State-society relations in civil conflicts

Civil conflicts are conceptualized as asymmetric, population-centric military struggles. The argument is that insurgencies, even though they are no match in military power to their state adversaries in many cases, resort to armed struggle nonetheless as a tool to impair state capacity, the quality o...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Kıbrıs, Arzu (Author) ; Kibris, Özgür (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Published: 2020
In: Terrorism and political violence
Year: 2020, Volume: 32, Issue: 1, Pages: 138-166
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Keywords:
Civil conflict
military control
state-society relations
popular support
adjudication
Description
Summary:Civil conflicts are conceptualized as asymmetric, population-centric military struggles. The argument is that insurgencies, even though they are no match in military power to their state adversaries in many cases, resort to armed struggle nonetheless as a tool to impair state capacity, the quality of governance, and the ability of the state to honor the “social contract” in order to eventually destroy state authority and render the state irrelevant for the society. Note that this argument implies that state-society relations do react to the military course of the conflict. In this article, we provide empirical evidence for this implication. Introducing a new panel dataset on the long-running civil conflict in Turkey, we first conduct a micro-level analysis and demonstrate the significant impact rebel presence has upon state-society relations across localities and time. We then analyze the results of semi-structured interviews we had conducted with a group of experts from the conflict regions to decipher the possible mechanisms behind the association we observe in the data. The interviews support our motivating theoretical argument.
Item Description:Gesehen am 01.03.2023
Published online: 02 Oct 2017
Physical Description:Diagramme
ISSN:1556-1836
DOI:10.1080/09546553.2017.1364634