 Thank you so much for coming. My name is Kruna Jensch. I'm from Leiden University as I was introduced earlier already. I'm very happy to be here and hear Mozambique all over the conference. It's very rare that this happens to me, so bear with me as there's another story coming about Mozambique. What I'm going to do today is to talk a little bit about my recently published book, Violent Resistance, Militia Formation and Civil War in Mozambique, and also talk about a chapter that's actually going to be published in the edited volume that Jana mentioned in the beginning to tell you a little bit about how militias emerge, where they come from, how they spread, how they mobilize members, but also not only discuss the origins. This is the story of my book, but the story of the edited volume chapter is what kind of consequences these groups have for civilian protection. And just to be clear from the start, what are militias? Militias are grass roots. I conceive of militias as grassroots self-defense groups that communities mobilize and organize in order to confront rebels, in order to confront insurgents, and in order to improve the security situation for civilians during civil war. So let's start with the story. In 1988, during the civil war that took place between the late 1970s and early 1990s in Mozambique, there was a traditional healer named Manuel Antonio who organized self-defense groups on the basis of a mission that he declared he had been given by God to protect the Mozambican people from the suffering of the war. So he claimed he had received the recipe for a potion that would make people immune to bullets and make people safe against the violence of the war. And this was the basis for initiating, mobilizing people into self defense groups and to make use of them as village patrols to defend local communities. And this was very pertinent in this war because this war was really about the people. Civilians weren't only targeted for violence, but they were also targeted for forced resettlements. This was a war that took place in an area where armed groups, the rebels, Renamo, as well as the state army, the main resources that they could rely on were the people, food and support and loyalty from the people. So the people were kind of the main resource to build on. That's why they were so important in this war. So this Manuel Antonio, he recruited people, young people for self-defense, very young, as you see in these pictures. They, at first, they fought with spares and knives and they were kind of dressed with amulets for additional protection. And he initiated them with this potion that was supposed to make them immune to bullets. And then this militia had a lot of initial success in certain areas because also Renamo believed in kind of the spiritual dimension of the war, believed in this potion. And so this militia was very successful early on, and that's why it spread across at least two provinces in the center and north of the country. So this is a map of Mozambique and of the central and northern areas of the provinces of Zambesia and Nampoula. And the book and my subsequent research is based on spending a year in Zambesia and Nampoula in these five districts that are highlighted here and speak to local civilians, to former militia members, but also to former army soldiers and Renamo combatants and local councilors, local administrators about the history of the war and about their experience with Renamo violence, but also with the emergence of this militia. And in total, I conducted over 250 interviews with all these different groups of people and I also collected archival documents in the provincial archives of Nampoula and Zambesia and Kelimane and Nampoula and analyzed those because they, of course, provided important additional information to triangulate the information that I received from the interviews. So the main focus of this work was to understand how and why militias form this initial work. More generally, to kind of tell you a little bit about where does this focus on self-defense groups and militias come from, well, there's a recent research agenda that focuses on militias that is based on the idea that we should understand that state armed forces or the state party to the conflict is not as unitary as we often assume. So we should not only understand civil wars as conflict between various insurgent groups and one state army or one state government, but we should understand civil wars as a conflict between various insurgent groups and various militarized or armed groups on the part of the on the side of the state. And so I conceive of militias as I define them as armed organizations that exist outside of the regular security apparatus of the state and emerge as counter movements against insurgents. And other people have collected a lot of data on the existence of paramilitaries and militias and have found that two thirds of civil wars between 1989 and 2010 actually saw the activity of militias during those conflicts. What I do in the book is to distinguish between state initiated and community initiated militias because I'm interested in why militias form. And at this point it's really important, as I argue in the book, who kind of initiates the formation of a militia. Is it the state itself or is it the community? Is it kind of a grassroots local movement? And what I then do is to focus on this community initiated form of militias and ask why does it emerge at this particular point in war? Where does it emerge? Why does it spread so quickly to other places? And why does it not spread to certain places? And then my last question in the book is how do these groups actually get participants and people to join their ranks? So this is basically the three questions that are outlined here. In the book I ask when do militias form? Where do they form? And how do they mobilize members? And I make three arguments to answer these questions. The question of when do militias form during civil war? I have an empirical chapter in the book where I argue that in the militias emerge at a particular point during the war when they were local stalemates. And these were violent local stalemates. There was a lot of violence, but territorial control didn't really move between and change between the armed parties to the conflict. And in this situation, civilians don't really know what to do. And so they kind of try to be innovative and creative about how they can best protect themselves and this is why they then form their own armed groups to improve their own security if they can't expect to receive that security from the rebels or the state itself. Where do militias form? So I found that militias spread to some districts, but not to others. And when I investigated this further and really compared different districts, I found that militias spread to the districts where there was some kind of inter-elite cooperation. And inter-elite cooperation, for example, between the militia leader and the local administrator is really important because, of course, when you see new armed groups emerging in a civil war context, you quickly suspect that this is an armed group that also wants to challenge the government or that it's used for private purposes. And so here it's really important that there is an inter-elite trust and cooperation to prevent the idea from emerging that this new militia could pose a threat to the state. And then the last question I deal with in the book is how do militias form? How do they mobilize their members? Well, here I said earlier that these moments of militia formation are moments of innovation and creativity. But this doesn't come out of the blue, right? People have to rely on something that they know ahead of time. They need to rely on preexisting institutions and practices. And this is exactly what happened in the Mozambican context. There was some kind of reinvention of prior practices. There was a reliance on a prior form of protection and self-defense that was kind of then turned into this collective endeavor of protecting civilians. Okay, so this is the origins of militias that I discuss in the book. What are the effects of armed civilian protection in Mozambique? This is the focus of this chapter I was talking about. Well, it's actually interesting. It's similar to Jana. I find the protection effect of this armed form of protection is immediate, but very short term. So it's actually short term and temporary. So in the immediate the immediate consequences was there was there were village patrols. There was information about immediate attacks. And these militias most importantly returned abducted family members to their families. And so that it had a very immediate and very important effect. But this was unfortunately temporary because of the dynamics of Civil War. So the rebels they learn from this, they see this new armed group emerging, they adapt, they innovate themselves and respond to this. And so and often also take organized revenge attacks on civilians and on on these militias. So there was, there were revenge attacks. There was a counter force by the rebels that was that was created. And the leader of this militia, Manuel Antonio, who I showed you the photo of in the beginning, was killed pretty, pretty soon after the emergence of this militia actually, well, three to four years after. Alright, so let's kind of what do we learn from this for civilian protection and civilian resistance? Well, I think that militias and self defense forces are a form of armed civilian protection, they do deliver protection consequences, protection effects for civilians. There are an example of civilian agency in Civil War. They emerge during military stalemates and with elite support, that's important because otherwise they're conceived of as enemies. And what I want to underline in this in this whole emergence and formation story is, that in order for militias to emerge, they need to be socially embedded in the context they are working, they need to kind of rely on the resources on the historical, social, and political resources of the community in order to kind of successfully take off. And in terms of the effects of these militias, I want to emphasize that, yes, militias and self defense forces, they do provide a lot of access to information and manpower, which makes them a really strong competitor as an armed group in Civil War. But they can trigger revenge violence and of course they can increase the fragmentation of war. And I think here we have a lot to learn a lot, we have to learn a lot more about kind of the adaptation and learning capacities on the parts of all armed groups participating in Civil War and especially on the part of insurgents. Thank you very much for your attention and I look forward to your questions.