Non-State Armed Actors, War Economies and Postwar Violence: Examining the Connections

In the context of war, states and non-state actors alike need resources to fund their armed activities. While states can use taxes to this end, non-state actors often need either territorial control to mimic the taxing abilities of a state or to participate in the trade of legal and illegal resources. After a war ends, these activities have no clear-cut end, but they may continue to fund other manifestations of postwar violence. We therefore ask: How do non-state war economies or rebels’ access to economic resources matter for understanding postwar violence? More specifically, what conditions might reinforce or mitigate these legacies after the termination of hostilities? In this paper, we challenge the general assumption that war economies thwart postwar transformations and peacebuilding. Motivated by scattered empirical evidence suggesting significant variation on the ground, we apply a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) research design to examine a sample of 42 postwar episodes. We focus on how the access of rebels and non-state groups to economic resources shape postwar violence. Due to the poor quality of comparable quantitative data across countries, we use a two-step approach. We first identify clusters of postwar societies based on the existence or absence of non-state armed actors’ access to resources and the level of postwar violence. Drawing from these findings, we validate the clusters with illustrative case studies in a second step. Our results show no linear pathway from the actors’ access to resources to postwar crime and violence. In fact, our findings suggest that the characteristics and depth of postwar crime and violence depend on specific and dynamic combinations of political regime and economic state capacities, which operate as intermediating factors fostering violence when weak or mitigating/counteracting violence when strong. Our findings caution against fatalistic—even deterministic—views of war economies shaping postwar societies. Far from being doomed, countries emerging from war find opportunities to strengthen democratic participation and diversify state presence. This confirms long-held notions that peacebuilding, as well as postwar crime and violence, amount largely to a question of building strong, capable, and inclusive institutions.