Rebel Leadership and the Specialisation of Rebel Operations

ABSTRACT

Rebels groups adopt different organisational structures, emerging in various shapes and sizes. Some rebel groups construct distinct military and political wings, delegating their military and political operations to specialised units. While recent studies have made great strides towards understanding militant groups’ activities on and off the battlefield, the literature has been less attentive to the root causes of the structural arrangements which groups form for these purposes. I argue that rebel leaders’ pre-war military and political experiences shape the structure of the organisations they lead into war. Using original data, I find that differences in leaders’ pre-war military experience, rather than political experience, are associated with discernible probabilities of rebel operational specialisation. In addition to offering practitioners and academics a comparative framework with which to evaluate the patterns of militant leadership, this study demonstrates how leaders wield independent agency over group structure and operations in the civil war environment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Similarly, Sinno (2008) defines organisational structure as an organisational component with contained sets of relations among two or more individuals that create incentives to behave, communicate, and reward or punish in a specific way (p. 27).

2. A notable exception, a number of studies emphasise that terrorist organisations may shift from a hierarchical and centralised structure to a decentralised one in order to survive while facing high levels of militarised pressure from state forces (e.g. Shapiro 2013).

3. As Thompson (1961) puts it, ‘The system of specialization requires the interaction of persons whose specialties must be harmonized in order to achieve the organization goal’ (p. 517).

4. While I focus on this expression of specialisation, rebel groups construct units which specialise in other tasks as well, such as: logistical operations, foreign affairs, intelligence, finance, and social services.

5. Alonso (2016) points out that, despite Gerry Adams frequent objections that ‘Sinn Fein is not the PIRA’ and his claim that Sinn Fein campaigned “openly and peacefully in pursuit of our political aims’, the ‘dual membership of many Sinn Fein and PIRA activists and the overlapping leadership of both organisations characterised the existence of the republican movement’ (p. 524).

6. For the most part, the literature on specialisation in rebel organisations has focused on the benefits and costs pertaining specifically to the creation of a political wing. This is likely because the baseline assumption is that the military arm is essential to the existence of a rebel organisation, while the creation of a separate but associated political wing reflects more a strategic decision.

7. The British Army Field Manual, Countering Insurgency, makes a similar point: ‘Excessive secrecy can limit the insurgent’s freedom of action, reduce or distort information about his goals and ideals and restrict communication within the insurgency. These effects can be avoided if the insurgency splits into political and military wings allowing the movement to address the public (political) requirements of an insurgency while still conducting clandestine (military) actions’ (2009, p. 2–7).

8. Human Rights Watch records Fatah leader Hussein al-Sheikh: ‘I am against touching civilians … .I will tell you another important thing: not all attacks by al-Asqa were done with the agreement of the political wing’ (2002, p. 84).

9. For instance see: Berti (2011) and http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2017/12/04/what-we-know-about-militant-groups-as-political-parties/.

10. The sample size is determined by the overlap of rebel group cases featured in the Rebel Leaders in Civil War dataset and the Non-State Actors Dataset. Because some of the control variables vary over time, I use a rebel-year unit of analysis data structure, rather than gloss over these important sources of variation. Importantly, the model results are robust to a test in which I aggregate the data sample to the leader-level, focusing on founding leaders who oversee for the initial construction of group structures.

11. Please see Tables A1, A2, and A3 for additional descriptive statistics.

12. The NSA rebpolwing variable, from which I derive my measure of operational specialisation, has four distinct values: ‘no’, ‘alleged link’, ‘explicit link’, and ‘acknowledged link.’ To operationalise the dependent variable for this study, I code all recorded values of ‘explicit link’, ‘acknowledged link’, and ‘alleged link’ as 1, and all others as 0.

13. To our knowledge, the NSA measure represents the best available cross-sectional indicator of our dependent variable. Future research would undoubtedly benefit from a more fine-grain, time-variant measure of rebel specialisation. That said, the binary indicator used here offers valuable insight into the differences of rebel organisational structure across different conflict contexts and global regions.

14. It is important to note that the recorded distribution of rebel specialisation may reflect a conservative estimate, a function of the occasional difficulty of discerning a clear delineation between some groups’ political and military wings. For example, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement featured a military wing called the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. While some use the acronym ‘SPLM/A’ to refer to the whole organisation, many others choose to use ‘SPLA’ as shorthand to refer to the activities of both wings of the group (e.g. Johnson 1998). Such practices demonstrate the kind of challenges that coders may face in identifying a rebel organisation’s unique political and military wings. On the whole, most specialised rebel groups use different names to designate their political and military wings, making the identification of these structural arrangements more straight-forward.

15. The RLCW coding team determined their set of rebel group cases based on the list of rebel actors featured in the UCDP One-Sided Violence Dataset (v14, Eck and Hultman 2007). Cases in the UCDP One-Sided Violence data which coincide with coup attempts by state military factions were removed. For more information on the UCDP inclusion criteria, please see: https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/nsos/ucdp-onesided-191.pdf.

16. Breaking up this distribution by the five leader experience indicators, of the 118 sampled rebel leaders: 23 have prior military service, 68 have prior combat experience, 48 have formal military training, 17 were formerly the head of a political party, and 15 previously served in national political office

17. Estimates based on the full model specification, including all control variables. All predicted probabilities were calculated for each main independent variable using the margins command in Stata (v16). Similarly, using the same command, I calculated the discrete change by switching the value of each of the main leadership variables [0,1] in turn while holding all additional variables at their mean values. Please see Table A4 in the appendix for an alternative presentation of the calculated predicted probabilities.