It takes three to tango: contested authority, violence, and rebel legitimacy in Colombia

Why do civilians’ perceptions of the legitimacy of armed actors vary locally during civil war? Existing scholarship grounds legitimacy in the resonance between armed actors’ justifications and civilians’ beliefs, but struggles to explain why legitimacy frequently diverges across villages facing similar actors and conditions. This article argues that understanding wartime legitimacy requires attention to how legitimation processes are shaped by armed actors’ contestations of authority. I theorise two mechanistic logics of legitimation under contested authority: intra-actions between armed actors and civilians, and inter-actions between competing armed actors. Drawing on fieldwork and process tracing, the article tests these mechanisms in a most-similar case study of two Colombian villages contested by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian army between 1990 and 2010. The analysis indicates that intra-actions between armed actors and civilians cannot fully capture variation in the legitimacy of armed actors. Rather, inter-actions between the FARC and the army influenced civilian beliefs and gave credence to the FARC’s justifications in one case but not the other. These findings illustrate the role of contested authority within the literature on rebel governance and legitimacy while also informing policy debates on how to build efficient and legitimate authority during conflict.