Managing Militias: Recruitment, Discipline, and Governance Among Counterinsurgent Militias in Sierra Leone
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Managing Militias: Recruitment, Discipline, and Governance among Counterinsurgent Militias in Sierra Leone Jonathan Filip Forney Charlottesville, Virginia Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006 Master of Arts in Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia, 2008 ADissertationpresentedtotheGraduateFacultyoftheUniversityofVirginiain Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Politics University of Virginia July, 2014 c Jonathan Filip Forney 2014 Managing Militias: Recruitment, Discipline, and Governance among Counterinsurgent Militias in Sierra Leone by Jonathan Forney Abstract Why do non-state armed organizations change over time? Why do some armed groups retain high levels of discipline and cooperative relationships with civilians, while other groups degenerate into racketeering and rogue banditry? This dissertation uses micro-comparative evidence to identify the mechanisms of organizational durability and change within three counter-insurgent militias that operated in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002. Newly gathered oral history and survey data from interviews with over 150 former militia members reveal that militia recruitment processes are essential in managing community-level conflicts, and are thus highly predictive of the long-term trajectories of armed organizations that draw recruits from local communities. Critical questions about how militia members are recruited have profound consequences – manifested in the varying levels of success of attempts to monitor and control existing militia members, and to extract key resources from civilian populations. My fine-grained examination of civil militias in Sierra Leone suggests important revisions to, and extensions of, existing theories of recruitment in armed groups and theories of civilian victimization during civil wars. ii For my American family, Barbara Forney and Peter Forney For my Sierra Leonean family, Etta Kamara, Bakarr Koroma, Sayed, and Waheb iii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES vi LIST OF TABLES vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix 1Introduction:CreatingandControllingAd-hocArmedOrganizations 1 The Recruitment Problem: Finding Trustworthy Fighters . 4 ScopeConditions .................................... 13 An Overview of the Dissertation . 15 2ATheoryofRecruitmentandOrganizationalChange 18 Adverse Selection Problems: Finding Trustworthy Fighters . 21 The Effects of Recruit Quality on Discipline and Relationships with Civilians . 34 ResearchDesignandCaseSelection. 38 3ManagingMilitiaRecruitment 44 Emergency, the Emergence of Militias, and Chiefly Leadership . 49 The Recruiters’ Perspective: Who Could Chiefs Trust with a Gun? . 53 Material Resources, Incentives, and the Supply of Volunteers . 59 Using Information Networks to Find Loyal Fighters . 68 ExplainingConvergence ................................ 77 Network Fragility and the Foreshadowing of Divergence . 79 iv 4CrisisandChange:RecruitingtheWrongPeople 82 National-Level Crisis and Change: Better Organized, but Worse Off. 86 Death, Displacement, Intrigue, and Divergence . 90 Northern CDF Recruitment: Screening with Disrupted Networks . 92 Recruitment of Displaced Donsos . 98 Kamajor Recruitment and Rogue Initiators in the Deep South . 108 SummaryandConclusions. 112 Appendix: Generating Sampling Weights to Adjust for RDS . 114 5PredictingRecruitQuality:StatisticalTests 116 Understanding Recruitment Outcomes . 117 Data and Research Design . 121 PredictingRecruitQuality. 135 Alternative Explanations: Maturation and Endogeneity . 142 Conclusions ....................................... 147 Appendix . 148 6ConsequencesofRecruitment:Discipline,Drugs,andOpportunisticVic- timization of Civilians 153 Understanding (In)discipline within Civil Militias . 159 Understanding Civilian Victimization in Civil Wars . 169 LosingControl ..................................... 183 Conclusions ....................................... 188 Appendix . 190 7Conclusion:HowThingsFellApart 195 Implications for the Study of State “Failure” and Informal Armed Groups . 196 Shortcomings of My Analysis and Avenues for Further Research . 199 BeyondCivilMilitiasinSierraLeone . 201 Bibliography 206 v LIST OF FIGURES 3.1 RecruitmentMap................................. 61 4.1 The Proportion of Sampled Militia Members Recruited by Year . 84 5.1 Model1 ...................................... 136 5.2 Model2 ...................................... 137 5.3 Model3 ...................................... 137 5.4 YearJoinedasaPredictorofQuality . 142 6.1 Model1 ...................................... 164 6.2 Model2 ...................................... 165 6.3 Model3 ...................................... 165 6.4 Model4 ...................................... 166 6.5 Instances of Civilian Victimization by District-Year . 170 6.6 Relationship between Recruitment Selectivity and Civilian Victimization by Year ........................................ 176 vi LIST OF TABLES 2.1 The Selectivity of Screening Processes as a Function of Time and Information Networks . 33 2.2 SummaryofCaseStudyVariation. 42 5.1 Recruitment Selectivity . 120 5.2 Homophily Estimates by Prior Firearms Experience . 128 5.3 HomophilyEstimatesbyAgeGrouping . 128 5.4 HomophilyEstimatesbyEthnicGroup . 128 5.5 Recruitment Selectivity . 134 5.6 Summary Statistics . 135 5.7 OLS Regressions Predicting Recruit Quality - Binary Selectivity Variable . 140 5.8 Regression Results Comparing Different Measures of Recruit Quality . 141 5.9 Regressions Predicting Recruit Quality - Controlling for Population Degradation145 5.10 OLS Results: Determinants of Recruit Quality . 149 5.11 Post-Estimation Summary of Survey Design Effects for Model 2 (Above) . 149 5.12 Ordered Logit Results: Determinants of Recruit Quality . 150 5.13 OLS Results: Recruit Quality, Omitting Optimal Screening . 151 5.14 Selectivity Scores by Region (District) and Year . 152 6.1 Instances of Victimization of Civilians, by Type . 175 6.2 Negative Binomial Regressions Predicting Civilian Victimization . 180 6.3 Summary Statistics for RDS Dataset – Predicting Drug Use . 190 6.4 Summary Statistics for TRC Dataset – Predicting Civilian Victimization . 191 6.5 LogitModelsPredictingDrugUse. 192 vii 6.6 NB Regressions Predicting Victimization – Without Bonthe 1997 Outlier . 193 6.7 OLS Regressions Predicting Logged Victimization Counts . 194 6.8 Regressions Predicting Victimization – with Controls for Population Size . 194 viii Acknowledgments The fieldwork for this dissertation was an elaborate exercise in social networking. While many helpful people in Sierra Leone deserve profound thanks for selflessly integrating astrangerintotheirwebsofpersonalrelationships,afewofthemdeservespecialmention here. Osainatu was the first person to welcome me to Sierra Leone, and it was her hos- pitality and extensive social network that provided me with the initial encouragement and information necessary to make this overwhelmingly expansive research project seem viable during my preliminary fieldwork. I cannot thank Danny Hoffman enough for connecting me with Mohamed “Sparo” Tarawalley, who is arguably the most efficacious and well-networked individual I have ever met. Nyamakoro Sesay, Sahr Buffa, S.R. Fillie-Faboe, and Mama Munda Fortune also deserve special thanks for their contributions to my research. Bakarr Kororma, David Yarjah, Mohamed Gbondo, and Henry Macauley were phenomenal research assistants and remain great friends. I could not have completed this project without the tough-love mentorship of David Waldner, who has been my most incisive and insightful interlocutor during every phase of the research and writing process. David read countless drafts of the chapters of this dissertation and often identified my arguments and their merits before I did. He allowed me significant creative latitude whenever possible, reigned me in when necessary, and has truly perfected the art of posing the right question at the right time. To the extent that my writing is crisp and my argument clear, David deserves significant credit. Whenever I write about the history of people in Sierra Leone, I ask myself: “How would Joe Miller phrase it?” For many years now, Joe has helped me to strike a balance in my thinking and writing between the theory-laden positivism of political science and the life-stories of ordinary people. Joe is also one of the most careful readers and thoughtful ix editors I have ever encountered. Exchanging drafts with him was an integral part of my creative process during the framing of this dissertation. Robert Fatton, Todd Sechser, and Denise Walsh also provided invaluable criticism and mentorship along the way. I want to thank Arthur Abraham, Paul Richards, Paul Stani- land, Tom Guterbock, Ana Maria Ibañez, and Brenton Peterson for sharing their specialized expertise and providing helpful comments on various aspects of this project. I received im- mensely helpful feedback from participants in Yale University’s 2012 Conference on Paramil- itaries, Militias and Civil Defense Forces in Civil Wars as well as the 2013 Olympia Summer Academy on Conflict & Political Violence. And of course, I am deeply grateful to Stathis Kalyvas for planning and facilitating both of those experiences. The bulk of this dissertation was written during a generous two-year pre-doctoral fellowship with the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. I could not have asked for a more welcoming and intellectually stimulating environment in which to refine my thinking and finish my writing. I