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Under what conditions do rebel organizations control territory during civil war? How do civilians influence the distribution of territorial control? Why do rebels invest in governance, and why do they target civilians with violence, in some locations but not others? This dissertation advances a political accountability theory to explain how civilians influence the distribution of territorial control and governance during civil war. Existing research explaining variation in rebel territorial control and behavior have emphasized structural and organizational factors, identity politics, economic conditions, and geography. However, the classic insurgency literature and recent counterinsurgency doctrine emphasize the importance of securing civilian support and protecting the population to achieving military objectives in civil war. If true, civilians retain at least some power over rebel personnel. The accountability theory of rebel conduct provides a unified framework linking inter-related conflict processes associated with rebel groups’ territorial control, governance, and strategic use of violence during civil war. It argues that community collective action capacity, the ease with which communities facilitate collective action to pursue common interests, influences the distribution territorial control and belligerent conduct during civil war. The empirical strategy draws upon complementary quantitative and qualitative methods to test the accountability against plausible alternatives using village-level data from the communist insurgency in the Philippines. The results provide robust support for the accountability theory over plausible alternatives, and yield policy implications for peace-building and economic development in conflict-affected states.
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Mapping and the politics of informality in Jakarta
Recent research has argued that, rather than viewing the “informality” of settlements as an empirically stable phenomenon that can be readily defined and measured based on legal and institutional criteria, informality should instead be viewed as a sociopolitical construct produced by the state in the interests of territorial control. This paper examines the implications of the increasing accessibility of geospatial data and technology for state framings of informality. We specifically ask how state actors have sought to define the “legitimacy” and “formality” of settlement types in mapping, how these mapping efforts have related to change and continuity in discourses and debates within the state about the idea of informality, and how the political dynamics that inform the production of informality have shifted through interactions with communities. We focus on the case of Jakarta, examining recent efforts to map “irregular” settlements, “slums” and “kampung” through an analysis of spatial data, interviews with bureaucrats, and a review of literature on community-based countermapping. We find that mapping efforts apply diverse definitions of informality, based variously on legal/regulatory, developmental, or morphological criteria. These efforts are shaped by the path-dependent interests of varied state agencies in legitimizing and enabling state territorial control.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1759596
- PAR ID:
- 10383449
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Urban Geography
- ISSN:
- 0272-3638
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 25
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2022.2059321
