Politicising the rebel governance paradigm. Critical appraisal and expansion of a research agenda

Abstract

The introduction to the special issue starts from the observation that the political nature of rebel governance is so far understudied. Moving beyond the functionalism and instrumentalism inherent in parts of the literature, we propose a politicisation of the rebel governance paradigm through a spatial and temporal widening of analytical approaches. To address the methodological localism of existing research, rebel governance should be studied across actors and scales, as well as through their interlinkages. Taking time seriously, it also has to be investigated as a sequential phenomenon, at different conflict stages and with regard to its legacies in post-conflict settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Rebel governance
• orders
• politics
• space
• time

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In many conflict and post-conflict settings, it is not one actor (typically: ‘the state’) that rules. A variety of concepts describes the management of public affairs in these spaces, including ‘hybrid orders’, ‘areas of limited statehood’, ‘public authority’, ‘informal institutions’, ‘mediated statehood’, and the ‘negotiation of statehood’.¹ Within this broad literature on orders and governance in (post-)conflict contexts, one research strand in particular has been growing rapidly over the last couple of years: the literature on rebel governance (RG). It examines internal dynamics in civil wars in which rebel groups take control of parts of a territory, regulate civilian life, and provide social, political, and economic goods.

Recent contributions to the field have deepened the empirical knowledge and widened the initial scope of the RG paradigm. First, authors have advanced our understanding of why rebels invest scare resources and manpower in governing: to increase civilian support,² to consolidate territorial control,³ to receive international recognition, for example through diplomacy,⁴ to transform society and politics according to their goals,⁵ and to stabilise economic production.⁶ Second, taking a comparative perspective, scholars have focused on variations in rebel governance and its institutions in terms of effectiveness,⁷ scope (extensiveness and intensiveness),⁸ inclusiveness,⁹ and responsiveness.¹⁰ Authors have also investigated the variation of such institutional arrangements over time in relation to conflict dynamics, and as a result of state-society relations or the quality of local institutions that predate the conflict.¹¹

Third, recent research, mostly through case studies, has shed light on the concrete types of governance outputs that rebels – and other armed non-state actors (ANSAs) – actually provide. While most authors emphasise the provision of security and basic goods and services as main governance functions, the creation of police forces and legal courts, as well as the taxation of civilians, are also among the first priorities of groups that gain control over a territory.¹² Other governance functions such as healthcare, education provision, the maintenance of civil registries, or public transport are more complex in that they presuppose the availability of significant financial and human resources, as well as a certain stability and durability of control.¹³ Besides scrutinising governance output, central authors in the field have, fourth, pointed to the input dimension, investigating whether and how rebels encourage, allow, coerce, or exclude civilian participation.¹⁴ This also touches upon the question of how rebels conceive of the civilians under their control, whether they discriminate among them or provide governance for all of them, and how responsive rebels are to civilian demands.¹⁵

The empirical deepening and theoretical-conceptual broadening of the RG research agenda have added significantly to our knowledge with regard to ANSAs and civil war dynamics. This special issue argues, however, that many takes on RG have lost sight of the deeply political nature of rebel governance itself and its contexts, which refers to the fundamental contestation of the political status quo involved in staging a rebellion, and the far-reaching and transformative goals of some rebel groups.¹⁶ Starting out from a critical appraisal of the RG paradigm and its latest developments, the goal of the special issue and its contributions is to address the understudied political view on rebel governance by moving beyond the functionalism and instrumentalism inherent in large parts of the literature. Second, by addressing the methodological localism of existing research, the special issue zooms in on RG across actors and scales, ranging from the local to the global, and their interlinkages. Third, by taking time seriously, the special issue considers the temporal dimensions of RG in different conflict stages and in particular its legacies in post-conflict settings. The special issue brings together conflict and violence researchers whose expertise covers several world regions and (post-)conflict zones. All papers are based on field research in often difficult-to-access-areas.

Concepts and definitions

The concept of governance has been developed to examine contexts of rule that go beyond the nation-state, e.g. involving inter- and supranational institutions and transnational actors. Following Rosenau,¹⁷ governance ‘embraces governmental institutions, but it also subsumes informal, non-governmental mechanisms [and thus describes] a system of rule that is as dependent on intersubjective meanings as on formally sanctioned constitutions and charters’. This conceptualisation enables a broad study of systems of rule, including not only structures and institutions, but also symbols and discourses, values and beliefs, practices, and collective identities.¹⁸

It is important to note that rebels, while they may provide public goods and even take over state-like functions, are usually under pressure to maintain the territory over which they exert effective control. This means that the establishment of what could be called a full-fledged political order¹⁹ seems improbable in most contexts of rebel governance. But we concur with others who have pointed to the need to investigate rebels as parts and (co-)producers of larger (social and political) orders, which often persist during, or come into being through civil war.²⁰ And it is, indeed, one core concern of the rebel governance debate to move beyond the idea of a mere collapse of order during armed conflict.²¹

Even though ‘rebel governance’ and ‘rebel rule’ are often used as synonyms, the two are conceptually distinct. Rule is associated more closely with the idea of ‘a structure of institutionalised subordination and superordination’,²² as it locates ‘ruler and ruled in an arrangement of rules’.²³ In contrast, governance is meant to capture the ‘entirety of co-existing forms of intentional regulation of societal matters on a given territorial level’²⁴ and at a given point in time. In principle, then, ‘governance’ is a more open concept than rule and allows for expanding the analytical view to a variety of actors, which includes but goes beyond the state, the temporal and spatial (dis)continuities of their activities, and the civilian perspective. Rebel governance then refers to ‘the set of actions insurgents engage in to regulate the social, political, and economic life of noncombatants during civil war’.²⁵

In practice, though, ‘rule’ and ‘governance’ are often used interchangeably when it comes to the rebel governance literature, and there is an analytical preference for the rebel rulers’, rather than civilian perspective. Relatedly, there is also a tendency to transpose state characteristics to the study of rebels.²⁶ In this way, the RG debate has tended to embrace a sometimes rather de-politicised vocabulary (like ‘managing’ and ‘organising’ civilians or ‘providing them with public goods’²⁷) – even though key initiators of the rebel governance debate had started from the proposition that rebels should be studied in terms of their governance activity precisely because ‘civil war is political (as) it involves parties that disagree over some fundamentally political aspect of the state’.²⁸ And it is one of the debate’s merits that it has challenged the image of rebels as either being greedy and only interested in economic benefit, or primarily acting violently and against an existing order.²⁹

And yet, the more technical understanding of governance present in the RG literature has sometimes led to a negligence of political aspects which revolve around rebels’ provision of goods, institution-building, and organisation of civilian life, such as negotiation and compromise, legitimation, and the struggle for recognition. Recent contributions to the field have fruitfully reintroduced the term rebel rule in a more Weberian sense,³⁰ scrutinising the fine balance that needs to be struck between legitimacy and coercion by any ruler, and in civil war in particular.³¹ Such work importantly establishes a link between the narrow rebel governance debate and more sociological and political-theoretical takes on armed non-state actors.³²

In this special issue, we use, and take seriously the conceptual openness that resides in the term ‘governance’ as introduced above and argue for a more political understanding, and for pushing its temporal and spatial boundaries. In order to take into account the range of actors actually involved in governing activities, we use a broad conceptualisation and include state actors, rebel groups, militias, and police and military forces in our analyses.³³ Besides, non-armed domestic and (armed and non-armed) external actors are also involved, ranging from foreign fighters and diaspora actors to NGOs and international organisations (IOs). Given this multiplicity of actors, we follow Kasfir, Frerks, and Terpstra³⁴ in understanding governance as a multi-layered system which involves interactions between governance actors and civilians, but also competition and coordination among various parties with competing claims to authority over a certain population.

Politicising rebel governance

With this special issue, we want to expand on, and move beyond some of the limitations of the RG paradigm. First, rebel governance is often analysed within a rationalist, functionalist, and instrumentalist framework. In the existing literature, governance is seen as an instrument to manage civilians which is less costly than other strategies, such as coercion, under certain conditions. Relatedly, the RG paradigm focuses narrowly on the relations between rulers and ruled in the locally confined context of rebel-held territory. Third, power is conceptualised as residing in those who rule and the institutions they build and as being exercised over the subjects under rebels’ control. With this issue, we develop a more political understanding of RG. We follow those colleagues who have argued for analysing rebel governance in its embeddedness in larger social and normative structures, as well as political and power relations. The special issue adds two specific analytical lenses to this research strand: the temporal and spatial contextualisation of rebel governance.

The functionalist and instrumentalist bend of the RG paradigm in conceptualising relations between rulers and ruled has sometimes clouded the view for the deeply political nature of the contestations around RG. Much of the existing literature is limited to the provision of goods and services by rebels, which are functionally equated to those of states.³⁵ This assumes ‘that it is either states or the entities that mimic them that produce order’.³⁶ But non-state actors differ from states in important ways. They cannot rely on the same resources and established apparatus as a state, even though they may appropriate and transform individual institutions for their own purposes. They also usually lack the privileged standing that recognised states have in international politics, from negotiation power and diplomatic networks to membership in international organisations and alliances.³⁷ As a consequence, rebel groups also face greater risks (and chances) than states in a situation of conflict.³⁸

The state is the normalised form of political order, whereas rebels and other armed non-state actors challenge and confound this normality. As this special issue shows, this does not only lead to the development of complex relationships between the state and ANSAs, which may involve competition, coordination and cooperation next to violent opposition, but also yields order innovation on the part of rebels. Viewing rebels as quasi-states neglects the various practices and processes through which non-state actors attempt to rule, and it underestimates the contexts of overlapping and fluid authority we often find in conflict zones. While acknowledging the capacity of armed non-state actors to generate political structures and institutions,³⁹ the analysis of these processes usually follows predetermined categories of rational action and state-centred conceptions and logics of power and authority. This reduces power to residing in a ‘set of centrally directed political institutions (…) within a bounded territory’ or, to a lesser extent, in wider political-military and social networks and institutions.⁴⁰ It also narrowly focuses on the relationship between rulers and ruled in a clearly confined context, thereby decontextualising it from larger societal and political practices, discourses and power relations in which RG is embedded not only locally, but also regionally, trans- and internationally as aptly demonstrated by Buscemi and Ketzmerick in this special issue.

The functionalism of the concept contributes to a de-politicised reading of the conflict situation and rebels, which makes the fundamental contestation of the political status quo, the essence of internal war, disappear. One problem we see is the conceptual separation between coercion and governance that is present in some strands of the literature.⁴¹ In this reading, it seems that rebel groups either build institutions to gain legitimacy, or rely on violence. But, as Malthaner and Malesevic⁴² remind us, ‘(a)ll forms of rule entail a fine balance between coercion and legitimacy’ and that civil war contexts in particular impose the necessity on state as well as non-state actors to strike a balance between the two. Reno⁴³ argues that some predatory rebellions also practice rebel governance, although of a different kind than insurgents who want to build mass popular support. Heger, Jung, and Wong⁴⁴ demonstrate the close link between the nonviolent and violent behaviours of non-state groups by focusing on the organisational structures that make both possible. Other contributions have included more coercive forms of rebel governance into their study.⁴⁵ Finally, van Baalen⁴⁶ has shown that rebel rule can be an instrument of coercion.

Following the path of deconstructing the binary between coercion and governance provision, the contribution by Glawion, Le Noan, and Acko shows the dynamic relationship between coercive means and service provision which changes according to the stage of rebellion and the presence of other stakeholders in a multi-actor arena. Rather than providing goods or services, rebels may use a governance narrative to legitimise their rule, which they keep up through coercion.

ANSAs, like other political actors, aim at legitimating their rule and thus transforming it into authority. Authors have addressed strategies of (de-)legitimation used by armed actors and the extent to which they create empirical legitimacy among the ruled and other audiences.⁴⁷ As Mehler⁴⁸ has summarised, again referencing Weber’s ideal types of rule, legitimacy can result from different sources such as groups’ performance in the provision of security and immediate protection; charisma, ideology, symbols, and myths; and the ‘congruence of basic normative convictions between protectors and protected’. Similarly, recent contributions to the debate have investigated how ANSAs seek recognition for their identity or grievances from various significant others and the impact of denied, granted, and mis-recognition on conflict dynamics and transformation.⁴⁹ Importantly, these studies have also shown how ANSAs not only have to address different audiences that reach well beyond their respective, narrow conflict context,⁵⁰ but also that they are embedded in global normative structures which influence their chances to be recognised for a certain identity or political claim.⁵¹

Both the politics of legitimacy and of recognition aptly capture the complex webs of power and social structures ANSAs operate in and takes them seriously as political actors with an identity and ordering project. However, this debate stands somewhat disconnected from the literature on rebel governance with its focus on territorial control exercised, institutions built, and output generated by rebels who organise civilians under their rule in the context of civil war. If the concept of legitimacy is addressed in the existing RG literature, it is usually characterised by a thin conceptualisation focused on output legitimacy.⁵² This may also have to do with the challenges related to collecting data on legitimacy and local support in conflict zones. It is difficult to conduct meaningful surveys in the shadow of violence and the lack of freedom of expression, which is likely, to a greater or lesser extent, the case in all contexts under rebel control. Furthermore, quantitative surveys in conflict areas are prone to biases.⁵³ Conducting these surveys after the fall of a rebel group is possible, but again methodological and ethical challenges (such as trauma, social desirability, distorted memories, etc.) arise.⁵⁴ Ethnographically inspired approaches, as chosen by many of the contributions in this volume, are certainly one of the most fruitful options in order to gain substantive assessments from at least a part of the population and violent actors themselves.⁵⁵

With regard to the role of ideology, ideas, and culture in rebel governance, a similar reluctance to integrate them more thoroughly into the RG research agenda can be found.⁵⁶ To be sure, it has been acknowledged from the beginning of the RG debate that ‘prior ideologies, cultural values, and social beliefs that rebels bring to rebellion’⁵⁷ should be investigated in their relation to governance, too. But their role is rarely addressed explicitly in the RG literature, which goes along with a general trend in civil war studies, at least until recently.⁵⁸ The reason for this might be that most studies of rebel governance focus on a single group or are quantitative in nature, and, with some important exceptions,⁵⁹ there is a relative dearth of studies in which governance by groups with different or similar ideologies is compared. Ideology is sometimes also explicitly excluded from empirical studies based on the assumption that the pressure on ANSAs to adapt their ‘strategy to the logic of irregular warfare’⁶⁰ overrides potential effects of ideology on the type of social order rebels establish. However, this does not mean that ideology does not shape order in important ways, e.g. with regard to the degree of armed groups’ intervention in the everyday private, political, and economic lives of civilians, what has been called ‘external intrusiveness of ideology’ by Schubiger and Zelina.⁶¹ Some authors have also analysed the symbolic aspects of RG, but largely done so within the framework of relations between rulers and ruled.⁶² In this context, questions related to how symbolic action can boost legitimacy in terms of the identification of civilians with the rebels in power and other strategies to lower the need for costly coercion have been explored.⁶³ What has not been taken into account is the larger spatial and temporal context of ideological, normative, and cultural structures: How do ideas, norms, and discourses circulating in broader society beyond the narrow context of a specific rebel-civilian relationship at a given point in time affect rebel governance?

Finally, some authors have pushed the critical argument toward the RG literature even further, questioning the very notion of power that underlies the study of the relationship between rulers and ruled in conflict zones. Following a Foucauldian approach, Hoffmann and Verweijen⁶⁴ argue that governmentality as a ‘distinct mode of rule that attends to “each and all” and largely operates through “regulated freedom”’ should be included in studies of RG. Such a perspective adds ‘disciplinary power’, i.e. the creation of certain subjectivities and regimes of truth which ‘produce certain ways of seeing, knowing, and conducting the self’⁶⁵ to the more direct ways in which rebels rule, such as coercion and the use of violence (‘sovereign power’). In his contribution to the special issue, Buscemi picks up this innovative perspective and broadens it by showing how practices of controlling the means of violence permeate the narrow rebel-civilian relationship and are connected to larger societal discourses and practices of ethnonationality and narcotics eradication.

This special issue picks up the existing attempts at politicising rebel governance by contending that rebels need to be analysed relationally, i.e. in their interaction with other state and non-state actors, and through their embeddedness in larger political, social, and normative structures. In addition to bringing politics back in, we widen the scope of the analysis in two ways: temporally and spatially.

Taking time seriously: RG over time and its legacies in post-conflict settings

The idea of constantly evolving systems of rule is widely accepted in the literature, but their systematic diachronic analysis has so far been underrepresented in empirical research. The beginning of a conflict, changed conflict dynamics, or its ending come with significant opportunities for the reshaping of social and power relations. Although closely related, territorial control should be kept distinct from RG conceptually. Concerning the former, three distinct phases can be distinguished: conquest, consolidation, and loss of territorial control. Zooming in on rebel governance itself, one can observe the development, consolidation, and decay of rule.

This life cycle of control impacts, first, what constraints rebels face in organising civilians. In irregular civil wars, conquest appears to require some degree of support from the local population, e.g. in the form of providing information. However, the consolidation of control can largely occur without popular support and can instead be accomplished through coercion or favourable external conditions. The latter include the absence of other insurgent groups and a lack of interest on the part of the government or the international community, which manifests itself in the absence of counterinsurgency efforts, among other things. Lastly, local support might become more important again in the phase of losing territorial control. However, civilians might be disillusioned with the rebels and might withhold crucial information more readily than in the beginning of the cycle.

Concerning RG, Terpstra⁶⁶ has shown that distinct phases of rule come with different legitimation strategies, both regarding output legitimacy generated through governance in the narrow sense (‘pragmatic legitimacy’) and what he calls ‘moral legitimacy’ which is generated through reference to normative structures and identities.⁶⁷ Other authors have investigated life cycles of rebel governance in terms of ‘critical junctures’⁶⁸ which might spark a phase of reckoning and learning from previous ruling experiences.⁶⁹ This in turn might lead to a different governance approach and potentially even a more effective performance. In this issue, the contributions by Glawion, Le Noan, and Acko and by Bamber-Zryd decidedly take the governance cycle as their analytical perspective. The former two investigate the dynamics of coercion and governance provision, as well as their relation to legitimacy, for the case of FPRC-controlled Ndélé, Central African Republic, from the capturing of the town through seven years of rebel rule until the fall from power. Adopting a historical approach, Bamber-Zryd shows that ISIS engaged in a process of self-reflection and adapted its governance strategy significantly after each failed governance episode, resulting in ISIS governing greater amounts of territory, through more complex institutions, for longer periods of time.

Only a few recent contributions take a broader temporal perspective which contextualises RG in the continuum from pre-conflict phase to civil war to post-conflict society. It has been argued that previous institutional arrangements, their effectiveness and legitimacy influence the incentives for rebel groups to change or transform them.⁷⁰ Pre-conflict state-society relations,⁷¹ including networks between local elites and central state authorities, impact how ANSAs will act, too. In an essay on the on-going civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, Heydemann⁷² suggests that the perception of civil war as a rupture of previous societal and governance arrangements might thus be flawed. Rather than breaking with the past, not only do state actors continue and perpetuate pre-war (economic) governance practices and institutions, but they are also adopted and imitated by non-state actors. This further questions the clear-cut distinction between regime and rebel practices, or, for that matter, state and non-state labels. It may also hint at the need to investigate to which degree continuities can be observed between the conflict and post-conflict phases.

Concerning post-conflict dynamics, a relatively new literature investigates how local wartime orders and rebel governance shape identities, perceptions, and societal relations after conflict.⁷³ Wartime orders matter on different levels: on the individual level, scholars have found that exposure to rebel governance influences post-war norms of interpersonal trustworthiness and democratic attitudes negatively.⁷⁴ Wartime orders also matter on the community level by shaping preferences for (re-)integration and experiences of local (in)security and violence.⁷⁵ On the institutional level, there are (dis)continuities between conflict and post-conflict orders in terms of the perpetuation of relationships of (dis)trust between the population and certain actors and institutions.⁷⁶ Rebel-civilian ties also influence the political authority of former rebel elites in the post-war system.⁷⁷ Finally, RG shapes broad post-war developments such as democratisation and post-conflict state-building efforts.⁷⁸

The articles in this special issue specifically aim to contribute to the long-term perspective on the relation between conflict and post-conflict social and political orders. Kocak’s piece scrutinises the continuities in the relations of trust between the population and different security institutions in Timor-Leste as a legacy of the conflict with the occupying power Indonesia. Perceptions of the military, consisting mainly of former rebels and benefitting from the image as resistance force, are very positive, as opposed to the police whose practices are seen as a continuation of Indonesian policing strategies. Albarracín, Corredor, Milanese, Valenica, and Wolff trace post-conflict violence in Colombia as a result of authoritarian political orders which emerged during the conflict on a sub-national level and which vested state and non-state actors now try to maintain, as they benefit from this status quo. A second piece on Colombia by Richter and Barrios analyses how patterns of cooperation between FARC ex-combatants and local communities relate to the social orders that were established during the conflict phase. These articles show, in particular, that important aspects of wartime orders persist on the local level, despite the entry of partially new actors. Finally, Alijla’s contribution investigates long-term rebel governance and shows that civilians’ exposure to it will shape and change their identity.

Overcoming methodological localism: overlapping spheres of RG across scales

While most of the contributions in this issue take a diachronic perspective, some of them also focus on the spatial embeddedness of RG and the interaction between rebels and other actors across different scales, challenging what could be called the methodological localism of the RG concept. This is not to attribute the local context less importance – on the contrary, in order to capture ‘how legitimacy arises from the overlapping of different forms of acceptance, loyalty, and moral orders’,⁷⁹ and understand ‘non-western authority practices’, a ‘grasp of complex local contexts’⁸⁰ and a deeper understanding of civilians’ everyday life under rebel rule are necessary. But while important progress has been made in studying the local context,⁸¹ we contend that a spatial widening of the analytical scope of RG is sometimes necessary. Existing studies mostly look at a locally confined conflict in which one rebel group claims control over a certain territory and provides goods and services to the local population through largely domestic means. In the RG paradigm, the internationalisation of wars – even though a recent trend in armed conflict⁸² – and actors outside the narrow context under study tend to get lost. Governance is often not only provided by local rebel groups, but by a variety of actors ranging from international actors (states, IOs, NGOs, diaspora groups) to local armed and non-armed actors.

Kasfir, Frerks, and Terpstra⁸³ attempt to capture the influence of these actors at different levels, ranging from the local to the international, through the notion of ‘multi-layered governance’. The efforts in which these actors are involved may take the form of complementary or co-governance,⁸⁴ parallel,⁸⁵ or competitive governance.⁸⁶ The provision of public goods, such as security, justice, and conflict management is often the result of bargaining processes among these actors. This pluralism of actors and institutions is neither necessarily incongruent nor without conflicts. Scholars have also emphasised that the relationship between the state and rebel groups is often much more nuanced than simple opposition: negotiations, bargains, and even cooperation may occur in parallel to conflict.⁸⁷ In line with these different arrangements, rebels may ‘outsource’ some of the governance tasks they face and enter co-governance arrangements in which they coordinate with the state(s) involved in the conflict, as well as IOs and NGOs.⁸⁸ States may be willing to keep providing some services to rebel-controlled areas.⁸⁹ Conversely, states may decidedly attack those areas where rebels successfully provide goods and services, so as to eliminate them as competitors and prevent an alternative authority from rising.⁹⁰ And finally, the involvement of inter- and transnational actors might change local approaches and priorities. External actors influence rebels’ behaviour, but also their legitimising strategies.⁹¹ The presence of global ‘recognition regimes’⁹² makes the success of some tactics and political ideologies more probable than others in the interaction with international actors.⁹³

Governing rebels are deeply intertwined with broader societal discourses and political dynamics in local, domestic, and transnational contexts. The interplay among actors from different scales should be studied further. With regard to governance output, for instance, existing literature generally does not distinguish between services provided in rebel territory by rebels or by other actors. We also do not know under which conditions governments and rebel groups collaborate in providing governance in areas under rebel control. By comparing instances of state-insurgent cooperation in the provision of wartime governance in Côte d’Ivoire and Sri Lanka, van Baalen and Terpstra show under what conditions rebels and state actors enter cooperative arrangements and what they do to reduce their costs. But as the contribution on Columbia by Albarracín et al. in this issue shows, it is as crucial to consider political orders which blossom and revolve around rebel rule on the local level – the state should, in this sense, be disaggregated. Similarly, as Buscemi’s article argues, practices by ANSAs are a manifestation of techniques which circulate in broader society, and may thus not be a specific rebel ‘behaviour’, but rather an expression of pervasive disciplinary power. Finally, Ketzmerick’s study on the Anglophone conflict in Cameroon adds an entirely new dimension to the spatial context in which ANSAs should be analysed: the transnational realm. She investigates how the escalation and transnationalisation of the Anglophone conflict were driven by a complex interplay of local, national, transnational, and international actors, with the diaspora playing a crucial role in politicising the conflict. These are vital contributions that capture the heterogeneity of actors and dynamics involved in contexts of overlapping and fluid authority.

The political quality of rebel governance becomes visible through the ambiguous relations between rebels, civilians, the incumbent government, and other non-state groups which are situated in time and space. This issue is organised along temporal and spatial aspects of rebel governance, taking a diachronous and a synchronous analytical lens respectively. The first part of the issue zooms in on rebel governance itself. The contribution by Glawion, Le Noan, and Acko scrutinises the surprisingly ‘long rule’ of rebels in Ndélé, CAP, which can only be explained by separating rule over a territory from actual governance by rebels in this territory. Bamber-Zryd is also interested in the phases of governance by one rebel group, arguing for a cyclical nature of governance and insurgency phases in ISIS’ activities and emphasising the group’s learning and increased governance sophistication over time.

The second part focuses on how experiences made before the conflict or in earlier phases of the conflict shape rebel governance. Hyyppä demonstrates that non-violent activists’ previous experience with massive violence constrained the way in which rebels could organise relations with civilians and build institutions in Daraya, Syria. For Buscemi, a genealogical reconstruction of two rationalities (ethnonationality and narcotics eradication) is key to understand Ta’ang rebel rule in Myanmar’s borderlands.

The legacies of rebel governance for post-conflict political and social orders are discussed in the articles grouped in the third part of this issue. Kocak traces how the FALINTIL rebel group benefits from the legitimacy sources it built during its resistance against the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste even after its transformation into the Timorese national armed forces. Albarracín, Milanese, Corredor, Valencia, and Wolff all show that political violence after an armed conflict is the result of a reproduction of authoritarian local orders which formed during wartime in Colombia. Richter and Barrios Sabogal also analyse the Colombian case and investigate the influence of FARC’s governance on social orders, more specifically patterns of cooperation between ex-combatants and local communities. Finally, Alijla analyses the effects of Hamas’ long-term governance in Gaza on identity constructions of the ruled.

The fourth group of articles consists of synchronous analyses of rebel governance. By widening the spatial view beyond the local conflict context, they expose complex relationships among various actors involved in, and the multi-layered quality of rebel governance.⁹⁴ Challenging the established view that rebels and incumbent governments violently fight against or compete with each other, van Baalen and Terpstra show that insurgents and the state may actually cooperate in governance. Their study of the Sri Lankan and Ivorian cases foregrounds the importance of bringing the state back into the analysis of rebel governance. Ketzmerick’s analysis of the Anglophone conflict goes even further, arguing that activists in the diaspora play a crucial role for conflict dynamics and thereby introducing a transnational dimension to the study of rebel governance. Finally, Waterman’s contribution questions one of the core assumptions of rebel governance, namely that governance presupposes territorial control. While rebel governance still has a spatial dimension, and rebels also need some place they use as a sanctuary, he finds that ULFA rebel governance in Northeast India was primarily non-territorial.

As the individual articles demonstrate, spatial aspects are inextricably connected to and change with phases of governance and conflict. They are also closely linked to conflict legacies and the pre-conflict experiences by which they are shaped. In this sense, the articles in the special issue could have been organised differently and the structure we chose is meant more as a suggestion. As Stewart aptly observes in the conclusion to this volume, the contributions can also be grouped around aspects of relationality which they address, that is, identity, networks, and learning.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank André Bank, Tim Glawion, Deniz Kocak, Paul Rich, Sebastian van Baalen, and David Weiß for commenting on earlier versions of this introduction. We would also like to thank the participants of the workshop on “Fractures and Continuities of Changing Rule in (Post-)Conflict Settings” which took place in spring 2021 at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, including André Bank, Andrea Carolina Jaramillo, Jude Kagoro, Lydia Letsch, Anne Menzel, Mara Redlich Revkin, Klaus Schlichte, Marika Sosnowski, Paul Staniland, Siddharth Tripathi, and Parisa Zangeneh for their discussion of, and comments on, the articles in this issue.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hanna Pfeifer

Hanna Pfeifer is Assistant Professor of Political Science with a Focus on Radicalisation and Violence Research at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and Goethe University Frankfurt. She is Principal Investigator in the Research Initiative ConTrust: Trust in Conflict – Political Life under Conditions of Uncertainty and the Regional Research Center Transformations of Political Violence (TraCe) at Goethe University, as well as head of the Research Group on Terrorism at PRIF. She received her PhD from Helmut Schmidt University/the University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg in 2017 and was a visiting scholar with a research fellowship by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the University of Cambridge in 2018. Her research focuses on violent and non-violent politics of ordering, and interactions between state and non-state actors, in the Middle East, as well as German foreign and security policy. Her research has appeared, among others, in Foreign Policy Analysis, Politics and Religion, and German Politics. In 2021, she co-edited (with Anna Geis and Maéva Clément) the volume on Armed non-state actors and the politics of recognition with Manchester University Press.

Regine Schwab

Regine Schwab is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and the Regional Research Center Transformations of Political Violence (TraCe) at Goethe University Frankfurt. She works on non-state armed groups in internationalised armed conflict, with a regional specialisation on the MENA region. She is particularly concerned with structures and institutions these actors (re)build, their interaction with other groups but also civilians and external actors, ideological changes, and violence against civilians. She received her PhD in 2021 from Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research has been published in Small Wars & Insurgencies and Terrorism and Political Violence.

Notes

1. Boege et al., Hybrid Political Orders; Hagmann and Péclard, Negotiating Statehood; Helmke and Levitsky, Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics; Lund, Twilight Institutions; Raeymaekers et al., State and Non-State Regulation in African Protracted Crises; Risse, Governance without a State?.

2. Huang, Wartime Origins of Democratization; Terpstra and Frerks, Rebel Governance and Legitimacy.

3. Arjona, Rebelocracy; Rubin, Rebel Territorial Control.

4. Jo, Compliant Rebels; Stewart, Civil War as State-Making; Sienknecht, The PKK’s Zig-Zag.

5. Stewart, Governing for Revolution.

6. Kubota, The Rebel Economy in Civil War; Lidow, Violent Order.

7. Mampilly, Rebel Rulers.

8. Arjona, Rebelocracy; Stewart, Governing for Revolution.

9. Stewart, Civil War as State-Making; Breslawski, Social Terrain of Rebel Held Territory.

10. van Baalen, Local Elites.

11. Mampilly and Stewart, A Typology of Rebel Political Institutional Arrangements; Arjona, Rebelocracy; Mampilly, Rebel Rulers.

12. Ledwidge, Rebel Law; March and Revkin, Caliphate of Law; Schwab, Insurgent Courts in Civil Wars; Schwab and Massoud, Who owns the Law?

13. Furlan, Understanding Governance by Insurgent Non-State Actors, 483.

14. Kasfir, Constructing a Field of Inquiry, 24; Breslawski, Social Terrain of Rebel Held Territory.

15. van Baalen, Local Elites; Furlan, Understanding Governance by Insurgent Non-State Actors; Stewart, Civil War as State-Making.

16. Important exceptions are Péclard and Mechoulan, Rebel Governance and the Politics of Civil War, and, more recently, the special issue of Partecipazione e Conflitto by Malthaner and Malešević, Between Rebellion and Governance.

17. Governance, Order and Change in World Politics, 4.

18. Hoffmann, Myths Set in Motion; Mampilly, Rebel Rulers, 56.

19. As, e.g. understood by Bull, The Anarchical Society, 3–4.

20. Péclard and Mechoulan, Rebel Governance and the Politics of Civil War; Worrall, (Re-)Emergent Orders.

21. Malthaner and Malešević, Violence, Legitimacy, and Control, 3.

22. Daase and Deitlehoff, Rule and Resistance, 12.

23. Onuf, World of Our Making, 207.

24. Mayntz, Von der Steuerungstheorie zu Global Governance, 55; our translation.

25. Arjona et al., Introduction, 3.

26. Hoffmann and Verweijen, Rebel Rule, 355.

27. Arjona et al., Introduction, 18.

28. Arjona et al., Introduction, 2; emphasis in original.

29. Péclard and Mechoulan, Rebel Governance and the Politics of Civil War, 10–12.

30. See, e.g. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, chapter III.

31. Malthaner and Malešević, Violence, Legitimacy, and Control.

32. Schlichte and Schneckener, Armed Groups and the Politics of Legitimacy; Geis et al., Armed Non-State Actors and the Politics of Recognition.

33. Kasfir et al., Introduction; Geis et al., Armed Non-State Actors and the Politics of Recognition. We use the terms rebels and armed non-state actor (ANSA) interchangeably in this issue.

34. Kasfir et al., Introduction.

35. Börzel and Risse, Governance without a State; Risse, Governance without a State?.

36. Phillips, Proximities of Violence, 4.

37. For as discussion, see Clément, Geis, and Pfeifer, Recognising Armed Non-state Actors. For an analysis of armed non-state actors’ external and foreign policy activities, see Darwich, Foreign Policy Analysis and Armed Non-state Actors.

38. Milner, International Theories of Cooperation, 483.

39. E.g. Cunningham et al., Voting for Militants; Loyle, Rebel Justice during Armed Conflict.

40. Hoffmann and Verweijen, Rebel Rule, 355–356.

41. Lilja, Trapping Constituents or Winning Hearts and Minds?; Weinstein, Inside Rebellion; Breslawski, Social Terrain of Rebel Held Territory.

42. Violence, Legitimacy, and Control, 1.

43. Reno, Predatory Rebellions and Governance.

44. Heger et al., Linking Nonstate Governance and Violence.

45. Hoffmann and Verweijen, Rebel Rule; Kasfir, Guerrillas and Civilian Participation; Revkin and Ahram, Perspectives on the Rebel Social Contract; Terpstra and Frerks, Rebel Governance and Legitimacy.

46. Van Baalen, Local Elites.

47. Baykonyi, War’s Everyday; Brenner, Authority in Rebel Groups; Burns, Insurgency as a Struggle for Legitimation; Duyvesteyn, Rebels & Legitimacy; Malthaner, Violence, Legitimacy, and Control; Podder, Understanding the Legitimacy of Armed Groups; Schlichte and Schneckener, Armed Groups and the Politics of Legitimacy; Terpstra, Rebel Governance, Rebel Legitimacy, and External Intervention.

48. Oligopolies of Violence, 545.

49. Geis et al., Armed Non-State Actors and the Politics of Recognition.

50. Pfeifer, Recognition Dynamics.

51. Hensell and Schlichte, The Historical Mapping of Armed Groups’ Recognition.

52. Asal et al., Doing Good While Killing; Cunningham et al., Voting for Militants; Flanigan, Nonprofit Service Provision by Insurgent Organizations; Florea, Rebel Governance in de Facto States; Loyle, Rebel Justice during Armed Conflict. Exceptions are Terpstra and Frerks, Rebel Governance and Legitimacy, and Terpstra, Rebel Governance, Rebel Legitimacy, and External Intervention.

53. Ghosn and Parkinson, Finding’ Sectarianism and Strife in Lebanon.

54. Revkin, Governance and Displacement Decisions Under Rebel Rule.

55. Revkin and Ahram, Perspectives on the Rebel Social Contract, also provide useful reflections on the observable implications of civilian support and a social contract under rebel rule.

56. An exception is, e.g. Donker, Jihadism & Governance in North-Syria.

57. Kasfir, Constructing a Field of Inquiry, 40.

58. Gutiérrez-Sanín and Wood, Ideology in Civil War; Leader Maynard, Ideology and Armed Conflict.

59. Baylouny, Born Violent; Kalyvas, Rebel Governance During the Greek Civil War; Stewart, Governing for Revolution; Suykens, Comparing Rebel Rule.

60. Arjona, Rebelocracy, 301.

61. Ideology in Armed Groups, 948; see also Arjona, Rebelocracy, 10–11; Svensson and Finnbogason, Confronting the Caliphate?.

62. But see Hoffmann, Myths Set in Motion.

63. E.g. Mampilly, Performing the Nation-State.

64. Rebel Rule, 359.

65. Ibid 357.

66. Rebel Governance, Rebel Legitimacy, and External Intervention.

67. See above 67. 1174.

68. Capoccia and Kelemen, The Study of Critical Junctures; Soifer, The Causal Logic of Critical Junctures.

69. Svensson and Finnbogason, Confronting the Caliphate?.

70. See above 62., 11.

71. Mampilly, Rebel Rulers, 71–72.

72. Civil War, Economic Governance & State Reconstruction.

73. Kao and Revkin, Retribution or Reconciliation?; Kubota, Imagined Statehood.

74. Kubota, Nonviolent Interference; Martin et al., The Political Legacies of Rebel Rule.

75. Kao and Revkin, Retribution or Reconciliation?.

76. Dirkx, Institutional Legacies of Rebel Governance.

77. Martin et al., Ex-Rebel Authority after Civil War.

78. Huang, Wartime Origins of Democratization; Podder, Mainstreaming the Non-State; Stewart, Governing for Revolution.

79. See above 22., 7.

80. Arjona et al., Introduction, 18.

81. See, e.g. the contributions in Malthaner and Malešević, Between Rebellion and Governance.

82. Pettersson and Öberg, Organized Violence.

83. Introduction.

84. Idler and Forest, Behavioral Patterns among (Violent) Non-State Actors; Stel, Mediated Stateness as a Continuum.

85. Thakur and Venugopal, Parallel Governance and Political Order.

86. Berti, From Cooperation to Competition. The latter is mostly discussed in relation to the competition between rebel groups and the incumbent state which the former challenge through violence and the provision of governance; Grynkewich Welfare as Warfare; Asal et al., Doing Good While Killing; Revkin, Competitive Governance and Displacement Decisions Under Rebel Rule.

87. Staniland, States, Insurgents, and Wartime Political Orders; Armed Politics and the Study of Intrastate Conflict.

88. Mampilly, Rebel Rulers, 83–85.

89. Glawion, Le Noan, and Acko, and van Baalen and Terpstra in this issue.

90. Martínez and Eng, Stifling Stateness.

91. Sienknecht, The PKK’s Zig-Zag; Terpstra, Rebel Governance, Rebel Legitimacy, and External Intervention.

92. Ringmar, China’s Place in Four Recognition Regimes.

93. See above 53.

94. Kasfir, Frerks, and Terpstra, Introduction.