Rebel governance: military boon or military bust? (Isard Award Article)

Stewart, Megan

doi:10.1177/0738894219881422

Cited by 23 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Others may offer support due to fear of punishment for noncooperation and survival concerns (Kasfir, 2015;Arjona, 2016;Huang, 2016b;Stewart, 2019). 2 These arguments acknowledge that rebel organizations are often deeply embedded in local societies and arise out of genuine grievances held by civilians.…”

Section: Mutual Dependence Argumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While foreign troop support can boost rebel capacity for governance, the rare prospect of swift military gains should galvanize the rebels to focus on defeating government forces, thus shortening their time horizons and making social service provision less pressing, even burdensome (Reno, 2011: 122;Arjona, 2016: ch. 3;Stewart, 2019). Indeed, large-scale direct military intervention may even make local inputs largely superfluous, as it did from the outset of the ADFL rebellion in the First Congo War, where rebel leader Laurent-De ´sire ´Kabila 'relied more on his foreign backers than he did on domestic support' (Dunn, 2002: 60).…”

Section: The Two Logics and Types Of External Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rather, the prevailing assumption throughout the literature is a complex combination of consent and coerced compliance and civilians often resist rebel rule (e.g. seeArjona, 2016;Stewart, 2019).Huang & Sullivan…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Arms for education? External support and rebel social services

Huang

Sullivan

2020

Journal of Peace Research

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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.

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Section: Mutual Dependence Argumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Two Logics and Types Of External Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Arms for education? External support and rebel social services

Huang

Sullivan

2020

Journal of Peace Research

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“…Various works show that when non-combatants are a reliable source of material assets, rebels face strong incentives to refrain from targeting them (Weinstein, 2006; Wood, 2014). In such cases, insurgents are incentivized to provide social benefits to civilians, such as health, education, or justice (Mampilly, 2012; Stewart, 2019). Providing services to non-combatants is perceived by rebels as a way to access “material contributions, political support, and recruits” from the civilians under their direct authority (Arjona, 2016: 50; Huang, 2016b: 74).…”

Section: Insurgent Sponsorship and Civilian Victimization In Civil Warsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Committed sponsors: external support overtness and civilian targeting in civil wars

Stein

2022

European Journal of International Relations

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Does the overtness of external support to rebels affect civilian targeting in civil wars? Conflict studies increasingly scrutinize how insurgent sponsorships shape rebels’ behavior. However, the influence of external sponsors’ decisions to publicly acknowledge or deny their support on rebel conduct is largely neglected. This article introduces a new dataset on the overtness of external support to rebels in civil wars between 1989 and 2018. It then assesses whether the overtness of support is correlated with insurgents’ propensity to target civilians. I hypothesize that overtly supported rebels are less likely to target civilians than covertly supported rebels. This hypothesis stems from how supply-side factors—the way state sponsors expectedly act after having allocated their support—impact insurgents’ structure of incentives around relations with non-combatants. Statistical analyses yield strong support for my hypothesis. Moreover, further analyses show that support overtness influences civilian targeting independently from sponsors’ characteristics, such as political regimes or foreign aid reliance. Thus, in addition to the type of material aid insurgents receive, variation in whether support is covert or overt shapes how rebels treat civilians.

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“…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.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

What is rebel governance? Introducing a new dataset on rebel institutions, 1945–2012

Albert

2022

Journal of Peace Research

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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.

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Rebel governance: military boon or military bust? (Isard Award Article)

Cited by 23 publications

References 46 publications

Arms for education? External support and rebel social services

Arms for education? External support and rebel social services

Committed sponsors: external support overtness and civilian targeting in civil wars

What is rebel governance? Introducing a new dataset on rebel institutions, 1945–2012

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