Resisting Displacement amid Armed Conflict: Community-Level Conditions that Make People More Likely to Stay

Abstract

The paper examines conditions under which communities threatened by armed groups amid the Colombian civil war are most likely to resist displacement. Using a game-theoretic framework and quantitative data, the paper shows that the threatened communities which expect rescue from an armed actor are more likely to resist displacement than those communities which expect no help. Community cohesion has a dual effect on displacement. The amount of peer support among community members reduces their chances to resist displacement, but the extent to which community members are involved in collective decision-making processes makes them less likely to displace. These findings reveal that both displaced communities and those that resisted displacement possess crucial social resources for their post-conflict recovery and development, such as cohesion and strong bonds of solidarity. The paper stresses the importance of local-level organisation coordinating collective decision-making to guarantee the most efficient use of these resources.

Keywords:

• displacement
• resistance
• community cohesion
• civil conflict
• Colombia

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Diego Gambetta, Juan Masullo, other EUI colleagues, JPD editors and reviewers for helpful feedback on various drafts of this paper. All remaining errors are mine.

Notes

1 To be sure, there are cases in which displaced communities that had relocated together organised civil resistance in their new locality and eventually returned to their lands.

2 Interestingly, there are forms of civil resistance accomplished through displacement, such as ‘protest migration’ (so-called hijrat; see Masullo 2015, 66).

3 The evidence in support of this hypothesis, however, is mainly anecdotal; systematic studies largely disconfirmed the argument (see Engel & Ibáñez 2007; Stanley 1987).

4 In order to perform an attack, the challenger must finance its activities with external resources, as in the case of paramilitaries raiding Cauca communities under FARC control (see Guzmán & Moreno 2007).

5 The defender is assumed to be militarily superior to the challenger because it fights in territories under its own control and can count on civilians’ support.

6 The data is publicly available at: https://encuestalongitudinal.uniandes.edu.co/, accessed 5 September 2017.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Krzysztof Krakowski

KRZYSZTOF KRAKOWSKI is a researcher at the European University Institute (EUI). He holds an MSc in Sociology from the University of Oxford. He worked at the Regional Office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for East Africa in Nairobi. In 2015 he received the Italian state prosecutor’s award for research on organised crime.