Rules For Rebels Research Articles

Tribalocracy: Tribal Wartime Social Order and Its Transformation in Southern Syria

Abstract This article introduces a new phenomenon in the study of civil war: tribal wartime social order. The proposed theory of tribalocracy, or tribal rule, integrates insights from civil war studies, anthropology, and sociology to provide a nuanced account of social order and its transformation in tribal warzones. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the Hauran region in southern Syria, the proposed theory explains how endogenous rebel groups, seeking to maximize a wide range of benefits rendered by tribal shaykhs, refrain from establishing a new form of order. Instead, they co-opt, reassert, and operate under a pre-existing order in reserve. In so doing, rebels rule minimally, leaving most of the local affairs in the hands of civilian actors closely monitored by tribal shaykhs. Given the fluid and volatile nature of wartime order, the proposed theory offers a compelling explanatory framework to account for the transition in the forms of wartime social order from a civilian model to one dominated by rebels. The theory and empirical results expand our understanding of the localized and kinship-based forms of solidarity, the origins of rebel organizations, the source of wartime social order, civilian agency, and the roles played by tribal shaykhs under rebel rule.

Civilian Agency and Service Provision Under Rebel Rule: Evidence from Côte d'Ivoire

Civilian Agency and Service Provision Under Rebel Rule: Evidence from Côte d'Ivoire

Courting Civilians During Conflict: Evidence from Taliban Judges in Afghanistan

AbstractRebels regularly provide public services, especially legal services, but the consequences of such programs are unclear. We argue that rebel courts can boost civilian support for insurgency and augment attack capacity by increasing the legitimacy of the rebellion, creating a vested interest in rebel rule, or enabling rebel coercion of the civilian population. We study the impact of the Taliban's judiciary by leveraging cross-district and over-time variation in exposure to Taliban courts using a trajectory-balancing design. We find that rebel courts reduced civilian support for the government and increased it for the Taliban, and were associated with more attacks and more coalition casualties. Exploring mechanisms, we find that courts resolved major interpersonal disputes between civilians but also facilitated more insurgent intimidation of civilians, and that changes in public opinion are unlikely to have been driven solely by social desirability bias. Our findings help explain the logic of rebel courts and highlight the complex interactions between warfare and institutional development in weak states.

The Supply and Demand of Rebel Governance

Abstract A recent wave of civil conflict scholarship examines rebel governance, the process through which insurgent groups organize local affairs in areas under their control. While current research predominantly focuses on the supply side of rebel governance, the attention given to the demand side has been relatively limited. In this study, we take stock of recent scholarship on the dynamic relationship between rebels and civilians to theoretically explore the supply side of rebel governance and develop a new demand-side typology that captures the key factors influencing civilian preferences regarding the nature of rebel rule. Specifically, we argue that demand for rebel governance is mainly shaped by the interaction between civilians’ perceptions of the state and civilian–rebel compatibility, which we define as civilians’ perceptions of the compatibility of the rebel group with their own values, ideology, identity, and preferred modes of socio-political organization. To illustrate our main theoretical points, we draw upon insights gleaned from multiple insurgencies. Our study significantly enhances our understanding of how rebel–civilian interactions mold the fabric of political order in civil war environments.

The Legacies of Rebel Rule in Southeast Turkey

During armed conflict civilians often inhabit areas of contested governance or areas where rebel groups, NGOs, and/or criminal syndicates vie for authority and challenge the control of the state. As non-state actors confront the authority and legitimacy of the state, civilians become central players in that competition asked to uphold or undercut these alternative governance claims. In this paper we examine the long-term impact of rebel governance for citizens living in spaces where state governance is challenged. Leveraging survey data from areas historically under PKK control in Southeastern Turkey, we focus on the ways in which contestation over governance during the conflict influenced future trust and engagement with the Turkish state. Specifically, we find that individual engagement with rebel governance institutions and personal conflict experience are important factors in understanding the effects of contested governance. Our findings increase our understanding of the long-term impact of armed conflict on civilians and the potential lasting impacts of rebel governance on the post-conflict state.

The Long-Term Economic Legacies of Rebel Rule in Civil War: Micro Evidence From Colombia

A growing literature has documented widespread variation in the extent to which insurgents provide public goods, collect taxes, and regulate civilian conduct. This paper offers what is, to our knowledge, the first study of the long-term economic legacies of rebel governance. This effect is theoretically unclear. Rebel governance may generate incentives for households to expand production and accumulate resources. However, rebel rule may be too unstable to maintain such incentives. We explore empirically the effect of rebel rule on households’ economic resilience using a longitudinal dataset for Colombia. Results show a positive relation between wartime rebel rule and the ability of households to cope with weather shocks in the post-war period. Households in regions where armed groups were present but exercised limited or no intervention fare worse. This effect is associated with infrastructure improvement led by armed groups, their intervention in dispute adjudication, and their close interactions with local populations.

Resuscitating a Forgotten Fourteenth Amendment

Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty, Mark Graber’s landmark new book, upends our understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Republican Congress that drafted it. Although today we consider Section 1 to be the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, Graber shows that, at the time it was framed, Sections 2-4 were the primary focus. Motivated by the threat of resurgent rebel rule and the need to protect those who had been loyal to the Union cause, the majority in the Thirty-Ninth Congress set about crafting an amendment that would configure constitutional politics in such a way that secured the contin-ued supremacy of their own party and ensured that Republicans, not a revived Slave Power, would control constitutional meaning and inter-pretation. The novelty and utility of Graber’s approach becomes especially plain when placed alongside three leading accounts of Re-construction and constitutional reform: those offered by Michael Les Benedict, William Nelson, and Eric Foner.

Rebel governance or governance in rebel territory? Extraction and services in Ndélé, Central African republic

ABSTRACT Rebel governance assumes a symbiotic relationship between coercion and public goods provision. However, in the rebel-held town of Ndélé, Central African Republic, we find that governance happens in rebel-held territory, but rarely by rebels. Rebels allowed other actors to provide services for the people only when this did not hinder rebels extracting political clout and economic benefit from the people and their lands. We show how rebels’ extractive ambitions and governance discourses evolved during successive stages of rebellion through a diachronic comparison rooted in multimethod fieldwork from 2018 to 2022. We ask, why were rebel groups able to set up their rule, then rule for seven years, before ultimately losing power? Rebels evoked public goods at the onset of rebellion to justify the use of coercive means. After rebel rule was established, rebels outsourced public goods to international and state actors allowing for governance in rebel-held territory while focussing their own efforts on extraction. When their rule was challenged, rebels targeted governance actors and spaces in their territory in pursuit of economic gain and political dominance. Our findings call for a re-evaluation of existing rebel governance studies and the ways in which rebel groups are engaged with.

‘Blunt’ biopolitical rebel rule: on weapons and political geography at the edge of the state

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the ways in which processes of weapons acquisition and armed collectives formation contribute to shape rebel polities – with their populations and attendant political geographies – in frontier spaces. It argues that the acquisition of weapons and the formation of an armed ensemble are shaped by political rationalities and techniques of governing the entanglements between humans and weapons that are diffused throughout society as a whole. Drawing on biopolitical governmentality, I also show that by governing weapons acquisition and the formation of an armed force rebel movements shape the rebel polity’s collective identity and political geographies of ‘vital’ space in frontiers. Harnessing fieldwork-based research to study Ta’ang rebel movements in Myanmar, I find that weapons acquisition and the formation of an armed ensembles have been inflected by govern-mentalities of narcotics eradication and ethnonationality. The article concludes that some forms of rebel rule at the edge of the state in Myanmar can be qualified as ‘blunt’ following work by anthropologist Elliott Prasse-Freeman. That is to say, rebel rule lacking the governmental apparatuses to intensively know and promote life at aggregate scales still operates massifications and divisions of biological populations and political space via the formation and governing of armed ensembles.

Defending Society, Building the Nation: Rebel Governance as Competing Biopolitics

AbstractRebel groups govern significant parts of territory worldwide. They often deliver crucial public goods and services to populations under their control. Scholarship on rebel governance commonly explains this with the need for armed groups to generate local and international legitimacy. We argue that this understanding of rebel governance as an instrumental means to power is insufficient. Instead, we propose a novel conceptualization of rebel governance as competing biopolitics. Tracing biopolitical technologies of rebel rule reveals the productive functions of war-time social orders for molding populations into imagined communities in direct opposition to the existing nation state. We develop this perspective by mobilizing Foucault's work in conjunction with Chatterjee's postcolonial understanding of governmentality in contexts of postcolonial state- and nation-formation, and empirical research on the Pat Jasan in northern Myanmar. Linked to the Kachin rebellion, this movement has fought against a devastating narcotics crisis with biopolitical interventions that form the Kachin nation body amidst protracted ethnonational conflict. Beyond shedding light on one of the world's longest running but least-researched civil wars, this offers three distinct contributions to international studies: exploring non-state armed groups as actors of public health, theorizing the sociological underpinnings of rebel governance, and developing the concept of biopolitics beyond the nation state.

The Political Legacies of Rebel Rule: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Côte d’Ivoire

How does exposure to rebel rule affect citizens’ political attitudes after armed conflicts end? We combine original survey data from Côte d’Ivoire with a natural experiment based on the arbitrary location of a ceasefire boundary to estimate the effects of exposure to rebel rule by the Forces Nouvelles (FN) on Ivorians’ sense of democratic citizenship. Our findings show that individuals in communities ruled by the FN held more negative attitudes about local government institutions 7 years after the reunification of the country, held weaker commitments to civic obligations, and were more likely to condone extralegal actions. The effects of rebel rule are larger than the effects of extreme lived poverty and appear among both rebel coethnics and non-coethnics. Using qualitative and survey evidence, we propose three theoretical mechanisms to explain why exposure to rebel rule weakened citizen-state relations: disrupted norms of compliance with state-like authorities, the formation of local self-help institutions leading to negative assessments of the redeployed state, and resentment due to unmet expectations of economic recovery. Our study informs debates about the links between war, citizenship, and statebuilding.

The Islamic State’s tribal policies in Syria and Iraq

ABSTRACT The surprising ability of the jihadist organisation “the Islamic State” to capture and hold large territories in Syria and Iraq raises important questions regarding rebel governance in civil wars. One understudied aspect in the growing literature on rebel rule is insurgents’ relations to kinship organisations. This article offers a detailed empirical exploration of ISIS’ tribal policies in the mid-2010s. It argues that ISIS’ relative success in maintaining control over tribal areas in Syria and Iraq and preventing a tribal-based uprising is due to three main factors. First, ISIS pursued well-calibrated carrot-and-stick policies vis-à-vis the tribes, which divided tribal constituencies and undermined their ability to mobilise effectively. Secondly, the politico-military situation in both Iraq and Syria contributed to deprive the Sunni-Arab tribes from trustworthy military allies and sources of external support, which forced them instead to lie low and accept ISIS rule, while waiting for ISIS to be defeated by their enemies. Thirdly, inter- and intra-tribal divisions had allowed ISIS to penetrate most tribes thereby reducing the tribe’s ability to act as cohesive and effective socio-political and military units. By comparing tribal groups and jihadist insurgents, the article also speaks to the theoretical debate on extremist advantages in civil war.

Max Abrahams, (2018). Rules for Rebels: The Science of Victory in Militant History. New York: Oxford University Press

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Arms for education? External support and rebel social services

How does foreign support for rebel groups affect rebel governance of civilians during armed conflict? Existing studies primarily examine the local and domestic politics of rebel rule, leaving the effects of foreign intervention on rebel governance underexplored. Focusing on rebel provision of social services, this study considers two competing arguments. The first suggests that foreign sponsorship reduces rebels’ need to rely on local civilians for resources and hence decreases rebels’ incentives to provide services. The second anticipates that by augmenting rebels’ resources and military capabilities, foreign support increases their capacity to provide welfare services. These competing logics suggest that different types of foreign support have divergent effects on rebel social service provision. The article tests this theory using cross-sectional time-series data on external support for rebel groups and rebel governance for the post-1945 period. It finds that rebel groups that receive external funding, weapons or training are significantly more likely to provide education and health services to civilians. In contrast, direct military intervention to assist insurgent forces has no effect on rebel service provision. This article is among the first to systematically study the impact of external support and third-party intervention on rebel social service provision during civil war and holds implications for civilian welfare in contested territories.

Competitive Governance and Displacement Decisions Under Rebel Rule: Evidence from the Islamic State in Iraq

When rebel groups with state-building ambitions capture territory, who stays and why? Through semi-structured interviews and an original household survey in the Iraqi city of Mosul, which was controlled by the Islamic State for more than three years, I conduct a multi-method descriptive comparison of the characteristics of “stayers” against “leavers.” I test and find some quantitative and qualitative support for a theory of competitive governance: Civilians who perceived improvements in the quality of governance under IS rule—relative to the Iraqi state—were more likely to stay under IS rule than those who perceived no change or a deterioration, but displacement decisions are multi-causal, influenced by many factors including economic resources, social networks and family structures, information, threat perceptions, and ideology. These findings suggest that historical experiences with weak rule of law and bad governance by states may affect the attitudes and actions of civilians living under rebel governance.

Book Review: Rules for Rebels: The science of victory in militant history

Book Review: Rules for Rebels: The science of victory in militant history

Rules for Rebels

<i>Rules for Rebels</i>

Reconceptualising Rebel Rule: The Responsiveness of Rebel Governance in Man

This study considers the concept of rebel governance responsiveness by the Forces Nouvelles (FN) in Cote d’Ivoire. Responsiveness refers to the degree to which a government’spolitical decisions correspond to its citizens’desires. The concept of responsiveness is vitalfor assessingregime types and constitutes an essentialmetric of democracy. However, the ideais rarely invoked in analyses of how rebel groups relate to civilian preferences in howthey govern citizens in rebel areas. The study makes three contributions. First, it develops a conceptualisation of rebel responsiveness across four domains:representation, security, taxation, and welfare. Second, it demonstrates the concept’s usefulness through acase study of two ethnic communities in Man, Cote d’Ivoire, using unique interview and archival data. The studyshows that while the FN governed both ethnic communities, rebel responsivenessdiffered in significantways. This finding highlights that focusing on the mereexistence, rather than the responsiveness, of rebel governance is insufficient for capturing the nature of civilian life under rebel rule. Third, the study showshow focusingon rebel governance’s responsivenesscan uncover new insights about civil war.

Max Abrahms, Rules for Rebels: The Science of Victory in Militant History

Max Abrahms, Rules for Rebels: The Science of Victory in Militant History

Abrahms, M. (2018). Rules for rebels: The science of victory in militant history. Oxford University Press

Abrahms, M. (2018). Rules for rebels: The science of victory in militant history. Oxford University Press