Doing Good while Killing: Why Some Insurgent Groups Provide Community Services

Victor Asal, Shawn Flanigan and Ora Szekely

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2022, vol. 34, issue 4, 835-855

Abstract: Many nonstate military organizations provide a wide range of social services to civilians. The apparent contradiction between their use of violence and their provision of charity has been the subject of a great deal of research in the conflict studies literature. Two of the most common sets of arguments hold that such services are either a form of bribery aimed at controlling and isolating constituents and potential recruits, or an extension of the organization’s ideological commitments. Our findings, based on a new analysis of the BAAD dataset, demonstrate that neither explanation is correct. Rather, we find that the provision of social services represents a means of confronting and undermining the authority of the state. In this sense, the provision of social services represents an extension of the broader political goals of the nonstate armed groups providing them.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2020.1745775 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ftpvxx:v:34:y:2022:i:4:p:835-855

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ftpv20

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2020.1745775

Access Statistics for this article

Terrorism and Political Violence is currently edited by James Forest

More articles in Terrorism and Political Violence from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().