Rebels without Borders

Transnational Insurgencies in World Politics

Idean Salehyan

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801457975
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Rebellion, insurgency, civil war-conflict within a society is customarily treated as a matter of domestic politics and analysts generally focus their attention on local causes. Yet fighting between governments and opposition groups is rarely confined to the domestic arena. "Internal" wars often spill across national boundaries, rebel organizations frequently find sanctuaries in neighboring countries, and insurgencies give rise to disputes between states.

In Rebels without Borders, which will appeal to students of international and civil war and those developing policies to contain the regional diffusion of conflict, Idean Salehyan examines transnational rebel organizations in civil conflicts, utilizing cross-national datasets as well as in-depth case studies. He shows how external Contra bases in Honduras and Costa Rica facilitated the Nicaraguan civil war and how the Rwandan civil war spilled over into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, fostering a regional war. He also looks at other cross-border insurgencies, such as those of the Kurdish PKK and Taliban fighters in Pakistan. Salehyan reveals that external sanctuaries feature in the political history of more than half of the world's armed insurgencies since 1945, and are also important in fostering state-to-state conflicts.

Rebels who are unable to challenge the state on its own turf look for mobilization opportunities abroad. Neighboring states that are too weak to prevent rebel access, states that wish to foster instability in their rivals, and large refugee diasporas provide important opportunities for insurgent groups to establish external bases. Such sanctuaries complicate intelligence gathering, counterinsurgency operations, and efforts at peacemaking. States that host rebels intrude into negotiations between governments and opposition movements and can block progress toward peace when they pursue their own agendas.

1 A Theory of Transnational Rebellion

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Rebellion is risky. Even when grievances against the state run deep, people who are unsatisfied with their lot will face difficulties in organizing collectively when political opposition activities are likely to be met with violence. Poverty and political powerlessness may be bad, but torture, imprisonment, and death are worse. Thus, many analysts have rightly emphasized the importance of constraints on the use of government coercion. If dissidents can evade the power of the state, organizing a rebellion becomes feasible. Of course, some rebel groups may be able to find safe areas within the state—in remote mountains or amid the urban underground, for example—as the state’s strength is never evenly distributed across its territory. Nevertheless, for modern nation-states, power, authority, and coercive capabilities are fundamentally limited by national boundaries, and so in a large share of civil conflicts, rebels seek resources and mobilization opportunities outside of the territory of the state—and rebellion becomes transnational.

Rebellion is a strategy for winning concessions from the government. It is used when conventional politics fails. At the extreme, rebels will demand—and sometimes win—complete removal of the regime in power or an independent state to call their own. In other cases, rebels ask for significant political, economic, or social reforms, power-sharing with the incumbent regime, or some form of regional autonomy. Whatever the demand, disputes between rebels and the state are part of a bargaining process in which actors threaten one another with violence. Insurgents threaten to use force and impose costs on the government if their demands are not met. States can accommodate the opposition’s demands or choose to use violent means of silencing dissent. Negotiating is commonly conceived of as antithetical to fighting, yet while bullets are flying and bombs are going off, actors are at least tacitly making demands and counterdemands. They are bargaining. Yet prior to mobilizing an army, rebels lack a credible threat to use force. External mobilization opportunities give rebel groups bargaining power through the ability to impose costs on the state, and they open a bargaining space. At the same time, external mobilization makes finding an acceptable settlement more difficult by creating ambiguity about the rebel’s relative strength and the appropriate level of concessions that must be offered; by making it more difficult for the rebels to commit to demobilization agreements; and by introducing new actors into the bargain.

This chapter examines how the norms of state sovereignty and territoriality impose significant limitations on government capacity to repress rebels. After exploring the role of TNRs in civil conflicts, the chapter looks at the implications of transnational rebellion for international relations. Finally, it develops preliminary arguments about the prospects for conflict termination and resolution. Although transnational rebels create tensions between neighbors, they also point to the need for regional security cooperation to limit TNR operations. Regional cooperation and improved diplomatic relations between states will be critical to bringing such conflicts to an end and securing a lasting peace.

Intellectual Heritage

This book builds on earlier studies of civil and international conflict; particularly the literatures on political opportunity structures, conflict bargaining, and the international dimensions of civil war. It expands these intellectual traditions by highlighting how external opportunities for mobilizing rebellion shape bargaining dynamics and how civil wars feed into international conflicts. Emphasis is placed on the political environment in which conflicts take place rather than on group motivations. Although the importance of the particular motivations of rebel leaders and rank-and-file soldiers—such as group grievances, personal enrichment, or ethnic discrimination—cannot be discounted, these motivations are not sufficient explanations for violence.

Ted Robert Gurr (1970) offered one of the best-articulated theories of how group grievances provide a motive for people to launch an insurgency. According to Gurr, when some social groups are disadvantaged relative to others, or when there is a disjunction between group aspirations and their current opportunities, people feel aggrieved and are psychologically predisposed to violence. Similarly, other scholars have argued that income inequality and a hierarchical class structure—especially when coupled with ethnic cleavages—lead to mass discontent and, in turn, political instability and violence (see, e.g., Alesina and Perotti 1996; Cederman and Girardin 2007; Gurr and Moore 1997; Horowitz 1985; Huntington 1968; MacCulloch 2004; Marx, Lenin, and Eastman 1932; B. Moore 1967; Muller and Seligson 1987; Murshed and Gates 2005; Rabushka and Shepsle 1972). Another, more recent line of thought argues that “greed” rather than grievance is a significant motive for several insurgencies. The desire for profit provides fuels some rebel organizations, and scholars have argued that many rebels are not so much concerned with righting wrongs but with enriching themselves through looting natural resources, although rebel leaders may not admit to such motives (Bannon and Collier 2003; Collier and Hoeffler 1999, 2004; Ross 2004; Weinstein 2005).1

Although grievance, greed, or other motivating factors can be important, such motivations alone cannot explain insurgent violence, as opposition groups must overcome collective action problems in the shadow of government repression (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Lichbach 1995; Tilly 1978). Arguably, all countries contain some group that is disadvantaged relative to others, but very few experience rebellion. Instead, most aggrieved groups choose alternative opposition tactics or remain quiescent. In addition, resources for plunder are frequently available: nearly all countries have some resource that can be looted. Even if a country is not richly endowed with natural resources, rebel organizations can enrich themselves through extortion or other criminal activities. This is not to say that motivations are unimportant. Without a sense of collective disadvantage or the prospect of economic or political advancement, it is hard to imagine why people would take up arms. Nevertheless, motivation is not enough for individuals to undertake the costly act of mobilizing a rebellion and fighting against the state: motivation must be coupled with the opportunity for action.

Opportunity

Opportunity theories of civil violence do not deny that rebel motivations are important, but they add the probability of success, the costs of collective action, and the costs of fighting to the equation. To be persuaded to fight, aggrieved people must believe that there is a reasonable chance of obtaining their objectives, or else they will not be willing to bear the costs and risks of joining a rebel movement. There must be limitations on the Leviathan’s nearly absolute control over the means of coercion for people to believe that challenging the government will be worthwhile.

Charles Tilly (1978) makes political opportunity a central factor in his theory of group mobilization and contentious political action. In his view, the decision to rebel involves a strategic calculation of how the incumbent government is likely to respond, taking into account its capacity for repression. According to Tilly (1978, 101), “Governmental repression is uniquely important because governments specialize in the control of mobilization and collective action . . . to keep potential actors visible and tame.” People fear the power of the state to imprison, harass, intimidate, torture, and kill, and they will not turn their dissatisfaction into visible forms of resistance so long as these costs are high. Therefore, the cost of repression is a critical variable for explaining insurgency and other forms of political dissent (see, e.g., Fearon and Laitin 2003; Kuran 1989; Lohmann 1994; Lichbach 1995; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Muller and Weede 1990; Tarrow 1994; Tilly 1978). This notion stems back farther to Thomas Hobbes, who noted the importance of a strong central authority in maintaining domestic order. Civil wars are more likely when the Leviathan is relatively weak and incapable of maintaining order: when the state loses its control over society, the domestic arena resembles the anarchic international environment (Posen 1993).

Most scholars focus on domestic institutions and constraints on government repression. Some have argued that states that do not allow peaceful reforms through democratic processes, nor have robust repressive capabilities—so-called “weak authoritarian” regimes or “anocracies”—are most prone to civil war (Muller and Weede 1990; Hegre et al. 2001). In addition, rough terrain, such as a mountainous landscape or densely forested regions, inhibits the state’s ability to pursue rebels into remote areas and provides insurgents the opportunity to escape coercion (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Hendrix 2008). In some of the poorest states where extensive infrastructure is lacking, government control does not extend very far beyond the capital because the state cannot project power into the periphery (Herbst 2000). Jeffrey Herbst (2004) focuses on the military as an institution and argues that ill-disciplined, corrupt, and incompetent military forces in Africa have been unable to thwart much smaller rebel organizations.

Political opportunities provide the means through which groups translate amorphous sentiment into organized violence. Most studies of civil violence focus on domestic politics and structural attributes of the state such as political institutions or physical geography but ignore forces outside of the state which may be equally, if not more, important. Moreover, the opportunity literature focuses on the political environment without paying much attention to bargains and negotiations between actors, which may obviate the resort to violence. Although environmental conditions shape the range of possible behaviors available to actors (Lake and Powell 1999), conflict is not inevitable, and understanding tacit or explicit bargaining processes is important in explaining final outcomes.

Bargaining

Increasingly, scholars of civil war are taking cues from bargaining perspectives on international war, which argue that since conflict is costly and burns resources, states should be willing to resolve their differences through negotiations (see, e.g., Fearon 1995; Powell 1999; Wagner 2000). In the absence of a central authority to bind actors—as when state authority breaks down in a civil war—these agreements must be self-enforcing. Bargaining may break down for several reasons. First, a poor informational environment may lead actors to miscalculate their relative capabilities and resolve to use force. Actors may be overconfident about their ability to prevail in a war, so proposed settlements are unsatisfactory. Second, credible commitment problems complicate negotiations if actors fear that the other side will not live up to the terms of an agreement. Finally, issue indivisibility may be an obstacle to negotiations if the issues at stake do not lend themselves to an easy compromise in which benefits can be neatly divided (see Fearon 1995). Importantly, as Wagner (2000) and Filson and Werner (2002) point out, war does not denote the end of the bargaining processes, but rather bargaining continues even as force is being used. During a war, combatants can opt to end fighting and find a suitable compromise that would be preferable to continuing a costly conflict.

This bargaining perspective has been usefully applied to civil conflict, as scholars have been looking for common ways of understanding violence regardless of whether the conflict is between states or between states and rebels (Lake 2003; Lake and Rothchild 1996; Toft 2003; Walter 2002). War is not the inevitable product of conflicts of interest but results from the inability of actors to find nonviolent solutions prior to violence or to make the necessary concessions to end a war. This perspective, while originally applied to international conflict, must be adapted somewhat to explain civil violence. In an international dispute, states typically have standing armies that they use as bargaining leverage against the other side. In a civil conflict, nascent rebel organizations do not have well-equipped and well-trained units at their disposal; rebellion entails a process of recruitment and mobilization (see Weinstein 2007). Potential rebels must raise forces with which to threaten the government in order to increase their bargaining leverage.

Owing to this key difference between civil and international conflict, bargaining and political opportunity theories can be usefully integrated. Political opportunities and state weakness allow rebel forces to mobilize and pose a credible threat to the government. Thus, a permissive political opportunity structure opens up the negotiating space and grants rebels the bargaining leverage that it lacked before.

As bargaining theories argue, states may accommodate opposition groups and offer reforms in order to prevent the outbreak of violence or to put an end to ongoing rebellions. But states are often unwilling to bargain with rebel organizations while the rebel groups are still weak because they hope for a swift military victory and because it is costly to recognize rebels as legitimate actors (Bapat 2005). Weak insurgents are often dismissed as “criminals,” “bandits,” or “terrorists.” As rebels gain in strength and a decisive government victory becomes less likely, states become more amenable to offering concessions in exchange for peace. Still, as Walter (2002) argues, fears of vulnerability and credible commitment problems following postconflict disarmament pose additional obstacles to peace because disarmed rebels fear reneging and victimization by the state. Thus, state weakness and political opportunity may explain why rebels are able to mobilize a viable threat, but the bargaining perspective adds the failure to find and commit to a compromise to the picture. Sanctuaries in neighboring countries provide the political opportunities needed to mobilize a rebellion; yet at the same time, as explained below, when rebels pursue a strategy of external mobilization, bargaining failure becomes more likely that it would otherwise.

The Global Politics of Civil Conflict

Over twenty-five years ago, Theda Skocpol (1979, 19) remarked: “Transnational relations have contributed to the emergence of all social-revolutionary crises and have invariably helped to shape revolutionary struggles and outcomes.” Despite this observation, for years most theories and empirical studies of civil war and insurgency focused on domestic conditions.2 Scholars of international conflict, moreover, ignored nonstate actors, instead privileging states as the dominant players in world politics. A growing tendency in the field of international relations has attributed international-level outcomes to domestic-level factors such as political institutions, domestic instability, and the incentives of national leaders (see e.g. Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999; Chiozza and Goemans 2004; Cowhey 1993; Doyle 1986; Milner 1997; Putnam 1988). Scholars also have shown burgeoning interest in the international sources of domestic politics (Peter Gourevitch 1978), but relatively few studies have used international factors to explain domestic political violence.

This has been changing, as an increasing number of scholars note the importance of interstate relations and transnational politics for civil war. One of the longest-standing theories in this regard is that several local conflicts may be characterized as proxy wars between rival governments (Midlarsky 1992; Rosenau 1964). For instance, during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were greatly concerned with how civil wars in developing countries could tip the global balance of power, and they actively intervened in numerous conflicts in Central America, Southeast Asia, and the Horn of Africa, among other regions. Rather than fight directly, the superpowers sought to undermine one another through fomenting conflicts in the developing world.

Others have suggested that signals of support for opposition groups by external actors—particularly by ethnic kin—enhance their bargaining strength (Cetinyan 2002) and perhaps encourage risky behavior by dissidents, making conflict more likely (Jenne 2006; Thyne 2006). Additionally, previous research on intervention has shown that external interventions by foreign governments prolong civil wars (Balch-Lindsay and Enterline 2000; Elbadawi and Sambanis 2002; Regan 2002); that foreign governments often intervene in domestic conflicts in order to protect their ethnic kin (Davis and Moore 1997; Saideman 2001; Woodwell 2004); and that third-party security guarantees are needed for combatants to make credible commitments to one another during peace negotiations (Walter 2002). Another group of scholars has noted that civil wars tend to cluster geographically and that conflicts and other social problems often diffuse across national boundaries (K. S. Gleditsch 2002a, 2007; Ghobarah, Huth, and Russett 2003; Sandler and Murdoch 2004; Lake and Rothchild 1998; Salehyan and Gleditsch 2006; Sambanis 2001). More generally, Balch-Lindsay and Enterline (2000, 618) advocate a multidimensional approach to conflict in which inter-and intrastate war reinforce one another, “with cause and effect swirling across the domestic and interstate arenas, as the policy agendas pursued by state and non-state actors alike intermingle in a dynamic, process-oriented environment.”

Finally, a few scholars have noted the importance of transnational social actors such as migrant diasporas, “terrorist” networks, and criminal organizations in directly or indirectly contributing to violence (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001; Bell 1971; Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Sandler 2003; Sandler, Tschirhart, and Cauley 1983; Shelley 1995). As opposed to “global civil society” groups, these actors represent the dark side of transnationalism. Mary Kaldor (1999) and John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (2001) argue that in the contemporary period conflicts are more likely to involve loosely organized, nonhierarchical, transnational groups.3 These organizations are aided by advances in technology, which lower transaction costs within the organization as well as raise the destructive capacity of small groups. Such organizations frequently form links with transnational criminal networks in order to tap into global black markets for illicit goods such as narcotics and conflict diamonds (Bannon and Collier 2003; Collier and Hoeffler 2001). Migrant diasporas, furthermore, may contribute to conflict by providing resources and support to opposition groups in their home countries (Adamson 2006; Byman et al. 2001; Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Lyons 2006; Shain 1989; Tatla 1999).

This literatu...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Theory of Transnational Rebellion
• 2. Transnational Rebels and Civil Violence
• 3. Transnational Rebels and International Conflict
• 4. The Nicaraguan Civil War
• 5. The Rwandan Civil War
• Conclusion
• References