Jacob Fortier
“…political parties are not peripheral to violent conflict but integral to how it unfolds and, at times, how it ends.”
Research on civil war and political violence has long centred on the behaviour and agency of a familiar set of actors: states, armed groups, and, more recently, civilians. However, political parties, despite their central role in the everyday functioning of most political systems, are rarely treated as autonomous agents in this literature. They typically appear either as electoral vehicles that armed groups seek to influence or as institutional endpoints through which armed struggle eventually subsides into electoral competition, obscuring the wider set of practices through which parties actively shape conflict dynamics beyond sponsoring violence.
This post argues that this view is incomplete. In many conflict-affected societies, political parties operate during hostilities, alongside or against armed groups and state actors. Because they are embedded in democratic institutions and occupy a privileged position in organising representation and electoral competition for constituencies that armed actors also seek to mobilise, parties play a central and distinctive role in shaping how violence is interpreted by the public and incorporated (or not) into democratic political life. In doing so, parties can also contribute to de-escalating conflict, either by sidelining violent actors or by facilitating their transition into institutional politics. Taking parties seriously as actors in violent conflict thus sheds light on several dynamics that recent Civil War Paths blog contributions have examined, including the construction of political narratives about violence and ordering processes in civil wars.
Armed Orders Through a Relational Lens
Although they may at first glance appear to be opposing ways of doing politics, armed mobilisation and democratic multi-party politics often take place side by side. Many countries, from Colombia to Peru, India, Turkey and Iraq, just to name a few, have held elections while armed conflicts were ongoing.
In such settings, political parties and armed organisations are rarely isolated from one another. Instead, they are connected through a range of relationships that vary in origin and intensity. These relationships take several forms. In some cases, armed groups emerge out of party structures. In others, parties are created by armed organisations seeking electoral representation. Elsewhere, parties and armed groups remain organisationally distinct but share constituencies, identities, or territorial bases, creating durable forms of interdependence. In Turkey, for instance, Kurdish parties have operated electorally for decades in the shadow of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK)’s armed campaign, navigating both repression by the state and expectations of solidarity from overlapping constituencies. In India, parliamentary competition has persisted alongside the Naxalite–Maoist insurgency, particularly in central and eastern regions, where parties such as the Communist Party of India (Marxist) operated electorally while navigating insurgent influence and state counterinsurgency pressures.
In these contexts, political parties continue to participate in democratic life even as it is transformed by war. Concretely, this often involves negotiating public space and access to constituents with armed groups that control segments of territory, but also entering into various relationships of cooperation and opposition with the warring sides in order to preserve electoral and organisational viability.
Crucially, these relational dynamics cut both ways. Armed actors often encounter local orders structured in part by existing political parties as the main local authority, forcing them to decide whether to sideline or coexist with those actors, while parties, on the other hand, may attempt to profit from or resist armed influences. Ultimately, armed orders are developed from within these relations between violent and institutionalized actors, rather than being merely imposed by armed groups.
The Colombian conflict exemplifies this. Throughout the war, parties across the ideological spectrum became entangled in local arrangements with guerrilla groups and paramilitaries. Some parties relied on armed actors to protect candidates or to coerce the electorate. Others experienced direct violence and displacement of their militants and supporter base, sometimes forcing them to reconsider their campaigning and policy positions. Ultimately, the outcome was not so much the disappearance of democratic competition but the emergence of political orders in which democratic practices were embedded within armed governance.
The Partisan Management of Violence in Democracies
Considering the role of parties in violent conflict also opens to new ways of thinking about how democracies manage political violence. Whether armed actors intrude into democratic political systems is determined not just by state security and law enforcement practices, but also by how democracy is practiced by parties. This is increasingly recognised by NGOs and commissions concerned with democratic protection, which emphasise how partisan actors shape the boundaries of acceptable political engagement in contexts marked by violence.
Ethno-nationalist movements illustrate this dynamic clearly. In Northern Ireland, the Basque Country, Corsica, and Quebec, legal nationalist parties have long competed electorally alongside clandestine armed organisations advancing overlapping claims and mobilisingthe same constituencies. This organisational overlap has at times enabled parties to shape how violence emerging from within the movement was managed. Under certain conditions, this role has translated into concrete contributions to conflict de-escalation through at least two distinct mechanisms.
First, parties may sideline violent actors by taking active measures that constrain armed mobilisation, such as cooperating with state authorities or withdrawing logistical and political support. This strategy is evident in the Basque Country, where the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) participated in cross-party agreements such as the Ajuria Enea Pact, and in Quebec, where the institutionalised wing of the independence movement worked with state authorities to marginalise the Front de libération du Québec(FLQ). Second, parties may offer an exit from armed struggle by facilitating political incorporation and alternative pathways for participation. In Corsica, nationalist parties helped create the political conditions that preceded the Fronte di liberazione naziunale corsu (FLNC)’s cessation of violence by committing to pursue nationalist claims through institutional politics. In Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin enabled former Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) members to transition into political and media roles, redirecting engagement away from armed action.
Violence, Democracy and Partisan Politics
Taken together, these cases suggest that political parties are not peripheral to violent conflict but integral to how it unfolds and, at times, how it ends. Including parties into the study of armed conflict thus sharpens our understanding of how violent and democratic orders interact, and highlights a set of actors whose everyday practices can both sustain violence and make its de-escalation possible. More broadly, this perspective encourages a shift away from viewing violence as either fully external to conventional politics or wholly determinative of it. In many settings, violence becomes politically meaningful through partisan positioning and understanding these processes requires taking political parties as central actors in violent conflict.
