Armed Groups in Cambodian Civil War

Territorial Control, Rivalry, and Recruitment

Y. Kubota

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137364081
• eBook ISBN: 9781137364098
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In civil war the causal mechanism on recruitment of combatants is complicated because armed groups interact for context-based strategic. This book argues that a group will adopt varying mobilization strategies depending upon the difference in a group's influence between the stronghold and contested areas, using as examples two Cambodian civil wars.

1

Introduction

The Theme of This Book

Mobilization of Combatants across Territories of Control

The purpose of this book is to explore the multiplicity of ­mobilization strategies that an armed group undertakes in the competitive relationship with its opponents in civil war. The recruitment of combatants who engage in military activities by investing their energies and resources is one of the major tasks for civil war groups because the size of their forces holds significant meaning. While civilians may passively tolerate a group’s presence by refraining from taking any action against it or by covertly providing assistance with intelligence and logistical support, a small population of civilians might assume a more active and overt engagement in military activities through membership in the group. Armed groups seek to recruit qualified, committed, and able combatants whose interests coincide with the groups’ long-term goals, but environments do not often allow them to do so. The groups often encounter an urgent need to recruit troops due to the loss of combatants in the battlefield or from desertion. However, their attempts at recruitment are made difficult by the war itself (e.g., decrease in and displacement of the population). Under limited conditions, however, the groups pursue possible recruitment strategies and mix some of these strategies to mobilize such combatants as long as the groups are able to exercise effective control over their members. Why and when, then, does an armed group adopt not just one measure but instead combine multiple strategies in their mobilization efforts?

A primary stance of this book is that a single armed group employs multiple recruitment strategies according to contexts, with the focus being on the diversity in participants’ reactions toward the group’s control over fragmented territory. The causal mechanism of the recruitment for armed groups is complicated because belligerents interact for strategic reasons according to specific contexts in civil war. Relevant literature has advanced the understanding of why and how armed groups collect their members. Provided that civil war involves the government and rebels, both of whom compete for domestic popular support and recruits and often have areas in which each of them can exclusively exert influence over civilians (i.e., the stronghold), the pool of available participants for the group expands up to its limit as the area controlled by the group grows, but the group’s capacity for recruitment decreases with greater proximity to the territorial boundary with the opponent-controlled area.

Although a civil war group can expect to acquire recruits in a stronghold, rivalry with the opponent in contested areas limits the group’s mobilization of combatants. It is indeed not entirely evident how this specific context affects the group’s recruitment, and possible answers are mixed. For instance, one thought is that since recruits in contested areas are relatively costly for an armed group to maintain and tend to defect to the opponent’s side, the group does not attempt to recruit soldiers in those areas.¹ With the increase in size of a contested area, armed leaders lose control over civilians, as well as information about their actions, as the distance between the leaders and followers is in inverse proportion to control and the acquisition of information. However, a possible counterargument is that the expansion of a contested area leads to the opponent’s loss of recruits, who are approached by the new group also, and results in the new group having increased accessibility to populations compared to that of the opponent forces.

This argument is accordant to that put forth in this book. Given a difference in a group’s influence between the stronghold and contested areas, the group will adopt varying mobilization strategies across regions. When the group seeks to mobilize combatants in the stronghold, it can use coercion as a means of mobilization. Within contested areas, in contrast, the group relies on the support of dedicated participants, because they are not as readily deterred from enlisting with the group as forced participants would be.

A better understanding of the recruitment strategies of civil war groups would serve to contribute to our knowledge of political organization and help those who are concerned with post-conflict reconstruction find necessary measures for, for instance, the social rehabilitation of ex-combatants. First, insight taken from the actions of armed groups in civil war would be useful to understand other political and economic organizations. Terry Moe argues that studies of these organizations have not paid enough attention to the role of power but instead place emphasis on the principle of free exchange.² In contrast, given the imbalance of power relations between an armed group and civilians, it is necessary to consider how coercion promotes one group’s recruitment but discourages the other’s efforts at mobilizing combatants. Including the role of power in studies of political and economic organizations³ would help us to better understand the unequal power distribution between leaders and rank and filers, which is a frequently observed principle in the maintenance of internal order.

Second, understanding how an armed group mobilizes civilians is integral for policymakers. Although coercion plays an important role in civilians’ collaboration with the group, paths through which they are mobilized are diverse. Some civilians are forced to participate in the group, but others may voluntarily enlist in armed forces. The establishment of a stable economic infrastructure is needed in post-conflict societies in which civilians’ engagement with conflict had been motivated by material incentives, and the saliency of politicized participation would remind us of the importance of institutional reform in such countries. Understanding what enables armed forces to mobilize civilians in a systematic way is beneficial when we strive to design a post-conflict society that is free from not only the causes of the war but also from the negative determinants that drove those civilians to become involved in military activities that often involve predation and slaughter.

This book examines cases taken from the Cambodian civil wars over two separate periods (i.e., 1970–75 and 1979–91). The case studies are aimed at providing empirical findings that may refine and expand theories about armed forces’ mobilization of combatants in civil war. The cases are characterized by diversity in relationships between armed groups and between the groups and civilians. During these conflicts, the methods of recruitment by armed forces varied across war situations and structural contexts. To examine the relationship between the structural contexts and the recruitment of combatants, I focus on some local districts in a northwestern province, Battambang, referring to findings obtained from interviews with residents who were living there during the time of the wars. This study also quantitatively explores the applicability of my theoretical argument by taking more cases into consideration. The large-N analysis allows me to test my argument’s validity by referring to cases that both resemble and do not resemble the Cambodian civil wars. The statistical analysis deals with cases that vary in terms of both independent and dependent variables.

The Concept of Civil War

Civil war is a specific type of conflict. Paying attention to the arena, actors, and rivalry, Melvin Small and J. David Singer define civil war as military action, internal to the mother country, with the active participation of the national government, and with effective resistance by insurgents.⁴ In addition, to qualify as a civil war, Small and Singer require a conflict to have had more than 1,000 battle-related deaths so as to demarcate it from low-intensity armed conflicts.⁵

Defining civil war as “armed combat within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties subject to a common authority at the outset of the hostilities,” Stathis Kalyvas does not explicitly necessitate the involvement of a government but instead introduces the idea of an intrastate division of sovereignty.⁶ This works in the same way as the threshold of intensity standard in Small and Singer’s definition,⁷ because the presence of a domestically fragmented sovereignty as a requisite of civil war excludes violent protests, communal riots, crime, low-level banditry, and genocide, all of which leave sovereignty intact.⁸

The division of the sovereign entity into multiple armed groups entails territorial division. The word territory is often used to imply the legal concept of sovereignty, meaning that one supreme authority exists in a single political unit.⁹ Despite the understanding that spatial activities within boundaries accompanied by control over the area (i.e., territoriality¹⁰) are found on various scales, the functions of territory have often been connected to state sovereignty in particular because the territorial framework provides for the basic elements of the state, such as citizenship and narratives of identity. One of the assumptions sustaining this association between territoriality and the state is that the territorial state is the container of the sub-national society.¹¹ In civil war, state-society relations often deviate from this understanding; while some territories to which societies belong are controlled by state actors, others may fall to rebel commands that are outside the range of state sovereignty. In such a context, however, territoriality is still significant in that it accordingly assigns people, things, and relationships to a designated category, demands their possession or exclusion, and enforces control over them.¹²

The focus on sovereign and territorial division is not meant to suggest that the definition of civil war is confined to a conflict without any external actors; rather, it can often be characterized as a war involving both foreign state and non-state actors having stakes in a country. In the Cambodian civil war between 1970 and 1975, Lon Nol’s coup d’état to overthrow the Sihanouk administration and his subsequent alignment with the United States were foreshadowed by Sihanouk’s shunning of the United States.¹³ And, in addition to the fact that Sihanouk went into exile in Beijing after the coup, Khmer Rouge forces were dependent on North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces until the Khmer Rouge was able to take over on its own at the midpoint of the conflict.¹⁴ The involvement of external actors cannot be overlooked, and the basic structure of the war may be framed as an internationalized regional conflict. However, membership to a sovereign entity was essentially shared by belligerents, the Lon Nol government, and the Khmer Rouge, and such a dimension is best analyzed as civil war.¹⁵

Mechanisms of Mobilization

A single armed group employs multiple recruitment strategies according to the context in civil war. Although recent studies of civil-military relations in civil war have advanced the understanding of combatant recruitment, these studies do not sufficiently address this thesis. For instance, each armed group may adopt a distinctive strategy of recruitment, and that specific strategy corresponds with the group’s features. However, this example does not hold true unless the group always adheres to a specific mobilization measure over time and across situations. A group may rely on different recruitment strategies, from voluntary recruitment to involuntary mobilization of combatants.

The focus on territorial control may help us understand why armed actors have to employ different recruitment strategies in differing contexts, in which the level of civilian collaboration with the group degrades as the level of territorial control decreases.¹⁶ However, all civilians do not uniformly respond to their environments, which makes a further exploration of the armed group’s recruitment efforts necessary. Thus, this book examines civil war groups’ recruitment by considering potential recruits who would react differently to their environment across contexts and seeks to discover why armed groups employ multiple mobilization strategies across regions. By emphasizing the diversity of civilian reactions to structural contexts, this book refutes the simplification that civilians are always obedient to armed groups who control their territory.

Territorial control does not discount the role of so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Literature Review: Diversity in Civilians’ Incentives and Multiplicity of Recruitment Strategies
• 3 Theory: Territorial Control, Rivalry, and Recruitment
• 4 Cambodia, 1970–75
• 5 Cambodia, 1979–91
• 6 Recruitment in Comparative Perspective
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix: Fieldwork in Battambang Province
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index