Abstract
Abstract Desertion, or the unauthorized exit from an armed group, has major implications for counterinsurgency, war termination, and recruitment dynamics. While existing research stresses the importance of individual motivations for desertion, organizational decline, in the form of military and financial adversity, can also condition desertion. Organizational decline undermines a group's instruments to channel individual preferences into collective action. These instruments include selective incentives, ideological appeal, and coercion. When the binding power of these instruments diminishes, individual desires start to dominate behavior, making desertion more likely. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) insurgency is used to examine this argument with a multimethod approach. First, a quantitative analysis employs unique data on more than 19,000 reported FARC deserters from 2002 to 2017, provided by the Colombian Ministry of Defense. Guarding against threats to causal inference, statistical analysis indicates that organizational decline drives desertion. Second, a qualitative analysis uses a large body of detailed reports on interviews with deserters conducted by Colombian military personnel. The reports demonstrate that organizational decline weakens selective incentives, group ideology, and a credible coercive regime, and fosters desertion through these mechanisms. These findings provide key insights for policymakers, given that desertion can both contribute to ending conflict and accelerate the recruitment of new combatants.
Highlights
The unauthorized exit from an armed organization, what we call “desertion,”[1] is a highly consequential act
We argue that organizational decline has an inouence on selective incentives, ideological appeal, and coercion
We argue that organizational decline increases the likelihood of desertion by members of armed groups, because the instruments that allow such groups to overcome collective action problems—selective incentives, ideological appeal, and coercion—are less effective during periods of decline.[23]
Summary
The unauthorized exit from an armed organization, what we call “desertion,”[1] is a highly consequential act. We offer a new theoretical argument about the organizational dynamics associated with desertion, drawn from collective action theory.[11] Armed organizations typically aght for non-excludable public goods, such as security, justice, or independence. Once these goods are obtained, at least formally, every member of society can enjoy them, regardless of whether they participated in their production. Rather than making assumptions about one’s motivations to stay or leave, our theory speciaes the relevant organizational dynamics that condition a member’s behavior
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