Conflict Management from Below: Insights from Somali Clan Militias and Colombian Indigenous Security Initiatives

The article challenges conventional views in peace studies portraying local responses to violence as spontaneous and unstructured. Drawing on cases from Colombia (Guardia Indígena) and Somalia (Ma’awisley), we demonstrate how local actors can autonomously shape security through systematic, coherent, and long-term strategies. The article shifts attention to a hitherto neglected form of purposive local agency amid conflict, whose marginalisation in the literature has been reflected in terminological inadequacy. To address this gap, we advance conflict management from below as a conceptual tool for analysing locally grounded, organised practices of violence mitigation beyond both state-centric paradigms and spontaneous grassroots initiatives.