Paper short abstract:

Traditional institutions govern many ethnic groups on the basis of customary law and conflict resolution. However, the effect of traditional governance and its interaction with state institutions on violence is not yet sufficiently investigated. This paper analyses this relationship comparatively.

Paper long abstract:

Many ethnic groups are politically organised through institutions of traditional governance. These indigenous political systems are based on customary law and organise communities through internal policing and customary judicial proceedings. States deal differently with the resulting parallelism of state and ethnic institutions: whereas some do not regulate the relationship to traditional governance institutions, some recognize the institutions, grant them autonomy rights, or integrate them into the state's institutional infrastructure. The effect of the state's relationship to traditional governance on violence is not yet sufficiently investigated. While state-level research in Africa has shown that unregulated jurisdictional overlap increases the risk of communal violence (Eck 2014), there is also group-level evidence that traditionally organised ethnic groups have a decreased risk of being involved in communal violence. In this paper, I apply new data at the group level, containing geo-referenced information on the existence and capacities of traditional governance institutions, and at the state-level, coding the regulation of the relationship between these institutions and states. I argue that unregulated parallel governance structures are a potential source of violent conflict by producing opportunity structures favourable to violent mobilisation through overlapping jurisdictions. The regulation, however, reduces the likelihood of violence due to an advanced justice and security infrastructure. To test this claim, I empirically examine the relationship by applying multilevel analysis. Thereby I am able to account for variation and significance of traditional governance between states, which offers a more fine-grained understanding of the effect of existing traditional governance on violence.