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Peace at War, Peace after War? Interrogating the Impact of Wartime Civilian Organizing on Postwar Retaliatory Violence
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Peace and Conflict Research.
2026 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (Two Years)), 10 credits / 15 HE creditsStudent thesis
Abstract [en]

What happens to wartime forms of peace-promoting civilian organizing after conflict ends? This thesis investigates whether wartime civilian organizing shapes patterns of postwar retaliatory violence, engaging two bodies of literature that have rarely been studied together. I develop a theory of Civilian Peace Infrastructure, arguing that sustained cross-cleavage civilian organizing reduces retaliatory violence through the formation of prosocial trust, the disruption of collective blame attribution, and the channeling of grievances into nonviolent forms. Drawing on a typology of organizing configurations differentiated by durability and cross-cleavage character, the thesis derives six hypotheses tested in Syria through a nested mixed-methods design combining district-level quantitative analysis across all 65 Syrian administrative districts with twenty key informant interviews conducted across Syria’s three wartime territorial orders. While the quantitative findings identify no statistically significant relationship between organizing and postwar retaliatory violence, the qualitative analysis finds evidence of the proposed typology and, following a model-building logic, identifies four processes that disrupted the anticipated mechanisms: the opening of vertical political channels, elite reconstruction of collective blame frameworks, the erosion of economic infrastructures sustaining cross-cleavage interaction, and the nationally scaled encounter of organizational cultures formed in territorial isolation. Transitional justice emerges across these dynamics as the absent structural intermediary. The findings frame the policy challenge less as one of reconstructing civic agency from the ground up than of institutionally reactivating the normative residues generated through wartime organizing and preserving the conditions under which they can endure.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2026. , p. 96
National Category
Peace and Conflict Studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-589378OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-589378DiVA, id: diva2:2069735
Subject / course
Peace and Conflict Studies
Educational program
Master Programme in Peace and Conflict Studies
Supervisors
Available from: 2026-06-11 Created: 2026-06-10 Last updated: 2026-06-11Bibliographically approved

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CiteExportLink to record
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  • apa
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Language
  • de-DE
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  • en-US
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  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
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  • Other locale
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Output format
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