Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Fates of Rebels: The Politics of Insurgency Survival and Demise

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

Political violence that takes place outside of state control, in particular civil wars and insurgencies, raises critical issues for academic inquiry and for practical policy responses to today's international security environment. Scholarly debates primarily focus on explaining the causes of insurgent violence, with particular reference to those rebellions that succeed or fail. Seldom examined is the broad range of outcomes faced by the greater majority rebel groups at war's end. Rebel fates vary considerably along a spectrum from survival, defined as ongoing insurgency or political settlement, to demise, defined as internal fragmentation or external defeat. These outcomes are not necessarily related to the causes of war, the motivations of group members, or to the degree of popular support for rebellion. This dissertation project presents a comparative framework for explaining the organizational variation and corresponding fates experienced by rebel groups in civil wars. It constructs a new typology of these groups based on two structural factors that contribute to their contrasting fates. First, a rebel group's degree of autonomy from external state actors' cross-border networks shapes how it collects and uses resources and reflects the role it plays in regional state politics. Second, its degree of autonomy from internal state authority shapes group membership and reflects the ongoing role it plays in domestic politics. State strategies for countering rebellion tend to correspond to rebel type and to the ways in which an incumbent regime deals with challenges to its authority from different segments of political society. These rebel types and their strategic choices provide the basis for generating plausible expectations of their survival or demise. Those with external resource linkages and internal political linkages are more likely to survive than those without. Such variation is prevalent in the fragmented states and contentious regional politics in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and is present in the borderlands of northern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Fieldwork funded by the NSF award will be conducted in Uganda, Southern Sudan, and Sierra Leone. It will focus on 1) obtaining and analyzing primary documents to reconstruct patterns of events and to identify key actors; and 2) field interviews with former insurgents, military and government officials, scholars, and civil society leaders, which will lend insight into the internal strategic debates and decision-making of a range of rebel groups that operated in these countries. These cases allow for testable propositions through comparisons while controlling for specific variables, and present counterfactuals against which to test conclusions. This research is relevant for policymakers in the United States. Local and regional instability in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, the threat of terrorism, and the recognized connection between failed states and national security focus attention on how to devise effective responses to insurgent violence that has become global in scope. The study of rebel fates generates widely applicable principles regarding the distinct relationships between rebels and the regimes they fight, and between rebels and neighboring states that sponsor them. Rebel types derived from these relationships thus lead to predictions regarding their organization, behavior, and ultimate trajectories in warfare. Research into the inner workings of multiple rebel types shows how international responses, such as peacekeeping interventions and counterinsurgency operations, can influence very different outcomes depending on which type of insurgency is their target. Such research will therefore provide practical advice on how to address these conflicts.