 It's a hard job indeed but it's also a lot of fun because all the papers are super rich empirically and I have a good role I think which consists of like just throwing challenges without having to solve them so it's pretty comfortable. So don't be surprised if I throw challenges but I hope this is going to be useful and in any case I've been like amazed by the amount of data that you all have and how rich in terms of evidence all the papers are so it's quite a treat for me to comment on these papers and so I will start with just a very broad remark about where we are now in the field of rubber governance and I think that's your papers really much reflect the state of this field within the field that was pioneered by people in the room and Anna as well and what I found like super interesting is that well perhaps 10-15 years ago the main question was about the nature of what arm orders and what shaved them and you sort of complexified the field by exploring the different ramifications of how what I'm orders for example shaped the post-conflict but also how rebels during wartime like deal with specific situations such as COVID or climate change so super beautiful addition to the field I'm now moving to a specific comments on each of the papers and then I will end with a big remark for all of you and all of you in the room too which reflects a concern I have with this rubble governance literature so starting with the paper by Chauvin I have been like super stimulated by the description you make of the different responses by the arm was captured by the papers I am I'm going to focus my comments mostly on Nigeria which is the case study that I know better also I may ask why you think that the comparison between Columbia and Nigeria is in fact useful I mean that's something that might be worth detailing a bit before sharing the findings actually and my main concern is about the conceptualization you offer of the crisis so you're talking about climate change you're talking about COVID and in fact we may want to analytically identify better the impacts of this different crisis like the temporality and also the spatial dimension of these two crises are in fact quite different and you may expect different responses perhaps depending on the nature of the crisis that hits the place where rebels are active so I think there's some work to do perhaps around the conceptualization of crisis themselves and their heterogeneity leading to different effects now when it comes to northern Nigeria I'm not sure we should necessarily be convinced with what people say about the recruitment process says in relation with crisis such as climate change which in the case of northern Nigeria is a super complex crisis it's not clear whether it's more rainfall or more the certification if the lake is shrinking or expanding in fact that there's a lot of controversy around the actual impact on livelihoods of climate change in the case of the lake shade chat area so asking people whether they know people who joined the armed group as a result of difficulties encountered that are linked to climate change I think is a kind of a stretch right it's hard to conclude from the answers whether or not climate change has an actual effect on recruitment now on the covid side of things beyond what she can who has declared about covid being something like mostly attached to the kufas and that good muslims should not wear masks we have little evidence about in fact the behaviors of the armed groups in areas they control with respect to the covid crisis itself and evidence about northern Nigeria and from the areas controlled by the groups is in fact very very thin and there's not so much that we know so it's hard to make conclusions about how armed groups actually behave in these zones so that would be my challenge for you Shoban moving to Martha's paper I found that the paper extremely like carefully thought and with very neat arguments and nice categorization of observations and evidence perhaps since you have many different mechanisms at work may ask how you manage eventually to identify like each causal mechanism like and whether the evidence allows you to conclude about the superiority of one mechanism over and another what I found also extremely valid and interesting and which connects with a broader finding I think in the governance literature and rebel governance literature is that whenever armed groups are challenged then the military imperative stands to supersede any other concerns and whatever you do in terms of rebel governance tends to be undermined eroded because you channel all the resources for the protection of the armed groups and the military operations now the big question I would have for you Marta is how you think the different armed groups and the Hootie case is super intriguing how they construct the threats and how they engage with science in fact so I was wondering whether you captured some narratives discourses that portray the COVID crisis in a certain way and whether a constructivist approach of the threat would be useful at all for your research moving to Anna's paper and Anna's and in fact other authors my main question is in fact about the original intuition which you based in the literature and which is a literature I don't know necessarily very very well but which I don't find so intuitive in fact you could argue that when you are exposed to arbitrariness and violence there's a demand for rule of law like you want to get rid of this violence and arbitrariness that surrounds you and demand for a stable environment that rule of law could foster and promote and so I was in a way surprised by the direction that the paper takes even though it's based on literature a second point that was interested in is the connections you make between like preferences and experience so it seems that for you the preferences derive from what you've been through right which is very very valid but preferences are also shaped by narratives discourses things that come from a very very far away and that may eventually affect the way you see the rule of law and maybe in the past the people you've interviewed like have been in touch with a form of rule of law that they were not happy with so the definition of the rule of law itself might be questionable because it might connect with previous experience perhaps it's just a degraded way of Western type or liberal democracy that people were not happy with because it would not deliver justice to them for example these are my questions for you Anna and eventually mine I think that the paper like it's super rich perhaps overly complicated analytically my my sort of spontaneous reaction when I try to summarize the main argument is okay whether what matters eventually is whether elite survives or not and maybe it's just a binary story that may be told as a way to simplify what looks like a very complicated argument and I have two questions for you is there a difference that you make between civil war recurrence and processes of escalation and de-escalation within the same conflict in the case of the twilight for example you could claim that they are like for twilight rebellions in Mali in fact it might be just the same war happening since 1963 so analytically is there a difference that you establish here and a second point that could be problematic is that you don't seem to differentiate between the wartime experience and how the war ends specifically so the war ends in a way that see a loser and a winner emerge but that's made what eventually emerges as winners or losers might not necessarily reflect the experience of wartime for example in a period of occupation by an armed group like all sorts of transformation may might have happened but it's not necessarily the case that this group that introduced changes and that's made people leave something else eventually end up as winners so maybe there's something to differentiate between the wartime experience itself and how the war ends and the type of settlements that emerge after the war and I will finish with a broad question for all of you that concerns the way we engage with history in the field of rebel governance we it's interesting that we now have projects about legacies of conflict and legacies of conflicts are studied through wartime experiences so you tend there's a tendency in the field to explain what you see by what immediately preceded right that's the way we engage with history and similarly what we do on wartime governance is generally shaped by pre-war institutions my feeling is that it's a sort of very mechanistic way of engaging history with history and what we may miss here and I know that some of you have engaged with these issues is the issue of endogeneity the kind of wartime governance that we see emerge in some places might be the direct product of history and how you create an order might might be caused by situations that pre-existed before and in fact the wartime order is just one small sequence of a longer history that may require you to go back in time and quite far away in time to make sense of all these observations also we can change the past by changing the narratives about the past and what we see now is a lot of falsification of history or reviving of all things that may explain what we observe during wartime and I think this is sort of loop here between the past and the present that we miss when we study things sequentially one like one thing after the other so yeah I mean that's a big methodological question for all of you and all of us I think which I think remains unanswered in the fields of rebel governance thank you very much again for your fantastic presentations thank you very much on that very thorough and good work on the papers for the interest of squeezing in a couple of audience questions as well I would invite those who have questions and I can see so many hands already so let's start from from here please keep them short yeah sure all you know I'm a senior fellow from the Finnish Institute of International Affairs really fascinating a set of papers maybe just comments on Marta your paper I mean the concept of governance I mean you have sort of a talk about security provision and judiciary that's like the minimalist approach and then you have the groups that have also service provision which is a more maximalist approach you know Hamas, Hispola, Taliban what have you so yeah just maybe it's maybe more a comment than a question that we have this I just liked your continuum that's the point but that links to Anna's paper and that's I'm slightly challenging the idea that you know rule of law as we understand is sort of the universal thing and this is actually one of the things that we published today in this paper understanding non-state armed groups that we put out with two colleagues at FIA and that the point here is that we premise our thinking on in in west at least on the Weberian notion of institution building and my experience after 30 years three decades of experience working in conflict settings ranging from Cambodia Afghanistan Palestine Iraq and so forth and I'm just wondering I mean isn't it the fact that often it is the exactly the judiciary and the security provision that many of these rebel groups insurgents what you whatever you want to call that that resonates among the local populations and hence their clout also so I'm just wondering you know we've been pushing the sort of rule of law agenda I used to work with the UN myself so down the throats of many populations I'm being provocative here and I don't see the results they doesn't look very good on the ground so I'm just challenging the notion that we are we are having this Weberian notion of institution building that it doesn't seem to fly but maybe you have comments on that thanks hi Adam day microphone doesn't seem to be working but that's why you can hear me from UN University I have a question for Anna which has to do with the specificity of the Colombian context it seems like the war in Colombia is largely driven by a quite illegal framework that disenfranchised the land tenure and the solution to the Colombian conflict was also quite legal you've got the land the victims restitution and land act there's a very high awareness of the legal framework versus other conflicts like when I work in eastern Congo and South Sudan most people don't see much of a legal framework to either the the conflict or the solution and I guess my question is do you think that your findings about that are that are fairly counterintuitive in some respects about the Colombian experience might actually not be easily extrapolated to to other conflicts where actually the reference points in the law and are non-existent for most people dealing with the conflict let's have one more question but if they are very quick one so let's have these two questions from there hi thanks Ben Lessing from University of Chicago just for Anna also you know I maybe went by or maybe I didn't follow it that well but it sounded almost like whatever the rebels did you know whether they were violent or whether they controlled violence either way the same prediction or something like that I couldn't quite tell so maybe you could that I think this goes to Yvonne's comments as well about what what's really the hypothetical prediction the last question there thank you so I'll keep it short down there University of Basel I have two questions one for Anna which is about the rule of law so in my view if you ask people do you want rule of law anyone will say yes but it no yep so I wanted to ask you if you could specify how you operationalize this in the survey that you did and then for the work on Ethiopia and Somalia I was wondering I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Christopher Clapham and he claims in his publications that the pre-existing state bureaucracy in Ethiopia was perhaps one of the reasons why the EPRDF managed a more or less stable transition so I wonder if yeah how you how you see that point thank you excellent so let's go brain twisting amount of questions comments and insights so let's proceed in the order that you spoke so please if you start thank you I'll keep it short because I think most the questions were to my fellow panel members but just maybe Yvonne in response to some of the things you brought up I don't disagree these really weren't designed to be case studies to compare anything across them it's just these are the places we're doing work and I should have probably set up front you know this project is really to have practical implications on the ground it's to support practitioners who are trying to run reintegration and DDR programs they're trying to be more effective they want to build peace in these different these different places it's also areas where we have access to ex-combatants so it's driven a bit by that but I do take your point there and I think you raise a really important thing to inform further work in the space this is about how we ask about questions related to climate change because people don't necessarily experience them as climate change they just might experience experience them as a really bad harm of 10 years we don't really we have to really careful we we spent a lot of time thinking about that and we try not to ever use the term climate change but I think it's a really good point for how you craft questions to really get at experiences and then just maybe one point on sort of asking other people so this is before we had access to ex-combatants themselves who are talking about climate change effects even if they don't speak about them in that way and this is talking about other people and their perceptions of what's happening and I still do think there's value there particularly in a context like northeast Nigeria I think it's different actually in the rest of the late Chad but because of how long reintegration is actually practically happening I mean almost everyone we speak to knows people personally family and community members who have gone through this and come back so they do have insights and community leaders who often broker returns they do have insights I don't think they're perfect for getting at this but I do think in the absence of other data and access to the people themselves it's at least its start but I really take I take these points of feedback to heart because we really want to get this to be stronger because I think we haven't made these links really yet we're just starting to and to find the right way to do it so thank you hi thank you even for your comments I really appreciated them and I find extremely interesting the point that you raised at the end about how the armed groups construct the threat how they engage with science for instance when it comes to the hooties it was very interesting to see how the group was using the health emergency the virus to strengthen some points of its ideological manifesto with propaganda accusing the United States accusing Israel rejecting PPEs that were brought by humanitarian organizations saying that they were ineffective and potentially harmful so it's really interesting to adopt this constructivist approach that you were suggesting to see how the group and the ideology of the group might really become another factor that affects the approach to the emergency so thank you for this insightful comment thank you Ivan for the comments just briefly so you and I think this connects to another question so you started your comments saying that you find sort of the this assumption kind of not making a lot of sense that's in part where the paper starts right so we are not we are not trying to develop hypothesis to say all these they should be right we're saying there is this big assumption let's do our best effort to think theoretically how it would work if it is correct right and so I agree with you that it's not clear how a human being responds to experiencing arbitrariness authoritarian rule it may go different ways based on the director we have on support for the rule of law it is true that you would expect a lot of these experiences to undermine support for the rule of law but the next step of course is to think about what is the process of preference formation and maybe under what conditions would people go for one reaction or the other and that's where we want to go right so this is a first paper sort of open a research agenda saying this assumption that you do see in a lot of policy debates and a lot of research where we assume there is this democratic deficit this may not be right but or may not be true and and your last point I think it's true you know in the geneticism when we started legacies there are so many issues one is pre-existing factors but another one is that a lot of things are happening at the same time I think a lot of the work on legacies focuses on violence but a lot of other things are happening and it's really hard to disentangle them and so when in the next stage when we are trying to really think about legacies on political behavior I think we really need to theorize very carefully if there are things that are in the past that are explaining rebel governance whether they could also explain what you see after the end of the war in terms of political behavior and then so I agree with your comments that well we don't know I don't know if interventions or policies to improve the rule of law is what we need and that's precisely a point of the paper saying we assume we do we want to help our research community and policymakers to investigate whether that is the case so we are not saying the opposite right we're actually questioning that the Colombian case is that is that going to generalize I'm not sure and I I think I am ignorant still about how this process is shaped political preferences and beliefs and that's why I think we need a research agenda on this and that where we unpack more of these mechanisms I do think Colombia is particular for a number of reasons but I also think that especially for conflicts that have ended recently a lot of people have been exposed to this talk of similar sort of normative values that may shape also what they think they they want or what they think they should have to tell an enumerator for example and these are things that we need to consider then your question so it's both and it's not our hypothesis like saying oh this this should be true it's us really engaging with different leaders to try to anticipate so the way in which we operationalize this and this answers the last question is exactly and they just have it here in order to capture criminals is it desirable that authorities on occasions break the law which is something that a lot of people would say yes in Latin America right and so building on that literature we expect people who have endured violence to support less the rule of law right but then we were trying to think okay maybe it's not just if they endured violence but also whether whether an armed actor was able to curb crime and so what we measure here is whether you may have lived under the governance of an armed actor but you may be very conscious about how good the armed actor was in reducing crime and in my field work this was very very often the case people were really happy that no one would take would steal or rape someone in their community that doesn't mean the group didn't commit acts of violence right it's different and you could have both you could have a community where there were massacres and homicides by the group but where crime was zero right and so we are developing these two different hypotheses and interestingly we find that none of these make people want their major to break the law in order to curb crime so I'll stop there thank you thank you very much for the comments and thank you very much for your question and I think you're explain but I think your question about Christopher Claffham's work actually speaks to the challenges of grounding the study of rebel governance in history and the endogeneity of rebel governance so the argument is in the Horn of Africa you have highland and lowland society and these two types of society have extremely different tradition of the state dating back to centuries ago and and I think there is some truth to the fact that this long-run tradition of the state influenced both the forms of rebel governance and the stability of the of the post-conflict government but at the same time I think there is a little bit of a risk of not only over emphasizing this argument about the tradition of the state but also sort of like essentializing political culture as if he was static never changing there's one way to look at this question which is there is a Somali province in Ethiopia that is this like that borders Somalia and so maybe like one day maybe I'll get to that but if you compare the government like so when the TPLF came to power it started to extend its governance system to the Somali region of Ethiopia and so I think it's it's it tells us that like political culture has some explanatory power but not but doesn't explain everything in the sense of like the Somali province of Ethiopia is not ruled that the same like isn't governed by the same governance system as Somalia like it's it shows that the Somali political culture does not preclude administration by institutions that are independent from the clan system so I hope this answers some of your question and then thanks so much for the comments I very much agree with your point about when do you decide when it's like one conflict or several conflict and when do you decide when you have achieved stability I don't know yet which is why the quantitative part is still a work in progress