Keeping Armed Actors Out: The Protective Effect of Shuras in Afghanistan

Abstract

Though civilians have traditionally been perceived as powerless at the hands of armed groups in civil war, recent research credits civilians with a greater degree of agency than previously perceived, revealing that effective institutions may be able to lessen the likelihood of violence in their locality through strategies such as resolving disputes between community members before they involve armed actors. However, systematic tests have been restricted in their scope and level of analysis due to the limited availability of data that captures the effectiveness of community-level institutions, so the applications of existing findings remain unclear. In this article, I replicate findings that effective local institutions lessen the likelihood of violence, even in a “hard” test of the hypothesis. Drawing upon survey data from Afghanistan, I demonstrate that more effective shuras and jirgas are associated with communities that perceive themselves and their families as safer, even in areas marred by armed group violence.