Doing Good while Killing: Why Some Insurgent Groups Provide Community Services

ABSTRACT

Many nonstate military organizations provide a wide range of social services to civilians. The apparent contradiction between their use of violence and their provision of charity has been the subject of a great deal of research in the conflict studies literature. Two of the most common sets of arguments hold that such services are either a form of bribery aimed at controlling and isolating constituents and potential recruits, or an extension of the organization’s ideological commitments. Our findings, based on a new analysis of the BAAD dataset, demonstrate that neither explanation is correct. Rather, we find that the provision of social services represents a means of confronting and undermining the authority of the state. In this sense, the provision of social services represents an extension of the broader political goals of the nonstate armed groups providing them.

KEYWORDS:

• Service provision
• nonstate armed groups
• political legitimacy
• BAAD dataset
• ideology
• recruitment

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Victor Asal, Brian J. Phillips, R. Karl Rethemeyer, Corina Simonelli, and Joseph K. Young. “Carrots, Sticks, and Insurgent Targeting of Civilians.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 63, no. 1 (2018): 1710–1735. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002718789748; Victor H. Asal, R. Karl Rethemeyer, and Eric W. Schoon, “Crime, Conflict, and the Legitimacy Trade-Off: Explaining Variation in Insurgents’ Participation in Crime,” The Journal of Politics 81, no. 2 (2019): 399–410. https://doi.org/10.1086/701492.

2. There is a growing body of work on community assistance by nonpolitical violent actors like drug trafficking organizations and other organized crime groups. The provision of community assistance by criminal groups is less researched than extralegal governance, particularly protection services, provided by criminal organizations. Some exceptions include Shawn T Flanigan, “Motivations and Implications of Community Service Provision by La Familia Michoacana/Knights Templar and Other Mexican Drug Cartels,” Journal of Strategic Security 7, no. 3 (2014): 63–83; Rivke Jaffe, “Crime and Insurgent Citizenship: Extra-State Rule and Belonging in Urban Jamaica,” Development 55, no. 2 (2012): 219–23. https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2012.10. The literature on extralegal governance and protection services, which has important parallels to the topics covered in this article, includes (among others) works such as Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Peter B. E. Hill, The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law, and the State (Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003); Marina Tzvetkova, “Aspects of the Evolution of Extra-Legal Protection in Bulgaria (1989–1999),” Trends in Organized Crime 11, no. 4 (2008): 326. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-008-9054-9; Federico Varese, The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001); Peng Wang, “The Chinese Mafia: Private Protection in a Socialist Market Economy,” Global Crime 12, no. 4 (2011): 290–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/17440572.2011.616055.

3. It should be noted that by categorizing these services as nonmilitary activities, we do not mean to imply they offer no strategic military benefit. Certainly, military operations can benefit from, for example, well-developed road systems that offer easier movement of troops or supplies, solid communication networks, or a healthy pool of fighters. In addition, some scholars argue that sites of social welfare provision serve as a ripe recruiting grounds for insurgent fighters, as we will discuss. In our definition, we simply mean that these activities do not solely serve military purposes and provide community benefits that extend beyond the military efforts of an insurgent organization.

4. Eli Berman and David Laitin, “Religion, Terrorism and Public Goods: Testing the Club Model,” Journal of Public Economics 92, no. 10–11 (2008): 1942–67.

5. Shawn Teresa Flanigan, “Charity as Resistance: Connections between Charity, Contentious Politics, and Terror,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 29, no. 7 (2006): 641–55.

6. See for example Mark Chaves and William Tsitsos, “Congregations and Social Services: What They Do, How They Do It, and with Whom,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 30, no. 4 (2001): 660–83; Émile Durkheim and Joseph Ward Swain, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Courier Corporation, 2008); Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001); Theda Skocpol, “Religion, Civil Society, and Social Provision in the U.S.,” in Who Will Provide? The Changing Role Of Religion In American Social Welfare, edited by Mary Jo Bane and Brent Coffin (New York, NY: Avalon Publishing, 2000).Robert Wuthnow and Virginia Ann Hodgkinson, Faith and Philanthropy in America: Exploring the Role of Religion in America’s Voluntary Sector (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1990).

7. See for example James Andreoni et al., “Diversity and Donations: The Effect of Religious and Ethnic Diversity on Charitable Giving,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 128 (2016): 47–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2016.05.010.; Charles H. Hamilton and Warren R. Ilchman, Cultures of Giving II: How Heritage, Gender, Wealth, and Values Influence Philanthropy: New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1995); W. E. B. DuBois, Efforts for Social Betterment Among Negro Americans: Report of a Social Study Made by Atlanta University Under the Patronage of the Trustees of the John F. Slater Fund; Together with the Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, Held at Atlanta University on Tuesday, May the 24th, 1909 (Atlanta, GA: Atlanta University Press, 1909).

8. Sara Roy, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

9. Nancy Jean Davis and Robert V. Robinson, Claiming Society for God: Religious Movements and Social Welfare in Egypt, Israel, Italy, and the United States (Bloomington, IN and Indiannapolis, IN: Indiana University Press).

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12. Shawn T Flanigan and Mounah Abdel-Samad, “Hezbollah’s Social Jihad: Nonprofits as Resistance Organizations,” Middle East Policy, no. Summer (2009): 122–37; Sara Roy, “The Transformation of Islamic NGOs in Palestine,” Middle East Report 214, no. Spring (2000): 24–26; Ora Szekely, “Proto‐State Realignment and the Arab Spring,” Middle East Policy 23, no. 1 (2016): 75–91.

13. Flanigan, “Charity as Resistance: Connections between Charity, Contentious Politics, and Terror”; Ricky J. Pope and Shawn T. Flanigan, “Revolution for Breakfast: Intersections of Activism, Service, and Violence in the Black Panther Party’s Community Service Programs,” Social Justice Research 26, no. 4 (2013): 445–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-013-0197-8.

14. Szekely, “Proto‐State Realignment and the Arab Spring.”

15. Eli Berman, Religious, Radical and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); James Kostelnik and David Skarbek, “The Governance Institutions of a Drug Trafficking Organization,” Public Choice 156, no. 1–2 (2013): 95–103. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-012-0050-x.

16. Berman, Religious, Radical and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism; Berman and Laitin, “Religion, Terrorism and Public Goods: Testing the Club Model.”

17. Eli Berman, Jacob N. Shapiro, and Joseph H. Felter, “Can Hearts and Minds Be Bought? The Economics of Counterinsurgency in Iraq,” Journal of Political Economy 119, no. 4 (2011): 766–819. https://doi.org/10.1086/661983; Berman, Religious, Radical and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism.

18. Berman and Laitin, “Religion, Terrorism and Public Goods: Testing the Club Model”; Zaki Chehab, Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement (New York, NY: Nations Books, 2007); Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence (New York, NY: Columbia University Press).

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20. Ora Szekely, “Doing Well by Doing Good: Understanding Hamas’s Social Services as Political Advertising,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 38, no. 4 (2015): 275–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2014.995565.

21. Alexus Grynkewich, “Welfare as Warfare: How Violent Non-State Groups Use Social Services to Attack the State,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 31 (2008): 350–70.

22. Shawn Teresa Flanigan and Cheryl O’brien, “Service-Seeking Behavior, Perceptions of Armed Actors, and Preferences Regarding Governance: Evidence from the Palestinian Territories,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 38, no. 8 (2015): 622–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2015.1030194.

23. Melani Cammett, Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press); Melani Cammett, “Sectarianism and the Ambiguities of Welfare in Lebanon,” Current Anthropology 56, no. S11 (2015): S76–87. https://doi.org/10.1086/682391; Flanigan and Abdel-Samad, “Hezbollah’s Social Jihad: Nonprofits as Resistance Organizations”; Szekely, “Doing Well by Doing Good.”

24. Zachariah Cherian Mampilly, Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life during War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

25. For further discussion of service provision, rebel governance, and territorial control see Mampilly; Ana Arjona, Nelson Kasfir, and Zachariah Mampilly, Rebel Governance in Civil War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015); José Ciro Martínez and Brent Eng, “Stifling Stateness: The Assad Regime’s Campaign against Rebel Governance,” Security Dialogue 49, no. 4 (2018): 235–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010618768622.

26. Martínez and Eng, “Stifling Stateness.”

27. Cammett, Compassionate Communalism; Cammett, “Sectarianism and the Ambiguities of Welfare in Lebanon”; Flanigan and Abdel-Samad, “Hezbollah’s Social Jihad: Nonprofits as Resistance Organizations”; Szekely, “Doing Well by Doing Good.” Of course, provision of services as political patronage and similar forms of clientelism are not unique to the Middle East. See also Bruce J. Berman, “Ethnicity, Patronage, and the African State: The Politics of Uncivil Nationalism,” African Affairs 97, no. 388 (1998): 305–41. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a007947; Miriam A. Golden, “Electoral Connections: The Effects of the Personal Vote on Political Patronage, Bureaucracy and Legislation in Postwar Italy,” British Journal of Political Science 33, no. 2 (April 2003): 189–212. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123403000085; Edmund Terence Gomez and K. S. Jomo, Malaysia’s Political Economy: Politics, Patronage and Profits (Cambridge, UK and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Richard Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson, “Parties, States and Patronage,” West European Politics 19, no. 3 (1996): 433–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402389608425145; Rebecca Menes, “The Effect of Patronage Politics on City Government in American Cities, 1900–1910,” (working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, February 1999). https://doi.org/10.3386/w6975; Andrew M. Mwenda and Roger Tangri, “Patronage Politics, Donor Reforms, and Regime Consolidation in Uganda,” African Affairs 104, no. 416 (2005): 449–67. https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adi030; Conor O’Dwyer, Runaway State-Building: Patronage Politics and Democratic Development (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

28. Flanigan, “Charity as Resistance: Connections between Charity, Contentious Politics, and Terror”; Shawn Teresa Flanigan, “Nonprofit Service Provision by Insurgent Organizations: The Cases of Hizballah and the Tamil Tigers,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 31, no. 6 (2008): 499–519. https://doi.org/10.1080/10576100802065103; Judith Palmer Harik, “Between Islam and the System: Sources and Implications of Popular Support for Lebanon’s Hizballah,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 40, no. 1 (1996): 41–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002796040001004; Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, Fourth Edition: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Oakland, CA: University of California Press); Roy, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector; Magnus Ranstorp, “The Strategy and Tactics of Hizballah’s Current ‘Lebanonization Process,’” Mediterranean Politics 3, no. 1 (1998): 103–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/13629399808414643; Graham Usher, “Hizballah, Syria, and the Lebanese Elections,” Journal of Palestine Studies 26, no. 2 (January 1, 1997): 59–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/2537783; Cammett, Compassionate Communalism; Cammett, “Sectarianism and the Ambiguities of Welfare in Lebanon”; Shawn Teresa Flanigan, Victor Asal, and Mitchell Brown, “Community Service Provision by Political Associations Representing Minorities in the Middle East and North Africa,” VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 26, no. 5 (2015): 1786–804. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-014-9516-4; Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh, In The Path Of Hizbullah (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.); Nicholas Blanford, Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel (New York, NY: Random House, 2011); Kostelnik and Skarbek, “The Governance Institutions of a Drug Trafficking Organization.”

29. Ilene R. Prusher, “Through Charity, Hizbullah Charms Lebanon,” The Christian Science Monitor, April 19, 2000. Questia, https://www.questia.com/newspaper/1P2-32580299/through-charity-hizbullah-charms-lebanon.

30. Nora Stel and Rola el-Husseini, “Lebanon’s Massive Garbage Crisis Isn’t its First. Here’s What that Teaches US.,” Washington Post, September 18, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/09/18/this-isnt-lebanons-first-garbage-crisis-and-what-that-should-teach-us/; Human Rights Watch, “Lebanon: Waste Crisis Posing Health Risks,” Human Rights Watch, December 1, 2017. https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/12/01/lebanon-waste-crisis-posing-health-risks; Sophia Smith Galer, “Lebanon Is Drowning in Its Own Waste,” BBC News, March 28, 2018. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180328-lebanon-is-drowning-in-its-own-waste.

31. It is worth noting that for many insurgent groups that act as political parties, even when the state is not their primary military adversary, groups’ weapons allow them to engage in political behavior that violates most norms of party politics. In the example of Hezbollah, in an effort to gain veto power in the Lebanese government, in 2008 armed members of the group occupied downtown Beirut until the Sunni-led governing coalition agreed to those demands. This was undoubtedly due in part to the political party’s show of military force. See for example “Hezbollah Gunmen Take Beirut Neighborhoods,” CBS News, May 9, 2008, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hezbollah-gunmen-take-beirut-neighborhoods/.

32. Asal et al., “Carrots, Sticks, and Insurgent Targeting of Civilians”; Asal, Rethemeyer, and Schoon, “Crime, Conflict, and the Legitimacy Trade-Off.”

33. Therése Pettersson and Peter Wallensteen, “Armed Conflicts, 1946–2014,” Journal of Peace Research 52, no. 4 (2015): 536–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343315595927; Lotta Themnér and Peter Wallensteen, “Armed Conflicts, 1946–2013,” Journal of Peace Research 51, no. 4 (2014): 541–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343314542076; Asal, Rethemeyer, and Schoon, “Crime, Conflict, and the Legitimacy Trade-Off.”

34. Gary LaFree, Laura Dugan, and Erin Miller, Putting Terrorism in Context: Lessons from the Global Terrorism Database (London, UK; New York, NY: Routledge, 2014).

35. Pettersson and Wallensteen, “Armed Conflicts, 1946–2014”; Themnér and Wallensteen, “Armed Conflicts, 1946–2013.”

36. Jan Teorell, Nicholas Charron, Marcus Samanni, Soren Holmberg, and Bo Rothstein. The Quality of Government Dataset. (Göteborg, Sweden: The Quality of Government Institute, University of Göteborg, 2011).

37. Monty G Marshall, Keith Jaggers, and Ted Robert Gurr, Polity IV Annual Time-Series, 1800-2013 (College Park, MD: Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland, College Park, 2014).

38. Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2017,” https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017 (accessed July 24, 2017).

39. UNDP, “UN data Per Capita GDP at Current Prices,” 2019. http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=SNAAMA&f=grID%3A101%3BcurrID%3AUSD%3BpcFlag%3A1.

40. Scholars argue that, after testing, GDP per capita works remarkably well as a proxy for state capacity. See for example James Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 75–90 and Cullen S Hendrix, “Measuring State Capacity: Theoretical and Empirical Implications for the Study of Civil Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 3 (2010): 273–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343310361838.

41. While the BAAD dataset would allow one to disaggregate the “services” variable into different service types, space constraints prevent us from addressing these variations in full in this paper, as addressed at greater length in the conclusion.

42. J. Scott Long and Jeremy Freese, Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata, 2nd ed. (College Station, TX: Stata Press, 2006).

43. Ora Szekely, The Politics of Militant Group Survival in the Middle East: Resources, Relationships, and Resistance (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work (specifically, the BAAD dataset) supported by the Science and Technology directorate of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Grant Award Numbers [N00140510629] and [2008-ST-061- ST0004], made to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START, www.start.umd.edu). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or START.

Notes on contributors

Victor Asal

Victor Asal is a professor of Political Science and the Director of the Center for Policy Research at Rockefeller College, University at Albany, State University of New York.

Shawn Flanigan

Shawn Flanigan is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University.

Ora Szekely

Ora Szekely is Associate Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Program in Peace and Conflict Studies at Clark University.