Rebel Organizations Research Articles

The Olympic Challenge: Russia's Strategy for the Establishment of Security in the North Caucasus before 2014

This article discusses the ongoing security situation in the Russian North Caucasus, with a particular focus on the upcoming Winter 2014 Olympics in the resort of Sochi. The aim is to discuss groups that could be a source of potential problems, including non-violent groups like the Circassians, which have an issue with the Olympics taking place in their ancestral homeland, and violent rebel organizations like the one led by Doku Umarov. Finally, we will discuss what initiatives Moscow is expected to carry out over the next three years, as well as providing some policy suggestions.

Create compliance and cohesion: how rebel organizations manage to survive

Established conflict theories focus on the role of incentives in the decision to join, stay, or leave an insurgency. These theories, however, disregard the pressure that an organization can impose on its members. Similar to legal organizations, we assert that a rebel organization can sustain itself by effective human resource management. Using narratives resulting from psychological trauma therapy of former combatants of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), these management strategies are examined. The analysis shows that the LRA sustains itself in the first place by the use of brute force. However, they also manage themselves by a careful selection process of their fighters, by the conscious creation of social control, and by offering their members an alternative social network in which promotion and compensation play a role.

Signaling and Screening for Recruitment among the Maoists in India

Recruitment into underground criminal and terrorist organizations is rendered difficult by the absence of formal institutions to protect agreements of non‐defection by entrants. Threats of violence, and punishments by informal norms are also difficult when defectors can vanish into anonymity in a large population. Ex ante means of Spencian costly signaling allows prospective entrants to build trust to enter rebel organizations like the Maoists in India. Based on field interviews in jungles and tribal villages in south India, it is discovered that costly to mimic signals play an important role in the recruitment of Maoists. It is also discovered that “bridge‐burning”, i.e., behavior that reduces alternative options of livelihood, and behavior that increases asset specificity of candidates, increases trustworthiness of prospective entrants.

Signaling and Predatory Mimicry in India’s Naxalite Lands

Extralegal and rebel organizations often extort civilians to raise funds for their operations. A key issue in this process is overcoming informational asymmetries regarding extortionists’ membership in the extralegal organization. In this paper, I examine how victims determine if an extortionist belongs to an extralegal organization, in this case a left-wing guerrilla/terrorist group in India called the Naxalites, or is merely a “deceptive mimic” (a fake)? I interview police, victims of extortion, Naxalites, and arrested Naxalite mimics to understand how the Naxalites use costly signals to “help” victims distinguish real Naxalites from Naxalite mimics. Naxalites’ tactics include quoting Marxist-Leninist literature to appear learned, singing revolutionary songs, carrying guns, and bringing along female rebels. I find that a key feature differentiating a small group of extortionists from an organized rebel group is the latter’s ability to use a large and efficient network to gather information about victims finances. For high-valued victims, Naxalites use these resources at a relatively lower cost than unorganized mimics to gather information about victims’ assets or recent earnings. By using this information to set their extortion price precisely and by revealing they know details about the victim that are hard to learn, they authenticate their claims to group membership. However, I also discover two types of situations in which Naxalite mimics succeed in passing as Naxalites. First, even though the Naxalite mimics sometimes use low-cost signals and demand small amounts of money, risk-averse victims fall prey when they are not able to see that it is not worth the time of real Naxalites to demand small sums given their higher expected costs of punishment if caught. Costs of punishment are expected to be higher for real Naxalites because they will also face terrorism charges. Second, I discover that some mimics are ex-Naxalites, who are more or less as capable of using costly signals as the Naxalites and therefore succeed.

The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (review)

Reviewed by: The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo Karen A. Ritzenhoff The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (2007). Directed by Lisa F. Jackson. Distributed by Women Make Movies. 76 min, subtitled. Guerilla rape: The leading surgeon in the documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in Congo (2007) calls it the "the monstrosity of this century." The Minister of Women's Affairs in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Faida Mwamgila, explains that "Congolese women find themselves in the middle of a battlefield." They are used as "weapons of war." Four million people have already been killed during the past ten years of civil war in the Congo, formerly called Zaire. In addition, over 200,000 women are the victims of rape. The mutilation inflicted by rifles and sticks to these women's genitalia and reproductive organs results in disfigurement, painful lesions, and "fistulas," or holes, that no doctor can repair, with damaged internal organs leading to urinary incontinence and sterility. These mothers, grandmothers and female children are alive, but struggle with wounds that require repeated surgery and take years to heal. "Why use sex in order to mutilate and defeat someone?" Dr. Denis Mukwege asks. He oversees the hospital of Panzi in a small rural community, a lengthy plane and car ride away from the capital of DRC. Rows of beds in close proximity visualize the despair of thousands of women who have been gang raped during the Civil War by men who emerged in their villages, pillaged their belongings, killed the men and raped the women and children. Minister Mwamgila does not place blame on one single group but on various rebel organizations of neighboring countries, along with the brutal Rwandan paramilitary. Some women lost their spouses; others are shunned in their own communities by husbands and relatives alike. One 34 year old woman, Marie Jeanne, explains on camera that her husband fled when the soldiers came to their house, but [End Page 134] then told her eight children that their mother had asked for the soldiers' abuse and consented to her rape. "My heart is broken," Marie Jeanne concludes, because she is now stigmatized and rejected as a rape victim. Filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson provides a grim picture of the situation of these rape survivors and uses her film to create a sense of alliance between American and African women. She wants to break the "greatest silence" and tell the women's stories so they do not remain invisible to the global community. Jackson tells the story of The Greatest Silence from a subjective point of view and recounts her impressions in personalized voice-overs. The middle-aged, white director from New York had herself been gang-raped as a 25-year-old, when she left her office late at night in Georgetown. Jackson explains that she can empathize with the Congolese women, not only in terms of their pain but also their feelings of guilt and rejection—her own short marriage having ended because her husband treated her as "damaged goods." In an emotional scene, visualized by a hand-held camera and the resounding footsteps of a woman walking along a badly lit street, she recounts her memories and shares her trauma with the women from the Congo who have been victimized. After interviewing a set of five men in the jungle who explain candidly why they "take" women to feel more "manly," or when they are in need of sex, Jackson remarks that she had insomnia for several days and experienced nightmares thinking back on the "men with guns." This scene is one of the key moments of the documentary, as the filmmaker elicits the perspectives of predators that now wear sunglasses and drape themselves in garments to conceal their identities. Through these interviews, the men confirm the loss of humanity that accompanies war, relating how their sexual violence uses women as objects in exchange for brief contentment, with no regard for human dignity. Some of the men interviewed on camera are married, several of them educated, all of them have careers in their civilian lives that should prevent them from committing atrocities. Jackson illustrates, through both image and narration, how the "men melted back...

Why Some Colombian Guerrilla Members Stayed in the Movement Until Demobilization: A Micro-Sociological Case Study of Factors That Influenced Members' Commitment to Three Former Rebel Organizations: M-19, EPL, and CRS

Based on 42 in-depth interviews with members of three former Colombian guerrilla organizations, M-19, EPL, and CRS, reasons why they stayed in these organizations through several years, if not decades, of violent confrontation with government forces are examined. From a micro-level perspective, the study identifies four important motivations for members to remain in these groups: personal dependence on their organization, values shared with other members and with the group, the clandestine life-style, and self-identity, which is boosted by the subjects' feeling that their work in the group matters.

The Delegation of War to Rebel Organizations

States in an international dispute sometimes choose to attack their enemies with their own military forces but other times choose to empower domestic insurgent groups. What explains the decision to act through rebel proxies rather than directly engage a rival? Theories and empirical analyses of international conflict have adopted a state-centric bias, ignoring the substitution between direct uses of force and indirect action through rebel organizations. This note examines the decision to delegate conflict to rebels through the lens of principal—agent theory. While states support rebel groups to forgo some of the costs of conflict, they also lose a degree of foreign policy autonomy. Preliminary evidence of conflict delegation is presented, along with a number of empirically testable propositions. Finally, the consequences of delegation from the rebels’ perspective are explored. This framework serves as a starting point for future research on rebel—patron interactions.

The Location and Purpose of Wars Around the World: A New Global Dataset, 1816–2001

A critical question in the quantitative study of war is how to choose appropriate units of analysis. While most studies link wars to the sovereign states that fight them, several authors have recently offered alternative perspectives, focusing on the the properties of rebel organizations and armies or tracking events in fine-grained geographic spaces. We contribute to these developments by introducing a new dataset of wars fought from 1816–2001 on fixed territorial units of observation that conform to the grid of states in 2001. Compared to standard datasets, we expand the geographic purview to include states not recognized by the international system. We provide location codes that identify the territories on which conflicts are fought, which is especially important for the analysis of imperial wars and colonial rebellions. We also introduce a new typology of wars based upon the aims of warring parties rather than their status in the state system. This dataset is uniquely suited to explore new questions that cannot be addressed with other datasets. To illustrate, we test an institutionalist theory of war and show empirically that the types of wars fought in a territory depend on whether it is governed as a modern nation-state, an imperial dependency, or the center of an empire.

Terror, Territory, and Deterritorialization: Landscapes of Terror and the Unmaking of State Power in the Mozambican “Civil” War

During the Mozambican “civil” war, residents across large areas of the countryside were terrorized out of their villages by the South African-backed Mozambican rebel organization Renamo. Drawing on the deterritorialization debates and investigations into the relation between territory and terror—literatures that have rarely engaged with one another—and bringing them together with interviews with survivors of the conflict, I show how Renamo unmade state power through a terror-induced deterritorialization. As the newly independent Mozambican state had attempted to build a new nation–state through communal villages as a particular ordering of space, Renamo used tactics of profound terror to destroy the lived spaces of these villages to empty them of residents but also of citizen and state. Speaking to a gap in the deterritorialization debates, this case illustrates that terror is a powerful force in realizing deterritorialization. Yet these debates, in particular their insights concerning the necessary relation between de- and reterritorialization, help clarify that terror is more accurately linked to territorialization processes rather than territory simply as space. This is a valuable addition to the literature on territory and terror and key to understanding Renamo's achievements. The de/reterritorialization coupling furthermore sheds light on the equally spatial and temporal aspects of terror and, more concretely, helps clarify why Renamo's terror stands out as particularly disturbing. Namely, Renamo effected a suspended state of deterritorialization; although it did rebuild spaces and spatial relations, this reterritorialization was ultimately aimed at social, political, and spatial annihilation and hence at ensuring the villages remain indefinitely empty.

Complex political perpetrators: reflections on Dominic Ongwen

ABSTRACTDominic Ongwen is an indicted war criminal and former child soldier in one of the world's most brutal rebel organisations, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Ongwen is at once victim and perpetrator: what justice strategy is relevant? I introduce the concept of complex political perpetrators to describe youth who occupy extremely marginal spaces in settings of chronic crisis, and who use violence as an expression of political agency. Ongwen represents a troupe of young rebels who were ‘bred’ in the shadows of illiberal war economies. Excluded from the polity, or rather never having been socialised within it, such complex political perpetrators must be recognised in the debate on transitional justice after mass atrocity, lest cycles of exclusion and violence as politics by another means continue.

Construcción y movilización de la sociedad civil en el discurso del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN)

The paper presents a piece of research into the intradiscursive process in which a specific social object, denoted by the expression “civil society”, has been constructed and mobilized by a particular discourse of a Mexican rebel organization, at a definite moment, from January 1994 to September 1996. The analysis of this discourse enables the description of the parallel evolutions of four kinds of construction; extensive, comprehensive, relative and dynamic. After presenting this analysis and its interpretation in an extra-discursive context, the resultant arguments are used to discuss a number of theoretical conceptions of civil society and social mobilization.

Religion, terrorism and public goods: Testing the club model

Can rational models, once theological explanations are discredited, explain why certain radical religious rebels are so successful in perpetrating suicide attacks? The fundamental barrier to success turns out not to be recruiting suicide attackers; there is a rational basis for volunteering. Rather, the barrier is the danger of other operatives defecting. A club model, portraying voluntary religious organizations as efficient providers of local public goods, explains how they weed out potential defectors by requiring sacrifices as signals of commitment. They are thereby able to succeed in risky terrorist attacks. The model has testable implications for tactic choice and damage achieved by clubs and other rebel organizations. Data spanning a half-century on both terrorists and civil war insurgents, much from Middle East sources and Israel/Palestine, reveal that: a) missions organized by radical religious clubs that provide benign local public goods are both more lethal and are more likely to be suicide attacks than missions organized by other terrorist groups with similar aims and theologies; and b) suicide attacks are chosen when targets are “hard,” i.e., difficult to destroy. Our results suggest benign tactics to counter radical religious terrorism and insurgency.

Inside rebellion: the politics of insurgent violence

Part I. The Structure of Rebel Organizations: 1. The industrial organization of rebellion 2. Four rebel organizations 3. Recruitment 4. Control Part II. The Strategies of Rebel Groups: 5. Governance 6. Violence 7. Resilience 8. Extensions.

The Structure of Charismatic Mobilization: A Case Study of Rebellion During the Chinese Cultural Revolution

This article makes a case for bringing the concept of charismatic authority back into the study of social movements. Three decades ago, with the paradigmatic shift from psychological to strategic explanations, Weber's concept virtually disappeared from scholarship about collective action. Based on an investigation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, I examine the distinctive structure and capacities of charismatic mobilization. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong called on students, workers, and peasants to attack the officials of his own party. Because Mao employed both bureaucratic and charismatic methods of mobilization, this movement offers an opportunity to compare the structural characteristics of the two and evaluate their distinctive capacities. Through a case study of the most prominent Cultural Revolution rebel organization, I demonstrate that the informal structure of charismatic mobilization gave the movement a rule-breaking power that made it highly effective in undermining bureaucratic authority. I then suggest how the concepts of charismatic and bureaucratic mobilization might be used to analyze other social movements and to clarify issues in long-standing debates about the tendency of social movement organizations to become conservative.

Greed and grievance in civil war

We investigate the causes of civil war, using a new data set of wars during 1960–99. Rebellion may be explained by atypically severe grievances, such as high inequality, a lack of political rights, or ethnic and religious divisions in society. Alternatively, it might be explained by atypical opportunities for building a rebel organization. While it is difficult to find proxies for grievances and opportunities, we find that political and social variables that are most obviously related to grievances have little explanatory power. By contrast, economic variables, which could proxy some grievances but are perhaps more obviously related to the viability of rebellion, provide considerably more explanatory power.

Criminal Rebels? A Discussion of Civil War and Criminality from the Colombian Experience

The Colombian conflict seems a typical instantiation of a “greedy war”and exhibits very strong links between criminal economic activities and rebel organizations. On the contrary, the author suggests that not even in Colombia does the “criminal rebels” thesis hold. On the other hand, the Colombian case shows that criminality and war mix in ways that escape a strictly economic interpretation of war.

The Rose-Colored Spike Heeled Shoe Without its Mate, and Other Contradictions of Development and Humanitarian Aid

It's not often that the recipients of development and humanitarian aid get to speak out about the well-intentioned, uneven, and mission-directed assistance that arrives to "help" them. In late July, the EZLN, a rebel organization operative in Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state, announced changes in their external and fiscal policy, as part of an internal reorganization. Spearheaded by the regional councils of autonomous indigenous municipalities, they were striving to achieve a more equitable and effective development plan.

Regress and War: The Case of the DRCongo

The New York-based International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates that, by the end of 2001, the indirect death toll in the ongoing war in central Africa – the first international armed conflict the continent had seen – had reached 2.5 million. In this media-silent war, which began in August 1998, people were killed not so much by bullets, but by an amazing lack of concern on the part of the occupying armies, rebel organisations and armed resistance groups, and by the ambiguous attitude adopted by the international community. Politically, various groups were aligned in ever-changing alliances that were devoid of any long-term ideology or strategy. In the present article, we argue instead that the international war in Central Africa can only be understood as an intricate cluster of phenomena. The long-term erosion of elite power and finance in some parts of Africa, occasioned by a changing geopolitical reality in the continent, sparked divergent responses, ranging from state reconstruction in some countries to resistance, criminalisation and war in others. The latter response would appear to be most common in weak states with deteriorating infrastructures and rich natural resources which were extracted on a small scale by petty producers. This would seem to give credence to the assertion that natural riches are a curse rather than a blessing. The above argument also runs against the deep-rooted conviction that Africa's underdevelopment is a consequence of the international economic environment and globalisation processes. We submit that Africa is being strangled by a lack of serious foreign investment rather than by a new scramble for the continent's natural resources.

Recruitment and Allegiance

Civil war is fought between two political organizations, the state and a rebel group. Myriad theories of civil war have examined the role of state institutions and state strength, but little attention has been devoted to theorizing about rebel organizations themselves. The organizational structure of rebel groups is examined to understand patterns of recruitment and allegiance. Drawing on principal-agent analysis of participation and incentive compatibility constraints and the analytical tradition of rent-seeking contests, a model is developed to demonstrate that three factors—geography, ethnicity, and ideology—play an important role in determining military success, deterring defection within the rebel group, and shaping recruitment.

The Evolution Of The Farc: A Guerrilla Group’s Long History

Colombia’s largest rebel organization is deeply rooted in a legacy of class conflict.