Tag Archives: rebellion

Internal Discipline in Rebel Movements, Part II

22 Saturday Jul 2023

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Revolution, State Formation, War, Writing

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In a previous post, I discussed the theory of Jeremy Weinstein on why some rebel groups act in a relatively restrained manner towards civilians, while other groups engage in indiscriminate violence. He argued that much of the difference stemmed from the initial resources available to the group, and how that affected the incentives of people to join the rebels. Poor groups were forced by circumstance to become “activist” groups, that is, to appeal to a base of civilian support and to recruit personnel who were “investors,” i.e. willing to endure short-term sacrifices for the sake of the group’s long-term goals. In order to do that, activist groups were forced to maintain strong discipline to convince the civilian populace that it would protect them from abuses by its soldiers. Poor groups that failed to do so soon withered away from lack of recruits or food.

By contrast, groups that began with access to money and guns from external sponsors, or from control over valuable resources such as drugs or gems, lacked the strategic imperative to seek civilian support. Moreover, they had a strong incentive to expand their membership by offering high pay or other benefits, and therefore attracted “consumer” members, those seeking short-term benefits that flowed from their membership in the rebel group. Groups largely made up of consumers had a much harder time preventing abuse of civilians, since their members were prone to looting or to abducting civilian women or murdering people they disliked for personal reasons. And such groups also had fewer reasons to impose strong discipline: because they had independent resources, they suffered few (initial) disadvantages from tolerating abuses of civilians.

In this post, we will continue Weinstein’s argument and examine the consequences of the previous paragraphs for rebel groups’ governance of civilian areas.

As rebel groups gain control over territory, they have to decide how to handle the civilians living there. Civilians can provide useful resources to rebel groups: information about government activity, new recruits, food, and tax revenue. However, civilians are strategic actors: they can choose to support the rebels or the government, and if neither option seems attractive they will try to flee the area entirely or to resist both sides.

Rebel groups have options in how to build governance structures in response. These can be said to vary on two factors: inclusiveness (AKA participation) and the extent of power sharing. (This is true of regime governments as well, which is not surprising since a rebel group administering territory is basically a kind of government.) A participatory governance regime tries to address the preferences and needs of the populace, while a non-participatory regime treats civilians with indifference at best, as targets of predation at worst. But even participatory governments need not actually share power over decision making, a tempting option in wartime. However, the more that a rebel group shares real power with civilians, the more that civilians will trust the group (or the government in similar circumstances) to uphold its bargains in the future. And in response, rebel groups that build participatory structures of true power sharing are likely to elicit more cooperation from civilian populaces.

Why then doesn’t everybody build such structures? Weinstein argues that the difference hinges on three factors (though he subdivides the factors somewhat differently on pages 171 and 196 of his book without tying the differences to his findings—tsk tsk, Cambridge University Press editors!):

  1. The degree to which the rebel group needs support from the populace;
  2. The extent to which extracting resources from the populace is dependent on civilian productivity; and
  3. The time horizons of the group’s members (i.e. whether they are predominantly “investors” or “consumers”), and the resulting ability of the group to make credible commitments to the populace.

A group that has significant starting resources needs the support of the populace less if at all, and will tend as a result to build non-participatory structures that do not share power. This tendency is exacerbated by the short-term orientation of its members, who want to plunder the populace and seize loot. Even the need to get food from the populace will not moderate this tendency much, since civilians cannot simply stop growing food and will therefore usually have food available to seize.

One complicating wrinkle occurs when the group can extract valuable resources from the populace, but only if the people commit their work to generating such resources. For example, the Shining Path in the Upper Huallaga Valley gained most of their revenue from the drug trade, but they therefore depended on civilians to grow coca. Out of self-interest, then, the rebels built structures that were responsive to civilian interest in having a predictable market for coca leaves, charging fixed taxes and administering public markets. (We would describe the resulting governance structure as inclusive but not featuring true power sharing.) 

A rebel group in this situation could instead choose to enslave civilians en masse, and some try, but this tends to result in civilians fleeing the area or throwing their support to the government in response. Still, the short-term orientation of group members tends to cause the breakdown of the inclusive structures over time, as individual members steal opportunistically. As a result, even non-activist groups that try to take the interests of civilians into account for selfish purposes often fall back on control by force.

An activist rebel group, on the other hand, is dependent on the support of the civilian populace for its very survival. As a result, it will prize the cooperation of civilians, and will tend to create governance structures that both are participatory and share true power, so that civilians will trust them to uphold their bargains. Because activist groups are largely made up of members with longer time horizons (i.e. patient “investors”), the members will submit to such checks on their power for the sake of the group’s strategic goals.

In later posts, we will discuss rebel groups’ strategic use of violence against civilians, and their ability to sustain their membership over time.

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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!)

Internal Discipline in Rebel Movements, Part I

13 Thursday Jul 2023

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Revolution, War

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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!)

Warlords and Frontiers

17 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

We’ve previously discussed how a government’s control over territory is not a given; states have to spend great effort to project power and build institutions of rule. Frequently, a state’s rule is not absolute; far from the core of its power, state control diminishes even in areas that are nominally under its rule. In border areas, the reality of daily life might involve balancing off the claims of two states, neither of which can fully enforce its authority.

That does not necessarily mean that no one rules. Politics abhors a vacuum. Often, the true authority in a contested or peripheral area might be a criminal boss, or a local bandit, or warlord. Crime bosses and bandits are common fare in fiction, of course. Less frequently discussed, but potentially more interesting, is the warlord.

What do I mean by “warlord”? Let me answer with an example:

During the continuing civil wars in the Congo, the Kivu region of the country was wracked by violence and a severe breakdown in civil control. Instead, political power often devolved to the closest military force, whether government, rebel, or local militia. A typical brigade commander in FARDC, the Congolese military, had the benefit of military rank, which entitled him to a salary, logistical support from the capital Kinshasa, and formal legitimacy; but he would also have informal status in the local power relationships of his area, having de facto control over the local bureaucracy, extracting extra taxes from the hapless civilians, and using military force to control rich resources like bauxite mines or logging operations.

His loyalty would be very much for sale, notwithstanding being an officer for the government; he often collaborates with local criminal networks or directs them himself, using his troops and their logistical abilities to solve problems for the criminals. He will often play both sides in the civil wars, throwing in with one or another of the feuding insurgent groups, often with the full knowledge of Kinshasa. However, the central government puts up with the commander’s unreliability, because even when he is enriching himself and building his own independent power base, his troops still keep the local violence tamped down—and the government lacks the power to replace him or his men with someone more loyal. The status quo is bad, but it would be far worse if the commander were to openly break with Kinshasa and become a direct threat.

What distinguishes the warlord is a combination of three things. The first two are capacity for violence, and the claim to politically represent some constituency. A mafia boss uses coercion, but generally for economic goals; corrupt politicians may seek power and status, but generally within the existing formal framework of their state. But if we look at our Congolese example, we see a third element as well: nominal submission to a distant authority along with practical local autonomy. Warlords exploit gaps in official control to gain power and status, and then use that status strategically to cement their power.

I’m using the term “warlord” in a particular way here, following after Ahram/King 2012. They define a warlord as someone who stands at the intersection of legal and illegal, or of two state or cultural regimes. From this position, they can arbitrage between the advantages of each side, in a way that someone fully committed to one side cannot. 

They cite as an example the Shan warlord Khun Sa, who began as a militia leader for the Kuomintang on the border between Burma and Thailand in the 1950s, but later broke free from them as his forces grew in power. He branched out into opium production, and secured semi-official status from the local government by fighting his fellow Shan rebels.

Khun Sa repeatedly switched sides over the next decades, sometimes calling himself a Shan nationalist, sometimes working with the Burmese government against local competitors; and he often sought Thai patronage as well (and gave hefty bribes to Thai politicians), as the political winds shifted and his opium operation grew. (At his height, Khun Sa controlled some 70% of the heroin production in Burma, with an army of over 20,000 armed men.) In addition, the Thai government tolerated Khun Sa because his forces controlled over a hundred miles of the volatile border region, and served as a buffer against revolutionary forces operating from Laos and Burma. In 1987, when the Burmese were taking American money for “anti-drug” efforts against Khun Sa, the warlord was actually cooperating with both Burma and Thailand to build a major highway through his territory. Later in life, he “surrendered” to the Burmese and disbanded his army, and in exchange was allowed to transform his wealth into legitimate businesses such as real estate and ruby mining.

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The concept of a warlord can be incredibly fruitful in fiction. A warlord character can play the role of ambiguous obstacle and sometime ally of your heroes; often such characters become fan favorites. More generally, the warlord is the natural consequence of settings where government control is tenuous; the presence of a warlord highlights the limits of official control. Questions to ask: What specific, local advantage does the warlord have over the government, and over rival warlords? What resources does the warlord control, and what relationships protect those resources? What would induce the warlord to change sides?

When Do Societies Face Unrest?

02 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Economics, History, Politics, Revolution, Self-Promotion, War, Writing

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I have just read a recent journal article by the brilliant scholar Peter Turchin, in which he elaborates on his theory of the dynamics of social instability over time and tests it on the United States from 1780 to 2010. Put briefly, his theory holds that one can expect a society to suffer greater social violence (such as riots or lynchings, as opposed to routine crime) in a relatively predictable cycle. The larger “secular” cycle occurs every 150 years; a smaller cycle of violence occurs roughly every 50 years, superimposed on the secular cycle. Thus in the United States, we had peaks of societal violence near the years 1870, 1920, and 1970, with the Civil War being the peak of the secular cycle. Turchin forecasts that the next secular peak should hit sometime around the year 2020. Turchin’s previous work has detected the same sorts of cycles in societies from ancient China to revolutionary France.

Of course, detecting a pattern does not tell you what has caused it. Turchin’s theory for when violence intensifies depends on two major factors. Both of these factors might derive from excessive population growth; in the early version of Turchin’s work, he was focusing on agrarian societies in which population growth leads directly to food shortages. But now that he is considering Industrial societies, Turchin is focusing more on the immediate causes laid out below.

First, whether from excessive population growth or technological disruption or whatever, there emerges a labor glut. The average wage drops in response, leading to diminished standards of living. Thus you see larger segments of the populace who are in a precarious situation, with the potential for violent outbreaks such as labor struggles, or ethnic competition with minorities, or political upheaval.

Second, there emerges “an oversupply of elites.” This can happen for a few reasons, and Turchin focuses on the economic one. The low cost of labor means that it is easier for those on the top to become far wealthier than they might have done in a more normal setting, leading to the accumulation of vast fortunes and a polarization of society. A consequence of this is that there is much more competition for the leadership positions in society, such as control of government offices. Politics becomes more nasty and partisan, leading in extreme cases to violent rivalries between elite factions struggling to secure their hold on power. Such violence is made easier by the larger number of poor, desperate people in society who can serve as a demagogue’s muscle.

In Turchin’s research, he finds that oversupply of elites has the strongest association with societal violence. This is easy to understand when one looks at places like the Philippines, in which politicians routinely employ armed militias to attack competitors (a horrifying example was the Maguindanao Massacre of 2009), or the Congo, which has been wracked with coup after coup. But even in the United States, a surplus of would-be leaders will tend to produce extreme ideologies, such as militant unionism in the 1920s, or the present upsurge in eco-terrorism.

I think many people, writers among them, mistake the relationship between cheap labor and exploitative rich. Often, a super-wealthy class emerges as a result of lots of poor people, who make it easier to be rich—that is, to benefit from the production of lots of other people. This is not to say that an exploitative class won’t try to keep everyone else poor, once it emerges. But the dynamics are complex here, and societal violence is one of the things keeping them in check.

(How might such violence be averted? Full discussion will have to wait for another post, but I find it rather interesting that the Biblical institution of Jubilee, in which land was returned to its ancestral owners and debts forgiven, follows a 50-year cycle.)

(Have I mentioned lately that my new book is available on Amazon Kindle? It’s called The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Stories of Political Possibility. You can read the first story for free here, and then buy it if you like. Enjoy!)

On Revolutions in (Some) Fantasy Fiction

03 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by in Better Fantasy, History, Politics, Revolution, State Formation, War, Writing

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(This post has been retroactively made part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Traditionally, fantasy has lent itself to stories of heroic uprisings or revolutions, as the Evil Overlord is swept out of power by the brave protagonists and their loyal army of oppressed commoners. That can be a good story, and sometimes the stories are indeed quite good. It feeds directly into some of our cultural loves: rooting for the underdog, the reestablishment of justice and defeat of evil, and so on.

But what makes this literature trying for a student of comparative politics is how infrequently revolutions are handled with any degree of realism. Not that I demand absolute realism in all books touching on politics—far from it. Often we simplify the mechanics of a story to distill its essence. Still, what annoys me is that people end up telling the same bloody story over and over and over again. And this is so, I think, because the mental model most fantasy authors have of revolutions is so impoverished.

From what I’ve read, most fantasy authors have two archetypes for how a revolution goes off: Robin Hood (as refracted through Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe), or the French Revolution and the various other Parisian dustups. Egregiously, I haven’t read any fantasy modeled after the American Revolution,* and only a single work of science fiction (Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a fun read). And most published fantasy writers live in the United States, for Heaven’s sake! And of course, the American Revolution is by no means the only other model you could look to.

The example that spawned this post is Steven Brust’s novel Teckla. (This is not, I hasten to add, because I have anything against Brust in particular, but only because it’s the book I happened to read.) In the book, an oppressed, illiterate underclass is being organized by a group of revolutionaries with the goal of blocking commerce into the capital city, in order to force reforms. To do so, the revolutionaries first endeavor to teach everyone how to read, so that they could then publish propaganda in newspapers.

This was the first point where I was tempted to throw the book across the room. In a real illiterate society, no one would have had the daft idea to publish a mass-market newspaper in the first place. It’s a bit like writing and selling manuals on how to use an iPod in the 1960s. Worse, written material would not be the most effective way to organize untutored masses anyway. Far more effective would have been using actual people to spread the message and organize more revolutionaries where they went, as was done by revolutionaries from Spartacus to Mao.

It got worse. The favored tactic of the revolutionaries was to build Paris-style barricades across the main road into the capital city. All well and good, except that a major mechanic of Brust’s entire series is that the ruling class knows how to teleport with magic. Barricades, or any static defense not augmented with its own magic, would be worse than useless.

So why did Brust rely on such tired tropes, even when they went counter to the very logic of his fantasy world? I suspect that the only model he had for how revolutions work was revolutionary France. And because he had no other mental model to work with, Brust did not have the building blocks that would have fit his story better.

And this is my point. When you study real historical revolutions with an eye toward fiction writing, you quickly find the potential for all sorts of stories that have rarely been told in Western fantasy. More realistic treatment of revolutions can be used to explore themes of divided loyalty, or how governments structure their environment to better exert their power, or how revolutionaries end up doing the same thing, or—and this is particularly fascinating—how civilians will often exploit the conflict between government and rebel, by extorting aid from both sides, or by denouncing resented neighbors as traitors to the cause (so that they will be executed and you can take their stuff).

At any rate, new stories, with new possibilities. This doesn’t mean that the old classics need to be chucked out; Robin Hood will always be a good story. But a creative author can take the old building blocks and mix in a few new things from real life, to make something original. A good place to start (not least because it’s free) is the 1970 classic by Leites and Wolf, Rebellion and Authority (PDF). It’s a study they carried out in the middle of the Vietnam War for the RAND Corporation, and has details from the history of Western counterinsurgency. Much recommended.

Oh, and if there is actually good fantasy or sci-fi out there that handles rebellions well, please let me know in the comments. I’d like to read it.

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* Which was not technically a revolution in the political-science sense, since the American social structure and forms of government remained more or less intact, and no one tried to extend the revolution to Great Britain. Really, you could best describe the colonial uprising as a war of secession from Britain.