was used cursorily to confirm survey results, rather than tracing fully how the civil war changed Ugandan youths' patterns of participation from pre-war norms, beyond differentiating those who were and were not abducted during the war. Such prosocial effects of exposure to civil war have been found in a variety of settings (see Bauer et al 2016), 8 but these participatory effects and attitudes towards the state and other groups may be mediated by social network ties (Dorff 2017) or by whether individuals lived primarily under government or rebel control (Liu 2022;Martin, Piccolino, and Speight 2022). This last point suggests that deeper long-term analyses could complement quantitative observational or experimental data with longitudinal qualitative process tracing to explore how experiences and social ties interact during and after the critical juncture of civil war to shift and then reinforce participatory patterns.…”