Social Control in Civil Wars

ABSTRACT

The primacy of territorial control in theories of civil war has advanced our understanding of war dynamics, most notably lethal violence, but has hindered our understanding of the distinct ways in which armed groups seek control over people. We propose to complement territorial control by separately conceptualising social control, which we define as the extent to which armed groups have access to people and their resources. Access to people requires different tactics compared to access to territory, because people are mobile. We develop a framework in which state and non-state armed groups choose whether to prioritise territorial or social control first in order to gain sovereignty, which requires both territorial and social control. Alternatively, armed groups choose to pursue territorial control or social control only, resulting in corridors or social networks, respectively. We illustrate the advantages of the framework by showing how it allows us to analyse armed groups’ tactics to control access to people, to connect research agendas on armed group violence, governance, and civilian displacement, and to better conceptualise armed group power and strength.

Acknowledgements

We thank Ana Arjona, Nicholas Barnes, Stathis Kalyvas, Juan Masullo, Enzo Nussio, Paul Staniland, Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl, Stephanie Schwartz, Sigrid Weber, the Amsterdam Conflict Research Network, participants in the 2022 Conflict Research Society annual conference and the Control in Asymmetric Conflict workshop, and issue editors Alex Waterman and James Worrall, as well as Rebecca Tapscott for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Rubin and Stewart (2022, p. 17) criticise the view that ‘territorial control is a prerequisite for sovereignty, and sovereignty (statehood) (…) a prerequisite for governance’. We agree that governance can occur without territorial control but maintain that (quasi-) statehood is linked to some form of territorial control.

2. In (Legal) Sociology, social control is defined as the opposite of coercive control, ‘the social organisation of a society which rests predominantly and essentially on force – the threat and the use of force’ (Janowitz 1975, p. 84). Social control refers to ‘the capacity of society to regulate itself according to desired principles and values’ (Janowitz 1975, p. 82). The society in question can be a primary group or a nation state, so for legal scholars, law is one form of social control – “government social control’ (Black 1976, p. 2).

3. This is in line with later thinking in sociology. Sociologists acknowledge that even non-coercive forms of control can have a repressive (coercive) component; for Barrington Moore, for example, social control involves an element of repression, whether conscious or unconscious (Janowitz 1975, p. 99). In fact, some sociologists consider social control as an ‘exercise of power’ and a ‘tool for social engineering’ (Meier 1982, p. 42), acknowledging an important role for elites in defining the norms they seek compliance for and enforcing them (Meier 1982, p. 44, 48). Our definition also departs from Migdal’s (1988, p. 22) as ‘the successful subordination of people’s own inclinations of social behaviour or behaviour sought by other social organisations in favour of the behaviour prescribed by [state] rules’. We incorporate the relational aspect element of this definition, but narrow it to focus on armed groups’ more specific aims.

4. Malthaner (2015) considers ‘support relationships’ the broader category and links ‘social control’ to an armed group’s symbolic forms of power and considers it as one possible expression of legitimacy for the group.

5. Of course, in practice, the pursuit of territorial and social control may be more simultaneous. For example, Teo Ballvé (2021, p. 7) suggests that territory is ‘[…] a spatialised political technology, a form of social control over a defined fragment of space’. However, we think our analytical disaggregation has important payoffs.

6. Slater and Kim (2015) describe strategies of ‘standoffish states’, which also follow similar calculations that we describe here, suggesting that this framework may apply more broadly beyond civil war settings.

7. McNamee (2023, p. 5) writes, ‘ … settler [colonists] are simply migrants who partake in projects of territorial conquest”. He contrasts such colonisation with imperialism, which he defines as the acquisition of new territory.

8. Weiner and Teitelbaum (2001, p. 54) define demographic engineering as ‘the full range of government policies intended to affect the size, composition, distribution and growth rate of a population’, and considers ‘state policies to move or remove populations’ (p. 55) as an important subset.

9. Interview with alias ‘William’, Bogotá, Colombia, 6 August 2007.

10. Interview with former Renamo combatant, Nicoadala, Mozambique, 8 March 2012.

11. In his work coding different forms of strategic displacement across civil wars, Lichtenheld (2020) finds that cleansing is most common in conventional civil wars, or wars that are fought for territory across clear frontlines (Kalyvas and Balcells 2010). This finding suggests that the logic we propose here is plausible, because cleansing is associated with territorial control.

12. Kalyvas (2006, p. 29) brackets cases in which armed groups do not aim to govern a population, which include those that feature ethnic cleansing and genocide. But we believe this conflates macro-level war aims with the imperatives of establishing local sovereignty. Social control demands expulsion, relocation and repopulation in ways that systematically vary within wars, even those not driven by genocidal ideologies.

13. With territorial control as a scope condition in the early rebel governance literature (e.g., Mampilly 2011, Arjona 2016), it falls in this category of our model.

14. She also finds that armed groups that she labels territorial challengers ‘tend to victimise civilians in areas to which many supporters of the territorial ruler flee, suggesting that armed groups currently not in control of a certain area punish civilians for siding with the opponent and spoil the relative stability in those areas’ (Weber 2023, p. 3).

15. Restricting mobility and exit has been a primary concern for state-builders as well. Paul Frymer (2017) documents the obsession of the early US federal government with restricting settlement on the frontier in order to avoid conflict with Native Americans and other colonial powers. Steele et al. (2017) describe governance in early modern Japan, when peasants were forbidden to leave their villages. However, mass out-migration was a form of protest that peasants occasionally undertook, especially to protest against high tax rates.

16. We thank Siobhan O’Neil for bringing these examples to our attention.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Corinna Jentzsch

Corinna Jentzsch is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University and author of Violent Resistance: Militia Formation and Civil War in Mozambique (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Abbey Steele

Abbey Steele is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Amsterdam, author of Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War (Cornell University Press, 2017), and founder of the Amsterdam Conflict Research Network.