Civilian Experience of Violence in Civil War and Armed Conflict

Abstract

The third chapter, Civilian Experience of Violence in Civil War and Armed Conflict, will be principally conceptual, and draw upon the increasingly consolidated scholarship dedicated to the comprehension of the logic of counterinsurgent, insurgent and paramilitary violence and the strategies that non-combatants formulate during armed conflict. The chapter sets out the definitional parameters that will frame the research and subsequently explores the debates regarding how and why individuals collaborate with armed actors in contexts of irregular warfare. The chapter explains conventional framings of violence in civil war and armed conflict and moves on to study important critiques presented by scholars such as Kalyvas. The argument that will be presented is that, in the case of Guatemala, diverse and interconnected factors explain the motivations behind individual and collective collaboration with the insurgency. Whilst ideology mattered, other aspects were also crucial in shaping individuals’ decisions to take up arms or to collaborate with the rebels: in short, not all violence was necessarily political.