Event: Where do Violent Norms Come From? Organisation, Power, and Space in Civil War

Event recording from 13/02/2017 Speaker: Dr Zoe Marks, Chancellor’s Fellow (Lecturer), Centre of African Studies and Co-Director, Global Development Academy, University of Edinburgh. Chair: Dr Kieran Mitton, CSDRG, War Studies, King's College London. Abstract: Guerrilla war requires careful coordination between rebel groups and the local population. Yet, many groups fighting for liberation and power to the people instead attack and oppress the people. In this paper, I demonstrate that the conceptual divide between violence and governance is partly an artefact of the data we have had available, and disguises the close relationship between coercion and authority in civil war. Using what has become the paradigmatic case for brutal anticivilian violence – the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone – I trace the processes by which violent norms and institutions were created within the rebel group and evolved over time. The analysis achieves two things. First, it shows that rationalist theories of individual ‘opportunism’ have limited explanatory value unless tied to the policies, power structures, and processes of the organization itself. I explain the relationship between violent norms and behavior through a framework of sociological institutionalism. Second, I examine the link between violence, governance, and military strategy, the latter of which has often been obscured in recent studies of civil war. Incorporating strategic choices made at the organizational level helps explain change over time in patterns of violence. Speaker Profile: Zoe Marks is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Lecturer in the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, where she is Director of the MSc in African Studies. Her research focuses on conflict and civil war, armed groups, gender relations, and post-conflict development. Her work examines the internal dynamics of rebellion and the post-conflict trajectories of ex-combatants. Her gender-related research focuses on sexual violence, the role of women in armed groups, female power brokers, and understanding victimhood and survival in social context. She is lead author and co-investigator on the ESRC-DFID Poverty Alleviation Research project 'Poverty and Conflict', which tracks social capital and economic survival during and after war through surveys, social network analysis, and qualitative research in DR Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Dr Marks is also leading two projects under the DFID-funded Political Settlements Research Programme: one on the inclusion of armed actors in post-conflict political settlements; and one on women's peace activism in conflict contexts. Dr Marks received her DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford and MSc in African Studies (also from Oxford); she holds a BA in Government and African American Studies from Georgetown University. Her work has appeared in African Affairs, Civil Wars, the Journal of Modern African Studies, and edited volumes; she is on the editorial board for Critical African Studies. The 'Approaches to Understanding Violence Seminar Series' is a programme of multidisciplinary lectures and events on the subject of violence, part of a CSDRG project led by Dr Kieran Mitton. Find out more here: www.kcl.ac.uk/csd. To sign-up to our mailing list simply send a blank email to: [email protected] For more information, visit http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/warstudies/events/eventsrecords/marks.aspx.