This chapter begins the book’s comparative ethnographic enquiry. While the scholarship has advanced several explanations for the post-authoritarian deactivation of the underprivileged across Latin American cities, little is known about the trajectories by which mobilization survives in some neighborhoods and not in others. This chapter focuses on the case of Nuevo Amanecer to better grasp the mechanisms that led to the demise of collective action in post-dictatorial urban Chile. It describes how party activists belonging to the Alianza Democrática developed a managerial leadership style in many underprivileged neighborhoods when coordinating anti-dictatorial protests in the 1980s. The relationships these moderate political activists fostered with neighborhood dwellers throughout the decade often evolved into networks of political loyalty after the democratic transition. These networks are current and ongoing. To feed their political loyalty networks, community leaders learn to insistently monopolize political capital at the grassroots level. This dynamic has further prevented mobilizational citizenship from developing. It also fragments población spaces, deactivates local initiatives of governance, and depoliticizes the youth.

The concluding chapter reviews the theory and evidence and derives implications for how civilian agency, violent resistance, and the rise of third actors affect the dynamics of civil war. The chapter explores how the arguments can shed light on similar developments in past and contemporary armed conflicts and reflect on Naparama’s legacy for postwar politics in Mozambique. Overall, the chapter shows that, while this book explains when, where, and how militias originate, there is much work to be done to understand how militias evolve and develop their relations with governments, rebels, and civilians. Militias are important third actors in civil wars, but we do not yet completely understand the challenges that come along with their rise.

Experiments are increasingly used to better understand various aspects of civil conflict. A critical barrier to peace is often conflict recurrence after a settlement or other attempt to end fighting between sides. This chapter examines the growing literature on experiments in post-conflict contexts to understand their contributions and limitations to our understanding of the dynamics in this period. It argues that work on post-conflict contexts takes two different perspectives: a peace stabilization approach emphasizes special problems from civil conflict, including how to sustain peace agreements, while a peace consolidation approach emphasizes problems common to statebuilding, including how to reconstruct communities. Both seek in part to prevent conflict recurrence, though, and that is the focus of this chapter. Although more existing theory links stabilization programs with enduring peace, more existing experiments examine consolidation programs. Both approaches would benefit from new work. Post-conflict contexts in general, however, are difficult environments in which to work, and so experiments face three interrelated challenges: first, these contexts present special ethical challenges due to both the high stakes of peace and the sensitivity of subjects; second, these are complex treatments often conducted simultaneously by different actors, and these are treatments that depend on both institutional change and behavioral responses, so change is the constant in these contexts; and, third, these contexts also face heterogeneity in terms of programs but also contexts that mean the lessons may not travel even among post-conflict settings. Despite these challenges, experiments in post-conflict contexts hold promise for advancing our understanding of enduring peace.