This book brings a new perspective to civilian agency and civilian responses to the dangers and uncertainty of armed conflict. I focus on the civilians’ collective action problem – opposite that of armed group recruitment – of how to keep from participating in the conflict and avoid the tyranny of the relatively fewer combatants and militant extremists. It is a puzzle that some communities apparently solved this collective action problem and were able to protect themselves while others did not. This book addresses this puzzle by taking civilian institutions seriously as an explanation for violence. In doing so, it both contrasts with and complements state-based, structural explanations of civil wars and refines our understanding of the production of violence.

The bottom-up approach shows that collective action for peace, and not just for violence, is possible even in settings of armed conflict. This is more than wishful thinking. Social organizations and cohesion function as an important buffer between communities and armed actors, enabling strategies to limit the fighting to only the combatants and the aggrieved. The nonviolent strategies that communities use to avoid getting caught in the crossfire are diverse and work because they are adapted to different threats of violence. However, these strategies can be difficult to observe because civilian autonomy is often a hidden behavior in rural, isolated areas. It does not always get reported as “news” – it is the dog that did not bark. This is in part because autonomy is not easy to define or identify when it occurs. The theory of civilian autonomy I developed therefore first involved the conceptual ground clearing of supplying a definition of autonomy in civil wars. The theory then posits that armed groups’ motivations and abilities to use violence vary based on the ability of civilians to impose costs on them and avoid entanglements with them, as captured by levels of civilian organization. The challenge thus became analyzing whether armed groups would have used more violence if not for civilian organizations.