Insurgent Conscription for Capacity and Control: State Violence and Coerced Recruitment in Civil War

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Though previous research has recognized that armed groups do not always recruit fighters on a voluntary basis, varieties and determinants of insurgent forced recruitment are still poorly understood. What drives armed groups to employ certain methods of coercive recruitment? This article conceptualizes and studies a particular form of coerced recruitment—insurgent conscription—whereby rebel groups rely on their administrative capacity to compel civilians to fight. Building on scholarship that highlights the impact of state violence on rebel recruitment, I theorize that state violence incentivizes armed groups to employ insurgent conscription. Leveraging a novel, cross-national dataset of insurgent conscription in state-rebel dyads between 1946 and 2008, I find that state targeting of an armed group’s civilian support base increases the likelihood of insurgent conscription. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between state violence and insurgent recruitment, rebel-civilian relationships, and the transformation of institutions and networks in civil wars.