Authority, Legitimacy, and Support for Armed Groups: A Case Study of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional

ABSTRACT

This paper applies a model of the relationship between armed group authority/legitimacy and popular support for armed groups, to explain how the EZLN gained support among a diverse array of constituencies in the period from 1983-2005. Moreover, it shows that the need to maximise support explains the EZLN’s strategy in the different phases of its existence. The EZLN is an interesting case, due to the organization’s high degree of reliance on international and national civil society support, which illustrates the importance of ideology and political messaging in understanding support for armed groups.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Amalia Ribi Forclaz, Thania Paffenholz, Farrah Hawana and Louise Hemfrey for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose helpful comments helped to improve the argument and empiricism of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Subcomandante Marcos, the nom de guerre of Rafael Sebastián Guillén, a former philosophy tutor, served as the spokesman for the EZLN for several decades until his retirement in 2014.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicholas Ross

Nicholas Ross is a researcher specializing in the inclusion of civil society and other actors in peace processes, as well as in monitoring and evaluation of civil society peace-building.