We fiction writers often feature resistance movements in our stories. American culture in particular lionizes rebels and guerrillas, thanks in part to our rose-colored cultural memory of the American Revolution on the one hand, and some people’s idealized picture of socialist revolution in the Che Guevara mode on the other.

In real life, most resistance movements fail before they even get started. Of the ones that get established enough to fight a serious war against the state, most of them lose—and before they lose, many of them victimize civilian populations more brutally than the states they try to overthrow.

Yet some resistance movements are protective of civilians, and maintain internal discipline to ensure that their foot soldiers do not steal or murder with impunity. Some of them end up getting corrupted by success and start predating civilians; but a few manage to stay moral all the way to victory.

What makes the difference? Why do some rebel groups routinely harm civilians and others don’t? And more to the point, how can we writers use these concepts in our stories?

Jeremy Weinstein, in his book Inside Rebellion, provides an unexpected answer that becomes utterly compelling as he lays out his evidence. Weinstein argues, on the basis of considerable fieldwork in Peru, Uganda, and Mozambique as well as analysis of the literatures on several other civil wars, that the key difference is the level of resources available to the rebel group at its inception.

If a group initially has very few resources (primarily money, food, and weapons), then it must quickly build links to a broader civilian community in order to survive. The need to maintain relationships with the populace then impels the group to develop strong internal discipline and governance, and to behave well with civilians (except for selective killings done for strategic reasons, for example executing collaborators).

If, on the other hand, a group has access to significant resources—money from a state sponsor, or from the drug trade, or from natural resources, for example—then it has much less need to maintain good relations with the civilian populace. That, by itself, doesn’t force a group to harm civilians; but the easy availability of resources tends to lead a group to pay its members well, which attracts a different (and less savory) caliber of recruit than would agree to join a poor, weak resistance group without resources.

This is not a simple argument of “rich group kills civilians, poor group does not.” Weinstein carefully lays out the cascading effects of that difference in initial conditions as they bear on five distinct problems faced by rebel groups (and by governments too, although that is outside of Weinstein’s scope):

• Recruitment;
• Maintaining discipline;
• Managing civilians in areas the group controls;
• Punishing people for cooperating with the enemy or otherwise shirking; and
• Resilience (that is, maintaining your membership and its governance structures over time)

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Before I explain these, let me just take a moment to rhapsodize about good theories. (Because this is my blog, and I can do what I want!) The world is full of thorny questions, and equally full of bad answers to those questions—as H.L. Mencken put it, “[T]here is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” It is a true joy to read a theory that suggests an answer that is utterly unexpected, and yet as you read the argument, it addresses so many features of the initial problem that the theory seems impossible to refute.

Obviously, later work can improve on even good theories. But some theories stand the test of time, and persist in their unaltered form despite the best efforts of later scholars. (Einstein’s theories are good examples. In a different domain, so is the work of Mancur Olson on collective-action problems.)

Not to suggest that Weinstein’s work is definitely in that latter category. But if it were, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program!

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Weinstein’s model builds from the starting assumption that there are two kinds of people who might join a rebel movement: “investors” and “consumers.” Investors are willing to incur significant short-term costs for the sake of the long-term goal of victory. Consumers, on the other hand, are interested in gaining benefits today from their association with the rebel group: a salary, a gun, prestige, the chance to loot plunder, the chance to harm neighbors they don’t like. Which type of recruit predominates in a rebel group has powerful effects on the development of the group.

If a rebel group is poor, it cannot offer immediate benefits to members. As a result, consumers would tend not to join the group, having little reason to. The group’s only option, therefore, is to attempt to appeal to investors—that is, develop links to a civilian population with which it shares ethnic, communal, or ideological ties to which it can appeal to gain support and foster loyalty. This means that the group will have to build institutions of self-governance, so that the civilian populace has reason to trust that the group will protect civilians from the government and from its own members.

It is important to emphasize that getting the support of a civilian base is a strategic imperative for poor rebels, regardless of their political program, ideology, or even personal standards of morality. Those poor groups that don’t manage it will simply wither away from lack of recruits or lack of food. This task will be easier with a rank-and-file made up of investors, who are relatively more willing to submit to discipline that serves the group goals, than it would be if most members were consumers and therefore willing to break the rules for personal gain.

Weinstein also finds that poor rebel groups spend a lot of effort filtering out low-quality recruits, despite the difficulties in finding manpower. Such groups have far too much at stake to risk antagonizing civilians with undisciplined behavior, like the National Resistance Army in Uganda and the Shining Path in Peru (except for the Shining Path in the Huallaga Valley, which became enmeshed in the cocaine trade and therefore followed the “rich group” trajectory).

If a rebel group has significant starting resources, on the other hand, it will be able to rapidly gain recruits by offering them steady pay. This tends to attract a much higher proportion of consumers. It also means that the strategic imperative to gain the support of civilians is largely absent: the group can support itself even if it is hated and feared by civilians, as long as the money or guns keep rolling in. As a result, the group will spend far less effort appealing to the populace, and will also spend less effort on filtering out low-quality recruits because it incurs little penalty from undisciplined behavior that harms civilians.

Moreover, even if the group wanted to stop its forces from harming civilians, it would have a hard time doing so: because most of its members are consumers, i.e. out for immediate gain, they will tend to resist orders not to predate on the civilian populace. So the group will tolerate bad behavior by its troops towards civilians in exchange for demanding obedience on the battlefield.

Now, you might wonder what happens if a group with significant resources nevertheless managed to resist the temptation to behave badly—and instead managed to only recruit investors, impose strong discipline, build links to the populace, etc. In theory, this is possible. In practice, however, the tremendous risks that rebels take when opposing the government would make it almost impossible for them not to take the quick and easy way of recruiting a bunch of thugs to boost their manpower, if they had the cash available. Remember, most rebellions fail miserably. Immediate survival often weighs more heavily on the minds of rebel leaders that the problems of tomorrow that they are unwittingly setting into motion.

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The foregoing is only the first half of Weinstein’s discussion, and this post is already quite long. In future posts I will summarize his discussion of how “rich” and “poor” rebel groups differ in how they govern civilians under their control, how they punish civilians for resisting their control or for apparent collaboration with the enemy, and how they maintain their own membership over time. But you can already see where the trend is going.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned fourth book in this series, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)