Capital, Civilian Agency, and the Repertoires of Paramilitary Governance

Why do armed groups kill some civilians unilaterally, coerce others into constrained bargains, incorporate some as partners, and treat others as passive beneficiaries of wartime order? Existing scholarship often analyses civilian victimisation, collaboration, and governance separately and tends to assume relatively homogeneous civilian populations. I argue that variation in civilian treatment is structured by the interaction between armed organisations’ macro-objectives and the type and substitutability of civilian-held capital.I conceptualise armed actor–civilian relations as a unified repertoire organised along two dimensions: violence and civilian agency—the capacity of civilians to shape outcomes through bargaining, cooperation, or withdrawal. Crossing these dimensions yields four interaction modes: unilateral violence, coercive exchange, negotiated incorporation, and unilateral governance. Where civilians control non-substitutable capital that coercion would degrade (e.g., information, technical expertise, organisational leadership), armed actors grant bounded agency and rely on negotiation. Where capital is extractable or obstructive, agency contracts and coercion predominates.Drawing on judicial records and perpetrator testimonies from Colombia’s Justice and Peace proceedings and employing process tracing across three paramilitary fronts, the analysis shows how shifts in organisational autonomy and capital dependence generate patterned transitions across interaction modes. The findings integrate violence and governance within a single relational account of civilian heterogeneity under armed rule and extend rebel-governance theory to pro-state militias.