The socialization of civilians and militia members

Abstract

When the Guatemalan civil war ended in 1996, the Peace Accords required the demobilization of the civil patrols. Yet, nearly two decades after the end of the war, the ex-patrollers remain organized and active. At first glance, the persistence of Guatemala’s civil patrols sounds like a triumph of socialization: the men enrolled in the civil patrols were effectively socialized during the war, so they continue patrolling today. This argument is seductively simple, but it is incorrect. Using process tracing to analyze historical documents and interviews with former civil patrollers, I show that the military did not succeed in socializing most of its patrollers. The military was, however, remarkably successful at socializing civilians in conflict zones. After enduring a ferocious scorched earth campaign followed by re-education, civilians either learned to fear and comply with the military and the civil patrols, or they internalized the military-promulgated narrative that repression is necessary to guarantee security. Both these outcomes facilitate patrolling in postwar Guatemala, where many civilians in war-affected areas either embrace or tolerate extralegal security patrolling as a means of preventing crime from spreading to their communities. Theoretically, the case of Guatemala’s civil patrols expands our knowledge of socialization in militias and civil defense forces. Mass socialization of group members is not necessary for an armed group to retain its influence in the long term, even after a conflict has ended. Additionally, socialization occurs not just within groups, but also dynamically and interactively across group boundaries. To fully understand the trajectories of armed groups, it is important to analyze both socialization within armed groups and the socialization of the broader civilian population.

Why Do Peace Negotiations Succeed or Fail? Legal Commitment, Transparency, and Inclusion during Peace Negotiations in Colombia (2012–2016) and Turkey (2012–2015)

“…The issue at hand, that is, how the negotiation framework affects the success of peace negotiations, requires the identification of initial conditions, key decisions, divergent paths following the decisions, and divergent outcomes (Bennett and Checkel ). Furthermore, the analysis uses process tracing to adjudicate between competing hypotheses by validating the observable implications of those hypotheses (Bateson ). Since the article examines the influence of the negotiation framework on commitment, information asymmetry, and exogenous shock problems, negotiating actors' signals of satisfaction and dissatisfaction are documented in detail.…”

The legacy of war: The effect of militias on postwar repression

“…The nature of the preceding conflict and how it terminated could explain variation in postwar repression. Particularly long lasting and violent civil wars create an environment in which state repression is perceived to be commonplace and in which state actors continue to use violence in the post-conflict period (Bateson, 2017). We capture the duration of the previous conflict with civil war duration and whether it was particularly violent by coding civil war intensity ''1'' if more than 1000 battle deaths occurred during the last year of fighting, using data from Gleditsch et al (2002).…”

“… 32. For a discussion on the violent behavior of the Civilian Defense Patrols in Guatemala, see Bateson (2017). …”

Socialization and violence

“…In exploring the mechanisms that socialize to violence, it is important to recognize that both violent and nonviolent ones can be at work. We thus theorize possible roles for persuasion (Johnston, 2001, 2008; Lynch, 2013); social learning (Price, 1998; Hoover Green, 2011); role playing (Beyers, 2005; Bateson, 2017); and instrumental calculation (Hooghe, 2001: Ch. 1; Schimmelfennig, 2005; Wood, 2014; Gates, 2017), as well as collective violence (Cohen, 2013a,b); and hazing and dehumanization (Kelman & Hamilton, 1989; Wood, 2010; Manekin, 2013).…”