Rules for rebels: the science of victory in military history

Abstract

Why do some armed rebellions succeed and others fail? In the popular consciousness and in much International Relations theorizing there is a widespread view against all evidence that terrorism works and that rebels kill civilians because it helps them get what they want. When Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was at the pinnacle of its power, an outpouring of literature lauded the group's strategic genius in using extreme barbarity and well-publicized atrocities to build their legitimacy and their caliphate and defeat their war-weary adversaries. But, as Max Abrahms shows in this well-researched and engagingly argued book, this view could not be further from the truth. Rebels do not succeed by killing civilians. In fact, terrorism—understood as the deliberate killing of civilians—rarely succeeds. We now know that the Islamic State was not led by strategic geniuses but by brutal opportunistic ideologues—its caliphate is collapsing into ruins almost as quickly as it was built, the group having achieved none of the objectives it had set for itself. The same is true of other rebel groups that kill civilians.