DOI: 10.5064/f6z5a2a7
title: Data for: Ideational Factors and Civilian Contention in Civil War

description: &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;This is an &lt;a href="https://qdr.syr.edu/ati"&gt;Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI)&lt;/a&gt; data project. &lt;/b&gt; &lt;h3&gt;The annotated article can be viewed on the &lt;a href="https://qdr.syr.edu/atipaper/ideational-factors-and-civilian-contention#annotations:group:2Nopp9mx
" &gt;ATI website&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;h3/&gt; &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h3&gt;Project Summary&lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For long civil war scholarship largely ignored, or at best downplayed, the role of ideology in
shaping both macro processes and micro dynamics of civil strive. While in recent years we
have seen a renewed interest in exploring whether and how ideology matters, most of this
work, naturally, has focused on how ideology shapes armed groups’ behavior. In this paper,
I shift the focus away from armed organizations and argue that ideational factors are also
fundamental to understand the ways in which organized civilians respond to armed groups.
I focus on one particular response, civilian noncooperation — i.e., the refusal to cooperate
with each and every armed group present in their territory – and argue that the form that
noncooperation takes is – at least partly – shaped by normative and ideological commitments.
Ideational forces have an impact on civilians’ repertoire of action and contentious
performances: they push civilians towards nonviolent forms of noncooperation (as opposed
to armed resistance) and incentivize them to engage in more confrontational forms of noncooperation.
Relying on original micro-level data collected in warzones in Colombia, and using
the strategy of paired comparisons, I provide detailed evidence for this argument and cast
doubt on some alternative explanations. I trace the effect of ideational factors on the repertoire
of action in three campaigns that engaged in distinguishable forms of noncooperation
and show that the effect is independent and comes from exogenous sources.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h3&gt;Data Generation and Analysis&lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The data for this paper was collected in two different waves of fieldwork conducted in 2014 and
2015. During the two waves of fieldwork, I conducted over 150 semi-structured interviews and
plenty of conversational, open-ended interviews with a wide array of actors that played a role
in the process of mounting noncooperation campaigns in the three cases analyzed in the paper.
While interviews different set of actors, including campaign participants and non-participants,
most interviews informing this paper were with participant campesinos.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The choices under study were made several years ago (in the case of the Peasant Worker
Association of the Carare River (ATCC) in 1987, the Peace Community of San Jos´e de Apartad´o
(PCSJA) in 1997, and the Youth’s Project of Peace (Joppaz) in the late 1990s/early 2000s) and
the process that shaped them (as I argue) took off many years before the decision was made.
Therefore, I tried my best to speak to every single resident who was present at the moment of
the choice and who lived through the process leading to it. Consequently, the main profile of my
interviewees was that of older residents. However, in all three localities, I also interviewed and
conducted workshops with participants that were not present when the choice was made, but
knew the history of the campaign through accounts transmitted by elders. Having this “secondhand”
accounts helped me to fact-check the evidence I was getting from key informants, as well
as to get new insights to explore further in subsequent encounters with key informants.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To get a balanced view of the process, I interviewed the founding mothers and fathers of
each campaign, those who were leading the process at the time of my research, as well as
ordinary residents that participated in the campaign but had never played any leadership role.
While getting the insights of leaders and learning in detail about their roles was central for
understanding the topic of tactical choice as analyzed in the paper, interviewing “rank-and-file”
noncooperators was vital to overcome some of the biases common in studies relying exclusively
on testimonies of “elite members” of social movements. Not only did their perspectives and
experiences differ importantly as they had different access points to the process (and played a
different role – or no role – in shaping the form of the campaign), but ordinary participants
often provided more critical and less linear accounts compared to those of leaders.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The campaigns I studied were largely based on one main settlement, where a large number
of participants live and where most of the activities and meetings related to the campaign take
place. Nevertheless, all three campaigns covered several neighboring hamlets, including some as distant as eight hours walking through the dense jungle or by canoe through rivers. My intuition
was that peoples’ experience and perspective of the process could vary according from where
they lived and how close they were to the “center”. To account or this, I took advantage of daily
or weekly events that gathered people from different hamlets in the main settlement (meetings,
community days, market days, parties) and also I visited as many hamlets as I could.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Interviewees were selected following a purposive strategy. I sought to interview people whose
experiences during the war represented a wide variety of roles (e.g., joined the ranks, cooperated,
displaced), choices regarding noncooperation (participating, not participating, engaging
in more/less confrontational forms), and positions with the campaign (founder, leader, ordinary
member). In the hamlets where I could spend longer periods of time, I tried to interview at
least one member of each household and I was attentive to keeping a gender balance. Capturing
multiple viewpoints, and deliberately working around each perspective’s potential biases, proved
to be central for constructing a balanced account of the process. Developing and maintaining
this multi-perspectival orientation would have been virtually impossible had I followed a random
strategy to select informants.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Interviews followed a semi-structured format based on a set of questions informed by theoretical
priors (based on literature and the exploratory case study) and complemented by contextbased
information I had gathered before visiting each locality for the first time. Interviewees
were asked to answer questions about their own personal experience before and during war, their
views on the social and institutional histories of their communities and the trajectories of war
in their localities, and their role in the process of leading/organizing/participating in noncooperation.
Most of my interviews were presented to my respondents and conducted as oral life
histories. As such, they flowed more as a conversation than as a survey or even a semi-structured
interview. Even if I had a clear sense of the questions I needed to ask and the topics I had to
cover based on carefully designed interview instruments, the order of the questions and the flow
of the interview was defined by the way respondents structured their life histories.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Interested in a process that involves the collective formation of meanings and identities, I
made an effort to also gather collective accounts through group interviews and memory workshops
to avoid my reconstruction of the processes to be no more than an aggregation of individual
perspectives. During group interactions, ordered individual accounts of individual participants
often were – passively and/or actively – challenged, qualified, refined by others. This dynamic
illuminated how community members collectively reconstructed and framed the process, yielding
evidence on how individual reconstructions integrate into collective accounts and how collective
meaning is formulated in that integration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I engaged deeply with each of my cases. I lived in their villages and spent most of my time
in activities other than (explicitly) gathering data. I removed cocoa pods from trees, dried their
beens, worked in community gardens (huertas), helped reconstruct trails when rapidly growing
weeds covered them, supported teachers at rural schools, participated in locally organized
potlucks (community sancochos), played with kids, and practiced sports with youngsters. These
activities, not (directly) related to my research, allowed me establish some level of rapport with
villagers that enormously improved my understanding of the context and allowed me to address
sensitive issues that I could have not covered otherwise – e.g, with other techniques such as surveys. A cursory comparison of the information that I got in my very pre-rapport interviews
with that from later iterations clearly reveals that I was able to gather data that would have
been beyond my reach had the relationship remained exclusively formal.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I visited every locality several times in each wave of field work and repeated the same localities
in both waves.1 This presented various advantages. First, it signalled villagers that I was not
there just to extract information and then forget about them, which was a concern than some
explicitly voiced. Upon my return, villagers would even greet me for holding to my promise and
coming back. Visiting communities on several occasions and talking to the same people more
than once, had an enormous impact on the quality of data in various ways.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Being able to compare the testimonies I was collecting revealed discrepancies (both between
testimonies of two different interviewees and between two testimonies of the same interviewee)
that were later dealt with, sometimes even addressing them explicitly with informants. It also
allowed me to identify systematic silences or absences of evidence, that I could more decisively
try to uncover in following trips – learning many times that absence of evidence was not indeed
evidence of absence! In addition, after completing each visit, I made lists of people that I had to
contact in the next visit, including people I had planned to interview but did not manage to get
a hold of and people I had not considered but who were repeatedly mentioned in the interviews
as relevant to the process (which does not imply that I was following a standard “snow ball”
technique).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I treated these pending key interviews as unavailable (“classified”) information at t0 to be
uncovered at t1. That is, as unavailable evidence that lowered the upper limit of the probability
I could attach to the likely veracity of my explanation at t0. Consequently, before each new visit
I generated concrete expectations about what the unavailable evidence could indicate. If such
expectations were borne out, as they were in several but not all occasions, they would constitute
strong confirmatory evidence for my theory.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Proceeding this ways also gave me the chance to improve my interview instruments (and
my skills as interviewer!). By carefully listening to audios and/or reading transcripts, I was
able to identify what worked and what did not. This lead to modifications of the instruments
(e.g., eliminating/adding questions or changing the way I was phrasing them) which ultimately
allowed me gather pieces of evidence I was not being able to access before. Finally, it gave me
a sense of how much and what type of data was missing. This was not only key in terms of
moving forward in an increasingly focus and targeted way, but also help me make a justifiable
decision on when to stop the data gathering process (e.g., when I had no pending key informants
to interview and new interviews were not yielding new names).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am fully aware that testimonies are subject to different types of problems and biases that
I could not correct for by comparisons across interviewers and within interviewees – especially
considering that what I was investigating choices made decades ago. Two central concerns are
selective memory and strategic recall/reconstruction of events. The fact that I collected testimonies
from a multiplicity of actors who had taken different roles during the conflict and that
memory workshops were conducted to stimulate collective recall certainly helped to counter
these problems and provided more balanced accounts of the processes. However, to weight the evidentiary status of oral sources and improve its interpretation and analysis, I triangulated
different streams of oral and non-oral evidence. I collected archival material generated at different
points in time by the communities engaged in noncooperation and their support networks.
These included briefings, meeting minutes, letters to government officials, petitions and even
documentaries. As most of this material was produced while events were unfolding and under
different strategic contexts, these data are less sensitive to the both memory problems and
strategic reporting. Moreover, as this material does not represent post-fact rationalizations, they
reflected better some of the confusion and uncertainty surrounding the process as it unfolded,
something that is not always easy to grasp in the more linear and organized accounts coming
from interviews.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In addition, I also reviewed local and regional newspapers for the time periods I was most
interested in. Beyond public archives (mostly at the municipality level), immersion in the field
opened up the opportunity to review private archives. For example, in San Jos´e de Apartad´o
and San Carlos, I met two women who had kept personal archives of the history of the war in
their localities. After repeated interactions, I was invited to their houses to review this material.
Unlike collective data in a formal archive, going through files together with people who went
through the events that are being described became a great opportunity to delve deeper (and
cross-check in vivo) into this information. To be sure, these archives were not systematic in
any respect, but included a wide variety of written and visual material that I could have hardly
accessed elsewhere or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h3&gt;Logic of Annotation&lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The chief objective of my annotation is that of rendering more transparent my reasoning behind
the choices I made in terms of which specific pieces of evidence to report. Given the large
amount of data that I collected and that informs this study, I had to make critical choices of
what pieces of evidence to report to support my arguments or undercut alternative explanations.
The logic behind my choices is not directly inferable from the quotes or paraphrasing that I use
in the text. Therefore, I took advantage of annotation to render this analytical process more
transparent. I expect this two serve at least two concrete aims:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;reveal that I was not cherry picking suitable quotes or fragments from my interviews to
support my arguments (i.e., that there was a logic behind the choices that I made);&lt;/li&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;explain the reader why I believe that my evidence (individual pieces, but the who body as
well) is strong enough to substantiate my claims.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;


&lt;p&gt;My choices regarding what to report followed two basic, but powerful intuitions:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;the evidentiary power of evidence does not come from the number of observations collected
(or interviews conducted);&lt;/li&gt;
 &lt;li&gt;different pieces of evidence have different probatory power and as direct researchers we
have means to weight this.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Following these two intuitions, in annotation (and in text) I do not use arguments of the
form “because a percent of my interviewees said x, I am confident that x helps us understand
y”. Rather, in text I mostly make reference to purposively selected single interviews and use
annotation to provide additional information about who the person is (being extremely careful
and conservative in not rendering any person identifiable to readers) and why that makes what
is being said particularly valuable (from an evidentiary point of view). Here I used two basic
heuristics: the “location” of the interview within the process and/or sample (a leader, a rankand-
file, a catholic, a member of the enemy faction, etc.); and the probability to hear what is
being said from that specific person (how likely/unlikely is that a person tells my x given the
person she is).

&lt;p&gt;Even if I do not always make it explicitly in annotation (I still wonder if I should do so for
every annotated fragment where it can be done), I also used “process tracing” evidence tests
to weight the evidentiary value of different pieces of evidence. Therefore, in some annotated
fragments I make explicit whether I consider a piece of evidence a straw-in-the-wind, loop and/or
smoking gun (I don’t think that I have any evidence that I could claim passes a doubly decisive
test) and briefly explain why.

&lt;p&gt;Beyond this analytical use of annotation, I also used it to refer the reader to useful visual
data to which I make reference and analyze in text. Even if having access to this images is not
indispensable for the reader to understand the argument and judge if the evidence is of value,
doing so clearly improves the body of evidence available to the reader.
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