Institutionalising Armed Militancy

The academic literature on political violence and civil wars has increasingly investigated non-state armed groups' (NSAG) meso-level with organisational studies. This paper seeks to broaden this corpus with the study of these groups' comparative institutionalisation, defined in this workshop as the internal routinisation of behaviour, external perception as having an ability to last, and objective durability. NGAG's institutionalisation processes generate the shared organisational norms that sustain a group's cohesion and survival in the long-run. This research argues that these organisational norms exist at two complementary horizontal and vertical levels. Horizontal norms connect a group's leadership and delineate the nature of its decision making processes. Vertical norms deal with internal discipline and hierarchy between a group's leadership and its members. This article develops a path-dependent analysis of the successful and failed institutionalisation of two Egyptian NSAG from their emergence to the partial joining of the post-2011 political process in Egypt. It argues that the timing of these groups' adoption of violence was critical in accounting for their subsequent institutionalisation. The Islamic Group (al-Jamaʿa al-Islamiyya), which endorsed violence a few years after its emergence, benefited from the low-risk activities organised before the cycle of violence to establish the norms that served its subsequent institutionalisation. The Jihad Group, whose early endorsement of violence fuelled long-term factionalism and internal disputes, failed to replicate a similar trajectory and never managed to fully institutionalise. This research is based on extensive field research and interviews with leaders and members of these two groups.