Recruitment and Allegiance: The Microfoundations of Rebellion

1 ABSTRACT Civil war is fought between two political organizations, the state and a rebel group. Myriad theories of civil war have examined the role of state institutions and state strength, but little attention has been devoted to theorizing about rebel organizations themselves. This paper focuses on the organizational structure of rebel groups to understand patterns of recruitment and allegiance. Drawing on principal-agent analysis of participation and incentive compatibility constraints and the analytical tradition of rent-seeking contests, a model is developed demonstrating that three factors, geography, ethnicity, and ideology, play an important role in determining military success, deterring defection within the rebel group, and shaping recruitment. What motivates a person to risk his life in armed rebellion? Why continue to expose oneself to life in the bush where one may be killed at any minute without home, family, or other comforts? Or from the perspective of the rebel group, how does a rebel group maintain organizational cohesion and deter defection? How does a rebel group sustain itself? To answer these questions we have to examine the motivations of those that join and stay in a rebel army. In this paper, I attempt to answer these questions by focusing on how geography, ethnicity, and ideology are linked to patterns of recruitment and allegiance among rebel groups. A plethora of theories explain the causes of revolt, rebellion, and civil war, yet, few provide insights for answering questions regarding the management of a rebellion. While a fair amount of work has focused on the institutional features of the state as they relate to civil war (Hegre, et al. 2001), the organizational structure and problems of agency within a rebel group are for the most part ignored by scholars of civil conflict. By examining the incentive systems used by different armed rebellion groups, loot-seeking, ethnic-nationalist, separatist, and ideological civil wars can be distinguished. Most economic models of civil conflict ignore politics, while most political scientists studying civil war ignore economic motivations. The approach used here allows me to account for ideology, nationalism, and ethnicity while featuring economic motivations. The article proceeds as follows. After a short introduction, a simple model of