This is an Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) data project.
The annotated article can be viewed on the ATI website.
Project Summary
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.
Data Generation and Analysis
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
Logic of Annotation
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:
- 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);
- explain the reader why I believe that my evidence (individual pieces, but the who body as well) is strong enough to substantiate my claims.
My choices regarding what to report followed two basic, but powerful intuitions:
- the evidentiary power of evidence does not come from the number of observations collected (or interviews conducted);
- different pieces of evidence have different probatory power and as direct researchers we have means to weight this.
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).
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.
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.
