INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION OF REBEL GROUPS AND THE DURATION OF CIVIL CONFLICTS

Open Access
- Author:
- Joo, Min Hyung
- Graduate Program:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 15, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Bumba Mukherjee, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Bumba Mukherjee, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Glenn Hunter Palmer, Committee Member
Douglas William Lemke, Committee Member
Eric P Baumer, Outside Member
Xun Cao, Committee Member - Keywords:
- rebel groups
civil conflict
rebel group structure
negotiation
rebel splits
civil war
rebel organization
rebel behavior - Abstract:
- Scholars of International Relations have invested substantial effort to conceptualize the organizational features of rebel groups in civil conflicts to understand how these features influence rebel group behavior and the dynamics of civil conflicts. Yet, in this dissertation, I argue that the broader literature on civil conflicts and research on the `industrial organization' of rebel groups raise some central questions about the following key dimensions of rebel organization that till date has not been systematically addressed by scholars -- the publicly-stated goals of rebel groups and the degree of centralization in rebel groups. In order to examine how these organizational features of rebel groups influence rebel group behavior and the dynamics of civil conflicts, in this dissertation, I theorize and test the relationship between (i) the publicly-stated goals of rebel groups and the prospects of rebel-government negotiations; (ii) the degree of centralization of rebel groups and the likelihood of organizational splits in rebel groups; and (iii) rebel-government negotiations, organizational splits and the duration of civil conflicts. Using a newly collected rebel-government-dyad-year and rebel-group-year datasets to test my theoretical expectations, I find that (i) rebel groups and governments are more likely to enter into negotiations when rebel groups have domestic-reform oriented goals and there are legislative rules that not only provide the government with amnesty-granting authority and but also oversee security agencies; (ii) the prospects of organizational splits in rebel groups is higher in highly centralized but older rebel groups; and (iii) although rebel-government negotiations accompanied by spoilers (splinter rebel groups) are more likely to prolong civil conflicts in the regular Bayesian survival model, reassessment of the theory using a new Bayesian MF survival model that accounts for the probability of misclassification of failure events shows that this relationship is unreliable.