Raise Your Voices! The Occurrence of Nonviolent Campaigns in Civil Wars

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Johannes Vüllers
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 282028664

The project addresses the political role of civilians, and particularly civilian nonviolent activism during civil wars. As many case studies have shown, civilians are often relevant and even pivotal actors in civil wars that need to be studied in a systematic way. Four gaps in the literature exist: Research neglects nonviolent campaigns during civil wars; non-consideration of campaigns against rebels; a selection bias against small campaigns; and existing data collections are on a highly aggregated level. The project aims to address these gaps by answering the following question: Why do nonviolent campaigns occur in civil wars? The theoretical model takes the civil war context into account: Fighting activities will lead social identity groups to be more risk-taking; social identity groups who lack an affiliation with one of the conflict parties will view campaigns as a promising way to influence the conflict parties policies; geographically concentrated social identity groups have dense group networks that reduce the costs of mobilization; and the risks associated with campaigns will be lower for social identity groups in areas controlled by the state than in rebel-controlled areas. The project will use quantitative and qualitative methods on different levels of analysis to study the proposed mechanisms empirically. First, the project will analyze campaign occurrence in civil wars using a global data set for the period 1989 to 2005. Second, a quantitative subnational analysis of campaigns in the Nepalese civil war takes the dynamics of a civil war into account and will use more fine-grained data by collecting information from local sources. The data for the independent and control variables for both analyses are available from other data sets. Third, process tracing of four selected Nepalese districts will aim to provide insights into the causal mechanisms explaining the occurrence of campaigns in the midst of civil wars.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants