Abstract This article addresses the question of why individuals do not join armed groups during civil wars. Based on conflict history interviews with non-combatants and former members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), it singles out the most relevant mechanisms that inform respondents’ non-participation choices: lack of opportunity, embeddedness in disapproving networks, resource activation, resilience, and determination. These mechanisms operate at different levels of analysis and therefore highlight the fundamental importance and interplay of (changing) political contexts, (adjusting) quotidian systems of social ties and individual dispositions in shaping non-participation dynamics and in generating spatio-temporal variation in non-involvement patterns. By analyzing non-participation in armed groups, the article contributes to the growing scholarly interest in the multiple choices and roles individuals take and adopt (beyond engaging in militancy) and elucidates the complex relationship between endogenous conflict dynamics and pre-war structures and dispositions underlying micro-mobilization processes.