Abstract
The literature on civil war recruitment has advanced our understanding of how armed forces mobilize combatants. The most recent theories (i.e., organization theories of recruitment and theories of control), in particular, have drawn our attention to the recruitment strategies of armed forces and the diversity of contexts in civil war. However, assumptions in these theories still need to be reframed so that we can capture both the spectrum of voluntary to involuntary combatant recruitment and the variety in civilian responses according to environment. Acknowledging these gaps in the existing literature, this chapter aims to establish a theory pertaining to combatant recruitment by armed forces during civil war. For this purpose, the following sections relate key findings and introduce critical associations for theoretical consideration, including the rivalry between government and rebel forces, armed forces’ control and violence, and coercive and noncoercive civil-military relations. In addition, this chapter emphasizes the idea that participants in armed forces are not homogeneous across contexts and that there are those who act differently from what current theories of control assume.
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Notes
Jeremy M. Weinstein, “Resources and the Information Problem in Rebel Recruitment,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 49 (4) (2005): 598–624; Weinstein, Inside Rebellion.
Michael G. Findley and Joseph K. Young, “Fighting Fire with Fire? How (Not) to Neutralize an Insurgency,” Civil Wars, 9 (4) (2007): 378–401, especially 380.
Heath et al., “The Calculus of Fear.” Rebel capabilities may be determined by their ability to obtain support from the civilian population. Wood claims that weak rebel groups that lack these capabilities are unable to provide their supporters with sufficient material incentives to encourage voluntary collaboration. Reed M. Wood, “Rebel Capacity and Strategic Violence against Civilians,” Journal of Peace Research, 47 (5) (2010): 601–614.
Joseph K. Young, “Iron Fists or Velvet Gloves? Evaluating Competing Approaches to Counterinsurgency,” Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA), Chicago (2007), 24–25.
T. David Mason, Joseph P. Weingarten, and Patrick J. Fett, “Win, Lose, or Draw: Predicting the Outcome of Civil Wars,” Political Research Quarterly, 52 (2) (1999): 239–68;
T. David Mason and Patrick J. Fett, “How Civil Wars End: A Rational Choice Approach,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 40 (4) (1996): 546–568.
Jenny Pearce, “Policy Failure and Petroleum Predation: The Economics of Civil War Debate Viewed ‘From the War-Zone,’” Government and Opposition, 40 (2) (2005): 152–180, especially 161. To raise the government’s costs for fighting, weak rebels tend to engage in the killing of civilians. Hultman argues that this militarily cheaper and easier strategy may eventually impose costs on the government because such action challenges its authority, as the government is responsible for the protection of civilians and also because it causes social disorder. Hultman, “Battle Losses and Rebel Violence,” 206.
Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr., Rebellion and Authority: An Analytic Essay on Insurgent Conflicts (Santa Monica: RAND, 1970); Mason, Caught in the Crossfire.
Findley and Edwards, “Accounting for the Unaccounted,” 590. Therefore, scholars of counterinsurgency emphasize the importance of intelligence as one of the conditions for successful counterinsurgency practices. For instance, see Kalev I. Sepp, “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, 85 (3) (2005): 8–12.
James Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organizations, 49 (3) (1995): 379–414.
Sabine C. Carey, “The Dynamic Relationship between Protest and Repression,” Political Research Quarterly, 59 (1) (2006): 1–11, especially 3.
Metelits, “The Consequences of Rivalry,” 2. Skaperdas also shows that warlords compete for turf where taxable resources and rents from mines are available, and that the competition between them often results in “lower material welfare as resources are wasted on unproductive arming and fighting.” Stergios Skaperdas, “Warlord Competition,” Journal of Peace Research, 39 (4) (2002): 435–446, especially 435.
Aguilera Peralta and Beverly distinguish such paramilitary groups from irregular groups, which are military groups “acting with structural, tactical, and strategic autonomy from the regular army and police.” Gabriel Aguilera Peralta and John Beverly, “Terror and Violence as Weapons of Counterinsurgency in Guatemala,” Latin American Perspectives, 7 (2/3) (1980): 91–113, especially 110.
In such a situation, civilians may tolerate the activities of militias. David Kowalewski, “Counterinsurgent Paramilitarism: A Philippine Case Study,” Journal of Peace Research, 29 (1) (1992): 71–84, especially 71–73.
H. Jon Rosenbaum and Peter Sederberg, “Vigilantism,” in H. Jon Rosenbaum and Peter Sederberg (eds.), Vigilante Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976).
Repression is “behavior that is applied by governments in an effort to bring about political quiescence and facilitate the continuity of the regime through some form of restriction or violation of political and civil liberties.” Christian Davenport, Paths to State Repression: Human Rights Violations and Contentious Politics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 6. For the literature on state repression,
see Ronald A. Francisco, “The Relationship between Coercion and Protest: An Empirical Evaluation in Three Coercive States,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 39 (2) (1995): 263–282;
Ronald A. Francisco, “Coercion and Protest: An Empirical Test in Two Democratic States,” American Journal of Political Science, 40 (4) (1996): 1179–1204;
Douglas A. Hibbs, Mass Political Violence: A Cross-National Causal Analysis (New York: Wiley, 1973);
Mark Irving Lichbach, “Deterrence or Escalation? The Puzzle of Aggregate Studies of Repression and Dissent,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 31 (2) (1987): 266–297;
Will H. Moore, “Repression and Dissent: Substitution, Context, and Timing,” American Journal of Political Science, 42 (3) (1998): 851–873; Opp, “Repression and Revolutionary Action”;
Karl-Dieter Opp and Wolfgang Roehl, “Repression, Micromobilization, and Political Protest,” Social Forces, 69 (2) (1990): 521–547; Rasler, “Concessions, Repression, and Political Protest”;
Lawrence W. Sherman, “Defiance, Deterrence, and Irrelevance: A Theory of the Criminal Sanction,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30 (4) (1993): 445–473;
Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1978).
Ronald A. Francisco, Paths to State Repression: Human Rights Violations and Contentious Politics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000);
Steve R. Garrison, “The Road to Civil War: An Interactive Theory of Internal Political Violence,” Defense and Peace Economics, 19 (2) (2008): 127–151, especially 130.
Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 46–47; Ahmed Hashim, Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 99–104; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, 155; Tishkov, Chechnya, 142.
Jason Lyall, “Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks?” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 53 (3) (2009): 331–362, especially 335. The rebels may choose to sit back and watch the government’s indiscriminate violence against civilians who have been unfriendly to them. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, 157–158.
Will H. Moore, “Rational Rebels: Overcoming the Free-Rider Problem,” Political Research Quarterly, 48 (2) (1995): 417–454, especially 434. The causal relationship is also undetermined because we do not have enough counterfactual evidence (that is, an increase in the number of rebel troops given the absence of state indiscriminate violence) and clues to show direct causality, rather than indirect through some intervening variables. Lyall argues that indiscriminate state violence erodes rebel resources through forcible population resettlement because it reduces the population that functions as a rebel’s tax base and guarantees its supply lines. It also imposes constraints on the rebels if civilians blame them for inaction against state violence or if the rebels need to change current tactics to prevent civilian defections. Lyall, “Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks?” 333–334 and 336–338.
Jannie Lilja, “Trapping Constituents or Winning Hearts and Minds? Rebel Strategies to Attain Constituent Support in Sri Lanka,” Terrorism and Political Violence, 21 (2) (2009): 306–326, especially 309–310.
For instance, the rebels’ strategy of control is determined by information (Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence), finances (Weinstein, Inside Rebellion), their violence as a signaling device (Hultman, “Battle Losses and Rebel Violence”), or constituent pressure (Zachariah Cherian Mampilly, Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life During War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
Ana Arjona and Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Recruitment into Armed Groups in Colombia: A Survey of Demobilized Fighters,” in Yvan Guichaoua (ed.), Mobilizing for Violence: Armed Groups and Their Combatants (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Kalyvas, “Wanton and Senseless?”
As Klandermans suggests, willingness to participate is different from actual participation because willingness is theoretically one of the conditions for actual participation. However, it is also true that, prior to actual participation, there are almost no better indicators available for researchers. Also for organizers, estimations of willingness have a significant meaning in determining their strategy. In this sense, willingness to participate should be considered relevant on its own. Bert Klandermans, “Individuals and Collective Action,” American Sociological Review, 50 (6) (1985): 860–861.
John Young, Peasant Revolution in Ethiopia: The Tigray People’s Liberation Front: 1975–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 124–125.
Benedikt Korf, “Functions of Violence Revisited: Greed, Pride and Grievance in Sri Lanka’s Civil War,” Progress in Development Studies, 6 (2) (2006): 109–122, especially 119–120.
Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Exploring Revolution: Essays on Latin American Insurgency and Revolutionary Theory (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1991), 35.
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© 2013 Yuichi Kubota
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Kubota, Y. (2013). Theory: Territorial Control, Rivalry, and Recruitment. In: Armed Groups in Cambodian Civil War. Asia Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364098_3
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