I thank Ches Thurber for a careful reading of my book Violent Resistance and a thoughtful discussion of its approach and arguments. I consider my book, as Thurber suggests himself, as articulating a research program on community-initiated militias, in which concepts are carefully developed, the breadth of the phenomenon analyzed, and links to existing research agendas established. I appreciate Thurber’s recognition that approaching a new research area through theoretical reflection on the basis of in-depth, immersive fieldwork and careful qualitative analysis is particularly valuable. The militias research program is important because such third actors are common phenomena across civil wars on different continents, and often contribute immensely to how wars evolve, but theories of civil war often overlook them, remaining attached to a dichotomous understanding of actors in conflicts.
I would like to engage with four questions for further discussion. First, what role did early success stories play in the formation and evolution of the Naparama militias in Mozambique? As I argue in Chapter 6 on diffusion, Naparama’s battlefield victories against the insurgents helped spread the idea of forming a militia, but did not help to establish militias in a sustained, long-term manner. The charismatic leadership of Manuel António played a role in convincing civilians to join as it made the militia’s power credible and the idea of forming militias within communities resonate. But what facilitated the militia to form long-term was unity and trust among community elites.
Second, can the argument apply to pre-existing organizations that take on the role of militias in civil war? I contend that even pre-existing groups—though they might have a start-up advantage in terms of organizational and human resources—need to remobilize and innovate to bring hope to people and attract their support, which means that the way they approach the war needs to resonate with the community. They might also be re-activated through wartime local stalemates; in that sense, the theory could apply to pre-existing groups, as their character and purpose needs to be adapted to the current wartime conditions.
Third, more generally, what is the universe of cases of the book’s theory? I define the scope conditions as applying to community-initiated militias in irregular civil wars. The fact that governments or political elites quickly co-opt militias that arise from bottom-up initiatives can make it difficult to recognize specific instances of community-initiated militias, but we have examples from across continents and social contexts, from Colombia to Nigeria to the Philippines and beyond. Probing to what extent the stalemate argument can account for the emergence of militias beyond Mozambique would be a promising project, as would analyzing the social foundations and conventions upon which these groups build.
Lastly, Thurber is right in pointing out that some of the most interesting questions that follow from the focus on violent civilian resistance are to explain what form civilian agency takes, under what conditions it takes a violent form, and when it remains non-violent. In forthcoming work, I engage with these questions more directly and consider community-initiated militias as “armed forms of civilian self-protection,” to be included in a spectrum of non-violent and violent forms of self-protection that communities engage in collectively, from the non-violent to the violent. Studying violence and non-violence alongside each other is a promising area of future research to understand the trajectories of civilian collective action in civil wars and beyond.
