Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: States Within States: The Social Contracts of Armed Groups

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

All rebel organizations need resources. They must not only survive as fighting forces, but the stronger they are, the better the political bargain they can negotiate with the state. In the absence of lootable resources, rebels acquire resources either through symbiotic exchange with civilian supporters or coercive extraction from civilian populations. How and why rebels structure their relations with civilians differently is not well understood. In this model, rebels are treated as policy-seeking organizations that optimize over their ideological goals and organizational needs. In this, they face many of the same challenges as states, and how rebels meet this challenge has ramifications for rebel-civilian relations. Rebels can appeal to external parties -- foreign powers, diasporas, transnational religious movements -- or local citizens for resources. Balancing goals and needs is a difficult political reality. Rebels may be forced to compromise some of their goals in order to increase their resources. The closer these resultant goals are to civilian preferences, the better governors rebels will be. Good governance can comprise political/ideological representation, as well as some public services -- including protection, and up to and including the full range of social services normally provided by states. Overall, rebel groups with domestic sponsorship are expected to provide the best governance, those with religious/ethnic diasporic support to be next-best, followed by foreign state sponsors, and finally extreme transnational movements. Leveraging the comparative power of a natural quasi-experiment in Mindanao (in the south of the Philippines), this project outlines how rebels forge relational contracts at home and abroad, and how they shape the pattern of rebel governance on the ground. This project uses qualitative and quantitative data to compare how Mindanao's three separatist movements respond to different strategic environments, as well as how rebels' behavior shifts over time, and from village to village. The study utilizes an extensive survey of Mindanao's conflict-affected areas, as well as extensive qualitative interviews to compare and outline how rebel groups provide governance. Existing studies of rebel governance fail to adequately explain variation among groups, and/or limit the role of either international or civilian actors. This project contributes theoretically to the study of insurgency by developing a model that includes the preferences and actions of both domestic and international actors. Empirically, this project uses within-case variation in one of the longest-running and most under-studied rebellions in the world. Leveraging within-case variation holds constant a range of socioeconomic and cultural variables that often bedevil cross-national comparisons of rebels' local behavior. A better understanding of how rebels build and establish governance not only can inform more appropriate security and humanitarian programs, but also can suggest ways that political settlements might incorporate and make more transparent existing infrastructures--making peace more likely to last on the ground. Historically, many peace agreements have failed to percolate to the ground. Identifying parallel forms of governance, how they work, what benefits they provide, and why they vary can allow more effective integration into post-conflict stabilization efforts.