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Paper short abstract

I argue civilians in former FARC strongholds coproduce wartime governance via Community Action Boards engaging in both: resistance and collaboration with armed groups and the government. I use the concept of convivencia, a locally grounded measure of social order, to track insitutional change.

Paper long abstract

Wartime governance scholarship has shown how armed groups build institutions that regulate civilian life, provide order, and shape local authority in conflict settings. Yet this literature often treats armed actors as the primary architects of rule and depicts civilians in a binary: they either resist rebel rule or accept it.

Based on research in former FARC-EP strongholds in rural Colombia, I argue that civilians in conflict settings can be active institutional actors who coproduce wartime governance who have a voice amidst the conflict. Community organisations helped build and maintain institutions of local order by contributing resources, labour, and time to sustain public goods, organise collective work, enforce community rules, and resolve disputes over land, debts, and everyday harms. These practices were essential to the social and economic development of the villages and did not simply operate “under” armed rule or coercion: there were instance of both, resistance and cooperation.

I evaluate the evolution of these institutions after the demobilisation of the FARC using the concept of convivencia as an empirical locally grounded measure of order. The Spanish term means the ability to live with one another in harmony, and I operationalise it through observable practices such as compliance with community rules, participation in collective work, dispute-resolution outcomes, and everyday norms of mutual support. The findings re-centre civilian agency in wartime governance and clarify how local institutions can persist and adapt when armed enforcement recedes or changes form.