www.hicn.org Wartime Institutions: A Research Agenda

Abstract

agreed to share their views and histories with us. 1 Understanding the choices of civilians and combatants is crucial to our research on civil war and post-conflict reconstruction. We want to know, for example, why people join rebels and militias, why families decide to flee, why combatants kill, how they expand to new territories, or why locals support or boycott counterinsurgency operations. Even when we ask questions about macro-level outcomes such as the duration of war, the stability of peace agreements, or the effects of peace keeping operations, our capacity to theorize and interpret empirical results depends at least partially on our assumptions about how actors make decisions on the ground. Despite the general agreement that institutions—understood as rules that structure human interaction—shape behavior, the study of how civilians and combatants make choices in war zones has, for the most part, neglected the role of wartime institutions. Overlooking institutions in the analysis of individual and collective behavior would be astonishing in any field in political science; however, it has endured in civil war studies perhaps because war is assumed to be chaotic and anarchic, as the widespread use o