Recent seminal contributions in the literature on civil conflicts have explored the micro-foundations of collective political violence. A great deal of attention is now paid to the non-state collective actors that organize violence and the specific constraints and challenges they face: gathering funds, recruiting combatants, enforcing rank and files’ commitment. The strategies implemented to solve these challenges have been shown to influence crucial outcomes such as the intensity of violence or the sustainability of violent groups over time.
The paper discusses the recently promoted view that organized insurgent violence should either be conducted by activists bonded together by social capital ties or self interested quasi-mercenaries, depending on the type of financial resources available to the group. We contrast this perspective with the study of an ethnic Nigerian militia, the
Oodua People’s Congress (OPC).
Section II discusses the existing conceptual frameworks related to violent organizations and states our analytical puzzle. Section III details and interprets our empirical findings on the organizational dynamics of the OPC. Section IV presents and comments the results concerning OPC militants’ profiles and subjective motives for violent engagement. Section V concludes.
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