Abstract: When do armed groups use violence to induce cooperation from civilians? Most scholarship related to this question examines variation in armed group strategies across groups or space. I focus instead on variation across distinct stages of rebel group trajectories and argue that the initial phases of rebel group formation are characterized by distinctive dynamics of violence. I argue that because incipient rebels are typically small and militarily weak, what rebels need from civilians during these initial stages is secrecy since information leaks to government about vulnerable, nascent rebels’ location leads to their demise. However, a civilian’s decision to maintain secrecy or not is difficult for incipient rebels to observe since they have not yet established reliable intelligence networks that enable them to police and violently punish denunciation – and thus, they cannot credibly threaten to do so. One implication of this conceptualization of rebel group emergence is that nascent rebels will refrain from violence against civilians, instead relying on persuasion to prevent information leaks. Only later in the insurgency, after rebels have established their fighting and intelligence capacity, will they find it advantageous to sometimes employ violence against civilians. I demonstrate this absence of rebel violence against civilians in the initial stages of rebellion, and why and how violence against civilians emerged after groups become viable, with original evidence about all rebel groups that formed in Uganda since 1986 as well as shadow cases from Sri Lanka and Ethiopia.
Janet I. Lewis, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Harvard College Fellows Program, Harvard University.
Robert H. Bates, Faculty Associate (on leave 2012–2013); Harvard Academy Senior Scholar. Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Department of Government; Professor of African and African American Studies, Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University.
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