Wolfgang Minatti

Existing scholarship often faces difficulties accounting for local variation in the legitimacy of armed actors during civil war as it pre-specifies "sources of legitimacy", considers beliefs about rightful rule as static and sees legitimation as isolated from network dynamics. Conversely, my dissertation argues that civil wars need to be conceptualised as contexts of complex governance networks, where civilians are confronted with different armed actors' governance simultaneously over time.

Combining process tracing with four months of immersive fieldwork in central Colombia, the thesis tests this theory of legitimation with a most-similar case design of two rural communities. Local variation in the legitimacy of the rebel group FARC, it finds, cannot be explained by dynamics within the relation between the FARC and each community but by network effects, particularly the role of the state.

The thesis pushes forward our understanding of the relationship between legitimation processes and governance networks by (a) offering a theory of congruence-finding that can capture and explain legitimation dynamics in complex governance networks; (b) specifying several mechanisms of how beliefs change endogenously to governance networks; and (c) contributing to the link between rebel governance and (self-)legitimation and its significance for the Colombian conflict.
 

Before joining the European University Institute in 2019, I obtained a Bachelors’ degree at the University Innsbruck (Austria) and a Masters’ degree at Leiden University (The Netherlands). I was a visiting scholar at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota (Colombia) and the Centre of Excellence SCRIPTS (Berlin).