 Understanding the nature and functioning of wartime governance is crucial because it has important ramifications for state building after war. When people think about war they usually think about destruction and anarchy and if you look at conflict zones what you find is that that is often not true. There is a new form of order and that order is a structure or the influence by armed groups and the civilian populations they interact with. When we do peace building or state building or interventions we tend to think of ungoverned spaces. My point is there are no ungoverned spaces. Wherever there are people there is governance. Even if that governance doesn't fit what we think it is. The systems of governance in conflict settings are sophisticated, they're complex and they're very resilient. So understanding how these groups and the local populations create order and new institutions is very important because people are living their lives around or following norms that are going to shape their beliefs and their motivations and their engagements perhaps not just during the war but also after the war ends. One of the reasons why governance is so important during wartime is because it's one of the strategies that armed groups have to win a war or to try to win it, to control territories and populations. So if we want to understand their behavior and how they're able to survive and to grow we need to understand how they govern civilians. Imagine these two villages in the same region of a country in the same armed group arrives to the area. In this one village the group is providing health services, education services, it's the critical authority. In this other village the armed group is present, it controls the territory, it controls the population but it doesn't really take on these governance functions. When the war ends and the group leaves the area in one village when the armed group leaves you have all these gaps in governance. If there are criminal groups around they're going to be able to exploit these gaps. In this other village the community continues to provide these forms of governance and these services and when the group leaves there is no gap that needs to be filled quickly and the prospects for peace are different in the two villages.