Beyond Greed: Why Armed Groups Tax

Abstract

Based on a review of the diverse practices of how armed groups tax, we highlight that a full account of why armed groups tax needs to go beyond revenue motivations, to also engage with explanations related to ideology, legitimacy, institution building, legibility and control of populations, and the performance of public authority. This article builds on two distinct literatures, on armed groups and on taxation, to provide the first systematic exploration of the motivations of armed group taxation. We problematize common approaches toward armed group taxation and state-building, and outline key questions of a new research agenda.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Mary Harper, “Somalia Conflict: Al-Shabab ‘Collects More Revenue than Government,’” BBC World Service News, October 26, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-54690561.

2 Joseph Thorndike, “How ISIS Is Using Taxes To Build A Terrorist State,” Forbes, August 18, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/taxanalysts/2014/08/18/how-isis-is-using-taxes-to-build-a-terrorist-state/.

3 Victor H. Asal, R. Karl Rethemeyer, and Eric W. Schoon, “Crime, Conflict, and the Legitimacy Tradeoff: Explaining Variation in Insurgents’ Participation in Crime,” The Journal of Politics 81, no. 2 (2019).

4 Karen Elizabeth Albert, “Institutions of the Weak: Rebel Institutions and the Prospects of Peace after Civil War” (University of Rochester, 2020), 15.

5 Following conventional understandings, we define armed groups as (i) armed organisations willing and capable of using violence in pursuit of their objectives that are (ii) not fully integrated into formalised state institutions such as regular armed, presidential guards, police or special forces Benedetta Berti, “Rebel Politics and the State: Between Conflict and Post-Conflict, Resistance and Co-Existence,” Civil Wars 18, no. 2 (2016): 118–36; Claudia Hofmann and Ulrich Schneckener, “Engaging Non-State Armed Actors in State- and Peace-Building: Options and Strategies,” International Review of the Red Cross 93, no. 883 (September 2011): 603–21, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1816383112000148.

6 Zachariah Mampilly, “Rebel Taxation: Between the Moral and Market Economy,” in Rebel Economies: Warlords, Insurgents, Humanitarians, ed. Nicola Di Cosmo, Didier Fassin, and Clemence Pinaud (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2021); Zachariah Mampilly and Shalaka Thakur, “Rebel Taxation: Extortion or a Technology of Governance? Telling the Difference in India’s Northeast,” Forthcoming; Mara Redlich Revkin, “What Explains Taxation by Resource-Rich Rebels? Evidence from the Islamic State in Syria,” Journal of Politics Forthcoming (2020); Rachel Sabates-Wheeler and Phillip Verwimp, “Extortion with Protection: Understanding the Effect of Rebel Taxation on Civilian Welfare in Burundi,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 58, no. 8 (2014): 1474–99.

7 Mampilly, “Rebel Taxation: Between the Moral and Market Economy,” 77.

8 Mampilly, "Rebel Taxation: Between the Moral and Market Economy," 86.

9 We examined 41 cases of armed groups, the majority of which engaged in some form of levying taxes, though some groups that did not appear to tax were also included. For each group, we reviewed types of taxes collected; taxed constituencies; group characteristics like goals, ideology, age, and size; relationships to the state; tax collection mechanisms; compliance mechanisms; other non-tax sources of revenue; and use of tax, including goods or services rendered in exchange for tax revenue. The cases include groups that were founded from 1949–2012, with the exception of Camorra which is estimated to have been founded in the 17^th century, though is still active today. We also included additional case examples, drawn from previously published work. For a list of all cases included in this paper, please see Appendix A.

10 Kasper Hoffmann, Koen Vlassenroot, and Gauthier Marchais, “Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups: Public Authority and Resource Extraction in Eastern Congo,” Development and Change 47, no. 6 (November 2016): 1434, https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12275.

11 Revkin, “What Explains Taxation by Resource-Rich Rebels? Evidence from the Islamic State in Syria.”

12 Revkin (2020) notes that tax-like payments are “justified on public interest grounds (financing public goods, paying for the costs of war, redistributing assets from rich to poor) whereas theft is justified only by a self-serving desire for private gain”. Rules, meanwhile, may be publicly known through written documentation as well as through oral or other social channels N. Richani, Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia, 2nd ed. (State University of New York Press, 2013.

13 For instance, groups can pursue economic and political goals, such as leftist, ethno-nationalist or religious based desires for a change in the status quo. These goals may also be more specific, like the toppling of an incumbent leader or regime or the establishment of a de facto or proto-state. More specifically, objectives may include (1) secession/independent state; (2) increased autonomy within state; (3) regime change; (4) pursuit of improved group rights; (5) pursuit of improved political representation or participation; (6) remove current leader; (7) democratisation; (8) leftist revolution; (9) implement theocracy; and (10) implement military regime V. A. Braithwaite, Defiance in Taxation and Governance: Resisting and Dismissing Authority in a Democracy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009); Belgin San-Acka, “Dangerous Companions: Cooperation between States and Nonstate Armed Groups (NAGs), v.04/2015,” 2015, nonstatearmedgroups.ku.edu.tr.

14 Naturally, it is difficult to judge the exact intentions and motivation of an armed group, especially when considering that their policies often are the result of competing interests, ideas, and sources of power within each armed group. Hence, the paper relies on an observation and analysis of the practices of armed groups.

15 Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers 56, no. 4 (2004): 563–95; Mampilly, “Rebel Taxation: Between the Moral and Market Economy,” 78.

16 Hoffmann, Vlassenroot, and Marchais, “Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups,” 1435.

17 Specifically, they argue that insurgents restrain their violence against civilians so long as they maintain a monopoly on the control of resources, but if they face competition over this control, these groups will abruptly adopt more coercive tactics in pursuit of material gains Claire M. Metelits, “The Consequences of Rivalry: Explaining Insurgent Violence Using Fuzzy Sets,” Political Research Quarterly 62, no. 4 (December 2009): 673–84, https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912908322413.

18 Philippe Le Billion, Fuelling War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflict (New York: Routledge, 2006); Angelika Rettberg and Juan Felipe Ortiz-Riomalo, “Golden Opportunity, or a New Twist on the Resource–Conflict Relationship: Links Between the Drug Trade and Illegal Gold Mining in Colombia,” World Development 84 (August 2016): 82–96, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.03.020.

19 Alex de Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (London: Villiers Publications, 1997); David Keen, Complex Emergencies (Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2008).

20 C. Nellemann et al., “World Atlas of Illicit Flows” (INTERPOL, RHIPTO, and the Global Initiative Against Transnational Crime, 2018).

21 Nellemann et al.

22 For the years 2014-17, ISIS’ tax revenues were estimated to be between US$300–400 million while oil and gas revenues were estimated to be between US$150–450. We recognise here that these estimates are likely rough, as it is difficult to come across verifiable resource estimates in many cases of armed non-state actor revenue.

23 Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Resource Rents, Governance, and Conflict,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 4 (2005): 625–33.

24 This is in line with Weinstein who shows that resource availability shapes how armed groups interact with civilians Jeremy Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)..

25 Alexandre Jaillon, Peer Schouten, and Soleil Kalessopo, “The Politics of Pillage: The Political Economy of Roadblocks in the Central African Republic” (International Peace Information Service, 2017), https://ipisresearch.be/publication/politics-pillage-political-economy-roadblocks-central-african-republic/.

26 Aisha Ahmad, Jihad and Co. Black Markets and Islamist Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

27 Linda T. Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560-1660, The Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage, v. 6 (Leiden ; New York: E.J. Brill, 1996); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford [England] ; Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1994); Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Yin Xu and Xiaoqun Xu, “Taxation and State-Building: The Tax Reform under the Nationalist Government in China, 1928–1949,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 48 (January 2016): 17–30, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2015.10.008.

28 Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” 14.

29 Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.”

30 Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy.

31 Xu and Xu, “Taxation and State-Building.”

32 Ashley Jackson, “Life under the Taliban Shadow Government,” Research Report (Overseas Development Institute, 2018), 23, https://odi.org/en/publications/life-under-the-taliban-shadow-government/.

33 Mampilly, “Rebel Taxation: Between the Moral and Market Economy,” 86.

34 Arabinda Acharya, Syed Adnan Ali Shah Bukhari, and Sadia Sulaiman, “Making Money in the Mayhem: Funding Taliban Insurrection in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 32, no. 2 (January 26, 2009): 95–108, https://doi.org/10.1080/10576100802628314; Florian Weigand, Conflict and Transnational Crime: Borders, Bullets et Business in Southeast Asia, 2020, https://www.doabooks.org/doab?func=fulltext&uiLanguage=en&rid=46430.

35 Other examples where civilian taxation is prevalent despite the availability of other non-tax sources of finance include the CPP-NPA and MILF in the Philippines, the LTTE in Sri Lanka, and both the ELN and FARC in Colombia.

36 Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín and Elisabeth Jean Wood, “Ideology in Civil War: Instrumental Adoption and Beyond,” Journal of Peace Research 51, no. 2 (March 2014): 213–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343313514073.

37 Jackson, “Life under the Taliban Shadow Government.”

38 Nathan Gilbert Quimpo, “‘Revolutionary Taxation’ and the Logistical and Strategic Dilemmas of the Maoist Insurgency in the Philippines,” Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs 1, no. 3 (December 2014): 263–87, https://doi.org/10.1177/2347797014551267.

39 Soliman M. Santos and Paz Verdades M. Santos, “Primed and Purposeful: Armed Groups and Human Security Efforts in the Philippines” (Geneva, Switzerland: Small Arms Survey, 2010).

40 Mampilly, “Rebel Taxation: Between the Moral and Market Economy,” 87.

41 Seng Lawn Dan et al., “The Pat Jasan Drug Eradication Social Movement in Northern Myanmar, Part One: Origins & Reactions,” International Journal of Drug Policy 89 (2021); Weigand, Conflict and Transnational Crime.

42 Francesco Strazzari, “Azawad and the Rights of Passage: The Role of Illicit Trade in the Logic of Armed Group Formation in Northern Mali” (Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre, 2015), 7.

43 Strazzari, 7.

44 Zachariah Cherian Mampilly, “Bandits, Warlords, Embryonic States, Black Spots, and Ungoverned Territories: The Unwieldly Taxonomy of Rebel-Governed Areas,” in Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life During War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Kristian Stokke, “Building the Tamil Eelam State: Emerging State Institutions and Forms of Governance in LTTE-Controlled Areas in Sri Lanka,” Third World Quarterly 27, no. 6 (September 2006): 1021–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590600850434.

45 Mampilly, “Bandits, Warlords, Embryonic States, Black Spots, and Ungoverned Territories: The Unwieldly Taxonomy of Rebel-Governed Areas,” 115.

46 Bert Suykens, “Comparing Rebel Rule through Revolution and Naturalization: Ideologies of Governance in Naxalite and Naga India,” in Rebel Governance in Civil War, ed. Ana Arjona, Nelson Kasfir, and Zachariah Mampilly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

47 Al-Shabaab’s zakat is set at 2.5 per cent of the monetary value of a business before profit. As the Hiraal Institute notes, “This is contrary to Islamic law, which requires that Zakah is paid as a percentage of what one has at the end of the financial year. This has led some of the more idealistic AS members to demand that their salaries be paid from the Zakah and not by taxes collected by the Finance Office” Hiraal Institute, “The AS Finance System” (Hiraal Institute, 2018), 2..

48 As described by the Hiraal Institute, “The first head of the Zakawaat office was Sheikh Fuad, who notoriously paid all the collected Zakah to the poor, leading to his immediate dismissal after his first year in the job…and afterwards only a small fraction was given to the poor” Hiraal Institute, 1..

49 Yaya J. Fanusie and Alex Entz, “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb: Financial Assessment” (Center on Sanctions & Illicit Finance, 2017), https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/defenddemocracy/uploads/documents/CSIF_TFBB_AQIM.pdf; Ricardo René Larémont, “Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb: Terrorism and Counterterrorism in the Sahel,” African Security 4, no. 4 (October 2011): 242–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/19392206.2011.628630.

50 Chris Dishman, “Terrorism, Crime, and Transformation,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 24, no. 1 (January 2001): 43–58, https://doi.org/10.1080/10576100118878; Justine A. Rosenthal, “For-Profit Terrorism: The Rise of Armed Entrepreneurs,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 31, no. 6 (June 13, 2008): 481–98, https://doi.org/10.1080/10576100802064858.

51 David Mansfield, A State Built on Sand: How Opium Undermined Afghanistan (London: Hurst & Company, 2016).

52 More broadly, reliance on illicit forms of finance that conflict with group ideology can undermine legitimacy and the prospects for recognition, as we discuss below. The fact that Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines generates revenue through kidnappings, including of Muslims, detracts from their ideological legitimacy (Weigand 2020).

53 Rosenthal, “For-Profit Terrorism,” 484.

54 John Otis, “The FARC and Colombia’s Illegal Drug Trade” (Wilson Center Latin American Program, 2014), 3.

55 Max Weber, A. M Henderson, and Talcott Parsons, Max Weber: The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York; London: Free Press ; Collier Macmillan, 1964).

56 Miranda Stewart, “The Tax State, Benefit, and Legitimacy,” Working Paper, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, 2015, 31.

57 Weber, Henderson, and Parsons, Max Weber.

58 Weigand, Conflict and Transnational Crime.

59 Mampilly and Thakur, “Rebel Taxation: Extortion or a Technology of Governance? Telling the Difference in India’s Northeast.”

60 Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988).

61 Hoffmann, Vlassenroot, and Marchais, “Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups,” 1451.

62 Weigand, Conflict and Transnational Crime.

63 Ana Arjona, Rebelocracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Sukanya Podder, “Mainstreaming the Non-State in Bottom-up State-Building: Linkages between Rebel Governance and Post-Conflict Legitimacy,” Conflict, Security and Development 14, no. 2 (2014): 213–43; Niels Terpstra and Georg Frerks, “Rebel Governance and Legitimacy: Understanding the Impact of Rebel Legitimation on Civilian Compliance with the LTTE Rule,” Civil Wars 19, no. 3 (2017): 279–307.

64 Ashley Jackson and Florian Weigand, “Rebel Rule of Law: Taliban Courts in the West and North-West of Afghanistan,” Briefing/Policy Papers (Overseas Development Institute, 2020).

65 David Brenner, “Ashes of Co-Optation: From Armed Group Fragmentation to the Rebuilding of Popular Insurgency in Myanmar,” Conflict, Security & Development 15, no. 4 (August 8, 2015): 337–58, https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2015.1071974; David Brenner, “Authority in Rebel Groups: Identity, Recognition and the Struggle over Legitimacy,” Contemporary Politics 23, no. 4 (2017): 408–26.

66 Aoife McCullough, “Reconstructing Our Understanding of the Link between Services and State Legitimacy” (Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium, 2020); Florian Weigand, “Investigating the Role of Legitimacy in the Political Order of Conflict-Torn Spaces,” Security in Transition (London, UK: LSE, 2015); Florian Weigand, “Afghanistan’s Taliban – Legitimate Jihadists or Coercive Extremists?,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 11, no. 3 (July 3, 2017): 359–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2017.1353755; Florian Weigand, Waiting for Dignity: Legitimacy and Authority in Afghanistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).

67 Weigand, Waiting for Dignity: Legitimacy and Authority in Afghanistan.

68 Deborah A. Brautigam, “Introduction: Taxation and State-Building in Developing Countries,” in Taxation and State-Building in Developing Countries: Capacity and Consent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–33; Francis Fukuyama, “Why Is Democracy Performing so Poorly?,” Journal of Democracy 26 (2015): 11–20; Mick Moore, “Revenues, State Formation, and the Quality of Governance in Developing Countries,” International Political Science Review 25, no. 3 (July 2004): 297–319, https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512104043018.

69 This institution building drive is not, however, universal. For example, despite Abu Sayyaf’s stated aim of creating an independent Islamic state in the Philippines, it has not obviously built a bureaucracy, administration, and governing institutions – in sharp contrast to other Islamic armed groups in the country, including the MILF and MNLF Bilveer Singh and Jasminder Singh, “From ‘Bandit’ to ‘Amir’—The Rise of the Abu Sayyaf Group as a Jihadi Organization in the Philippines,” Asian Politics & Policy 11, no. 3 (July 2019): 399–416, https://doi.org/10.1111/aspp.12480; Ashley South and Christopher M. Joll, “From Rebels to Rulers: The Challenges of Transition for Non-State Armed Groups in Mindanao and Myanmar,” Critical Asian Studies 48, no. 2 (2016): 168–92..

70 A. Tannira, “The Political Economy of the Gaza Strip Under Hamas,” in Political Economy of Palestine, ed. A. Tartir, D. Tariq, and T. Seidel, 2021, 141.

71 Tannira, “The Political Economy of the Gaza Strip Under Hamas.”

72 Hiraal Institute, “The AS Finance System”; Hiraal Institute, “A Losing Game: Countering al-Shabaab’s Financial System” (Hiraal Institute, 2020); UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, “Letter Dated 7 November 2018 from the Chair of the Security Council Committee Pursuant to Resolutions 751 (1992) and 1907 (2009) Concerning Somalia and Eritrea Addressed to the President of the Security Council” (United Nations Security Council, 2018).

73 Hiraal Institute, “The AS Finance System.”

74 While the KNU tries to maintain control over this bureaucracy, it is less able to do so where its administration is weak, the KNLA has a strong presence, and insecurity is high. In these contexts, less institutionalised forms of taxation and revenue extraction are more common, with informal revenues collected by local leaders and armed members of the KNLA Karen Human Rights Group, “Looting, Extortion, and Arbitrary Taxation,” in Foundation of Fear: 25 Years of Villagers’ Voices from SouthEast Myanmar (Karen Human Rights Group, 2018), https://khrg.org/2018/02/17-1-t1-ch5/chapter-5-looting-extortion-and-arbitrary-taxation..

75 Kim Jolliffe, “Ceasefires, Governance, and Development: The Karen National Union in Times of Change” (The Asia Foundation, 2016), https://asiafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Ceasefires-Governance-and-Development-EN-Apr2017.pdf.

76 Jolliffe, 22.

77 In particular, where taxpayers already have to pay taxes to al-Shabaab, some local governments report feeling limited in collecting additional revenues because of the extra burden it would imply for taxpayers – while also being physically limited in collecting taxes where there is high insecurity or a risk of retaliation by al-Shabaab Vanessa van den Boogaard and N.N. Isak, “The Political Economy of Taxation in Somalia: Historical Legacies, Informal Institutions, and Political Settlements,” Working Paper (International Centre for Tax and Development, Forthcoming)..

78 Hiraal Institute, “The AS Finance System.”

79 Ido Levy and Abdi Yusuf, “How Do Terrorist Organizations Make Money? Terrorist Funding and Innovation in the Case of al-Shabaab,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, June 17, 2019, 10, https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2019.1628622.

80 Lindsay Scorgie-Porter, “Economic Survival and Borderland Rebellion: The Case of the Allied Democratic Forces on the Uganda-Congo Border,” The Journal of the Middle East and Africa 6, no. 2 (2015): 206.

81 In 2011, Congolese military officers estimated that the ADF “benefits from the popular support of nearly half of the population of Beni territory” UNSC, “Letter Dated 29 November 2011 from the Chair of the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1533 (2004) Concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo Addressed to the President of the Security Council” (The United Nations Security Council, 2011), 30.,at least in part because ADF “combatants and their family members are relatively well integrated and generally respect the traditional hierarchy in the host communities’ Hans Romkema, “Opportunities and Constraints for the Disarmament & Repatriation of Foreign Armed Groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo” (Washington: The World Bank, 2007), 29, http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/668411468244798529/pdf/440810WP0BOX327388B01PUBLIC1.pdf..

82 Scorgie-Porter, “Economic Survival and Borderland Rebellion: The Case of the Allied Democratic Forces on the Uganda-Congo Border,” 209.

83 Romkema, “Opportunities and Constraints for the Disarmament & Repatriation of Foreign Armed Groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” 44.

84 Hatfield highlights, for instance, that despite the public attention to the information that the US national security apparatus holds on US citizens, “the IRS likely has the surest legal claim to the most information about the most Americans’ Michael Hatfield, “Taxation and Surveillance: An Agenda,” University of Washington School of Law Digital Commons, 2015..

85 James Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

86 Legibility typically refers to states’ possession of information, but also how this information is structured and aggregated in ways that make it understandable and actionable to state administrators.

87 Aymenn al-Tamimi, “The Evolution in Islamic State Administration: The Documentary Evidence,” Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no. 4 (2015): 117–29.

88 Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

89 Jaillon, Schouten, and Kalessopo, “The Politics of Pillage: The Political Economy of Roadblocks in the Central African Republic”; Peer Schouten, Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa (Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

90 Revkin, “What Explains Taxation by Resource-Rich Rebels? Evidence from the Islamic State in Syria.”

91 Hoffmann, Vlassenroot, and Marchais, “Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups.”

92 B. Hughes, “‘The Entire Population of the God-Forsaken Island Is Terrorised by a Small Band of Gun-Men’: Guerrillas and Civilians during the Irish Revolution,” in Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day., ed. B. Hughes and F. Robson (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), 93.

93 Ashley Jackson, Negotiating Survival: Civilian-Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan (London: C Hurst & Company, 2021).

94 Kristof Titeca, “Access to Resources and Predictability in Armed Rebellion: The FAPC’s Short-Lived ‘Monaco’ in Eastern Congo,” Africa Spectrum 46, no. 2 (August 2011): 52, https://doi.org/10.1177/000203971104600202.

95 Tobias Hagmann and Didier Péclard, “Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa: Negotiating Statehood,” Development and Change 41, no. 4 (August 16, 2010): 539–62, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2010.01656.x; Hoffmann, Vlassenroot, and Marchais, “Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups”; Zachariah Cherian Mampilly, “Performing the Nation-State: Rebel Governance and Symbolic Processes,” in Rebel Governance in Civil War, ed. Ana Arjona, Nelson Kasfir, and Zachariah Cherian Mampilly, 2015.

96 Kasper Hoffman, “Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups: Public Authority and Resource Extraction in Eastern Congo,” Development and Change 47, no. 6 (2016): 1436.

97 Ruchi Kumar, “From Road Tax to Courts: The Taliban’s Attempts at State-Building” (Al Jazeera, 2018), https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/8/26/from-road-tax-to-courts-the-talibans-attempts-at-state-building.

98 Hiraal Institute, “The AS Finance System”; UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, “Letter Dated 7 November 2018 from the Chair of the Security Council Committee Pursuant to Resolutions 751 (1992) and 1907 (2009) Concerning Somalia and Eritrea Addressed to the President of the Security Council.”

99 Jaillon, Schouten, and Kalessopo, “The Politics of Pillage: The Political Economy of Roadblocks in the Central African Republic.”

100 Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett, and Michael Woolcock, Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action (Oxford University Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198747482.001.0001.

101 Jackson, “Life under the Taliban Shadow Government.”

102 Hoffman, “Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups: Public Authority and Resource Extraction in Eastern Congo,” 1434.

103 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds., States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Duke University Press, 2001), 8, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smxxj.

104 Hoffman, “Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups: Public Authority and Resource Extraction in Eastern Congo,” 1447.

105 The Economist, “Somaliland Deserves International Recognition,” 2021, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/05/08/somaliland-deserves-international-recognition.

106 Mampilly, “Rebel Taxation: Between the Moral and Market Economy,” 96.

107 Mampilly, “Rebel Taxation: Between the Moral and Market Economy”; Mampilly, “Performing the Nation-State: Rebel Governance and Symbolic Processes,” 84–85.

108 UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, “Letter Dated 7 November 2018 from the Chair of the Security Council Committee Pursuant to Resolutions 751 (1992) and 1907 (2009) Concerning Somalia and Eritrea Addressed to the President of the Security Council.”

109 A. Chopra, “Afghan Taliban Flex Muscles with New Telecom ‘Tax.’” (AFP, January 18, 2016), http://news.yahoo.com/afghan-taliban-flex-muscles-telecom-tax-064416382.html.

110 Jackson, “Life under the Taliban Shadow Government,” 23.

111 Stokke, “Building the Tamil Eelam State,” 1022.

112 Hiraal Institute, “A Losing Game: Countering al-Shabaab’s Financial System,” 6–7.

113 M. Bowden, “After Geneva – the New Challenges and Risks Facing NGOs and Civil Society in Afghanistan,” Lessons for Peace Afghanistan Blog (ODI, 2021).

114 Kirsten E. Schulze, “The Free Aceh Movement (GAM): Anatomy of a Separatist Organization” (East-West Center Washington, 2004), 24.

115 Schulze, 12.

116 Radio Free Asia, “Arakan Army Collects Taxes, Polices Streets in Parts of Myanmar’s War-Torn Rakhine State” (Yangon, 2020), https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/arakan-army-07202020093940.html.

117 International Crisis Group, “An Avoidable War: Politics and Armed Conflict in Myanmar’s Rakhine State,” June 2020, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-asia/myanmar/307-avoidable-war-politics-and-armed-conflict-myanmars-rakhine-state.

118 R. Jackson, “International Community Beyond the Cold War,” in Beyond Westphalia: State Sovereignty and International Intervention, ed. G.M. Lyons and M. Mastanduno (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

119 Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,” The American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993): 567–76; Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.”

120 Some groups may in fact be primarily driven by economic motives, may limit their activity to supporting a political goal in a different territory, might seek to influence politics within an existing state system, to capture power within it or to change it, or might solely seek to maximise revenue.

121 Mampilly, “Rebel Taxation: Between the Moral and Market Economy,” 88.

122 Michael L. Ross, “What Have We Learned About the Resource Curse?,” The Annual Review of Political Science 18 (2015): 239–59.

123 Moore, “Revenues, State Formation, and the Quality of Governance in Developing Countries”; Wilson Prichard, Taxation, Responsiveness and Accountability in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

124 Radha Sarkar and Amar Sarkar, “The Rebels’ Resource Curse: A Theory of Insurgent–Civilian Dynamics,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 40, no. 10 (October 3, 2017): 870–98, https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2016.1239992.

125 While some have considered the relationship between financing sources and armed group relationships with civilian populations, these have, to the best of our knowledge, excluded an explicit exploration of armed group taxation.

126 Fanusie and Entz, “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb: Financial Assessment.”

127 Miguel Angel Centeno, “Blood and Debt: War and Taxation in Nineteenth‐Century Latin America,” American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 6 (May 1997): 1565–1605, https://doi.org/10.1086/231127; Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2002); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992, Rev. pbk. ed, Studies in Social Discontinuity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992).