| Summary/Abstract |
Civil society actors have become key players in conflicts, especially in intra-state ones. This has been facilitated by the transformation of conflicts, increasingly characterized by high-intensity intra-border ethno-religious tensions and strong international influence by proxy. The usual take on conflicts focuses on the role of governmental actors, both national and international. Accordingly, violence and peace are usually considered to be determined above all by the political decisions of official institutions alone. While this remains partly true, in this paper I examine the other side of the coin: the non-governmental component in conflicts. Civil society actors, or as I define them, conflict society organizations, are increasingly central in view of the high degree of complexity of contemporary conflicts. These are conflicts that can only be understood by combining macro with micro approaches that focus on society. It is thanks to the latter approach that it is possible to unpack the political inputs, be they good or bad, which emerge from below, from the civil society domain, and scale up to the top political echelons. This is even more so in societies that are highly fragmented and deprived of stable governing institutions. It is in failing states such as those undergoing an ethno-political conflict that much of politics unfolds "on the ground." Hence it is there, at the micro level, that we need to explore
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