Rebel Governance

Abstract

The past few decades witnessed unprecedented challenges to the modern state system among which the rise of nonstate armed groups stands out both in terms of the number and types of groups that have emerged. Since World War II, more than half of nation states have faced an ethnic, religious, or ideological insurgency by rebel groups, which pursued political or territorial objectives against their target states. Frequently, armed groups’ resort to force as a strategy has been coupled with attempts to establish governance institutions emulating states. Indeed, many of them succeed in achieving a parallel political order to the one maintained by states within whose borders they survive. The most notorious groups, such as Hezbollah, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and al-Shabaab benefit from their capacity to rule over local populations. They extract revenues by taxing those local populations, garnering legitimacy through building court systems, and recruit members to their ranks. Nevertheless, not all groups develop governance capacity. Given that maintaining governance institutions is too costly, rebel groups are anticipated to pragmatically invest all their resources in improving their fighting capacity. What, then, makes a rebel group split its limited resources across two domains (i.e., governance and fighting)? The research on rebel governance emerged seeking an answer to this puzzle. Although we have learned a lot about the types, causes. and institutions of governance from existing research, we still lack knowledge about how international factors such as power distribution, system level shifts, and foreign state support influence are influenced by rebel governance institutions. Scholars need to invest more time in developing a theoretically motivated research agenda to bring the rebels into the center of international relations research in order to predict the future of the modern state system and yield policy-relevant findings about how governance can be reinvented and adjusted to the realities of our times.