Civilian protests can push conflicts toward peace — but not always. This study asks how different types of wartime civilian protest shape violence and the prospects for conflict resolution, and develops a framework to explain why some protests escalate rather than de-escalate violence.
📊 New Georeferenced Event Data from Côte d'Ivoire
- Uses newly compiled, disaggregated, georeferenced event data from Côte d'Ivoire, combined with qualitative evidence to trace protest events, actors, and immediate outcomes.
- Employs a mixed quantitative–qualitative approach to measure where and when protests occurred and to interpret their local meanings and demands.
🧭 A Typology That Connects Protest Demands to Outcomes
- Introduces a novel typology of wartime civilian protest that groups protests by their aims, including actions that: salute or support armed actors, oppose peace agreements, or resist peacekeepers.
- Theorizes heterogeneous effects: protest effects depend on protesters’ demands, intended audience, and the protest's relationship to armed actors and peace processes.
🔑 Key Findings
- Protests are not uniformly pacifying; when protests express certain demands, they are statistically and qualitatively associated with:
- Increased violence against civilians in affected areas;
- Violence involving peacekeepers;
- Greater likelihood of failed conflict-resolution efforts.
- These associations vary by the content and target of protests rather than being solely a product of nonviolence versus violence.
⚠️ Why It Matters
- Expands understanding of how civilians shape civil war dynamics by showing that nonviolent collective action can sometimes reinforce escalation and obstruct peace.
- Signals caution for policymakers and peacebuilders: the content and targets of civilian protest matter for conflict trajectories, not just the fact of protest itself.
