In the course of civil war, it is not unusual for armed rebels, who are fighting to either take control of a state or create a new one, to create state-like governing institutions. For example, nearly 64% of rebels between 1945 and 2012 created at least one governing institution. One challenge to moving the literature on rebel governance forward is getting data on the many possible institutions that comprise rebel governance. I introduce new data, the Rebel Quasi-State Institutions dataset, which covers 235 rebel groups and codes annually for 25 institutions during the entire existence of the group. I demonstrate the usefulness of this new dataset by exploring a relationship important to scholars: that of rebel strength and rebel governance institutions ( Stewart, 2020 ). These analyses show two things. First, there is value in disaggregating rebel governance and looking at institutions separately because not all governance institutions are correlated with strength in the same direction. Second, taking into account the time dimension is important. Since rebel conventional capability increased as a result of the end of the Cold War (Kalyvas & Balcells, 2010) and rebel institutions became more prevalent, there is an important time component to rebel governance that correlates with events in the international system.

Civil wars are difficult to resolve through negotiated settlements. Rebel institutions are thought to make negotiations more successful. I show, however, that this positive association does not hold. Rather, rebel service provision is negatively correlated with successful negotiated settlements. The well-established literature on commitment problems suggests that negotiated settlements are not reached because governments end negotiations amidst fears of rebel growth from civilian support derived from service provision. I offer an alternative explanation—strategic stalling—based on rebel incentives to realize the full long-term benefits of service provision. Qualitative evidence shows that observable implications of strategic stalling are observed in the cases surveyed.

In today’s current climate of near-peer conflict, it is important to understand the dynamics of strategic competition. Understanding these dynamics will improve decision-making in this environment, which is often called the gray zone of conflict. I use a two-stage simultaneous move game to study the state of strategic competition. The simulation of this model reveals two dynamics through which strategic competition can be managed. The first is the probability of winning a confrontation. The second is the cost of actions. As the cost of more-aggressive actions increases relative to the cost of less-aggressive actions, then even with higher chances of winning a confrontation, players are incentivized to choose less-aggressive actions. Increasing costs of the most-aggressive actions, but not the less-aggressive ones, offers decision-makers a second avenue through which they can encourage less-aggressive competition, which is less likely to instigate a full crisis or lead to war.