Humanitarian Action and Conflict Governances in Areas of Limited Statehood

A strong argument in the literature on rebel governance sees cooperation with civilians a key component for the success of rebel groups’ political agendas. Coercion, in fact, may work only until territorial control is contested. Conversely, once control is secured, it may alienate civilian support and imperil the group’s achievements. The key challenge here is how to build governance structures able to provide public goods. One factor affecting the development of such governance structures is the presence of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). Ensuring INGOs collaboration may increase rebels’ international/local legitimacy. However, compared to their increasing engagement, we know fairly little about the ways in which INGOs interact with conflict security governances. Thus the paper will address the following questions: How do NGOs define their security strategies, in adaptation to conflict dynamics? Which factors will most likely affect the decision making process? Drawing on two different sets of theories, the paper will advance a theoretical framework aiming to tackle such issues. It will compare two competing hypotheses, the first drawn on studies of governance in areas of limited statehood and rebel governance; the second based on the learning theories of organizations. Both hypotheses assume firstly that – to be operative – organizations must purchase security from the market for force. Secondly, that organizations have a set of strategies - avoidance, acceptance, alliance, fortress and engagement. For the first perspective, NGOs strategies are considered as contractual choices constrained by and adaptive to structural governance imperatives. For the second perspective, the ‘purchase’ spawns from a constant monitoring of the conflict, thus strategies result from a ‘learning process’. The strategy is the explanandum, while the learning - the intermediate variable – is determined by experience, context and knowledge. This micro-level focus on NGOs officers allows to explore the processes driving the NGO interaction, to understand the dynamics behind arrangements of public goods, and shedding lights on the impacts on local governance.