Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence, by Jeremy M. Weinstein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; pp. 402. £15.99 (pb). ISBN 0521677971.
Researchers have been going through the tangled forms of wars in developing countries with a finer comb than that of large-N statistical studies. At their best, such studies combine research methods, engage in fieldwork and/or archival research, and test their shapely models with a refreshing clarity and honesty. It has become easier to appreciate that there are varieties of violent conflict and of rationalism. Inside Rebellion is very much in this vein.
Why do some insurgent groups seem committed to abuse and atrocity, while others appear to pursue a kinder rebellion? In Peru, why was one branch of a rebellion so much more unrestrained in its violence than another? In answering the question, Weinstein shapes a hypothesis and a way of testing it from a host of influences. These include organisational sociology, new institutionalist economics, the largely gloomy ‘resource curse’ literature, and a concern with asymmetric information. But the book does not trot out the banalities of some of the sillier economics of conflict literature and, while it takes the opportunity for rebellion seriously, it does not presume that everyone is motivated exclusively by material gain. Rather, the main argument turns on how rebels deal with a series of organisational challenges that have been given too little attention in the literature: recruitment, control, governance, the use of violence and the need to demonstrate resilience. Through ‘thick description’, interviews and quantitative data, Weinstein explores the cases of the NRA in Uganda, Renamo in Mozambique, and the variation within Peru between the main Sendero Luminoso group and its regional committee in the Upper Huallaga Valley.
Any aspiring rebel management has to mobilise resources to tackle these tasks. There are, Weinstein tells us, two types of resource endowment that help: economic endowments and social endowments. This distinction combines with another, between high and low commitment recruits, or between investors in and consumers of rebellion. Economic endowments are simpler to mobilise. Where rebels lack access to resource rents or external aid, they have to get embroiled in the slow and awkward business of cultivating ties of solidarity, trust, and reciprocity with local populations. Inconvenient as this may be, it primes rebels to respect non-combatants: organisation will be more centralised and disciplined, and civilian abuses are unlikely to escalate into a pattern of atrocity. If, however, rebels have access to economic endowments, they use them. This makes it easier to recruit sufficient soldiers and to mount a military challenge to governments. But it means rebel leaders will lead a jumble of high and low commitment recruits – thanks to selective material benefits – without knowing enough about which are which.
Initial endowments affect internal organisation and rebel behaviour. Most dramatically, Weinstein argues that endowments determine atrocity. If Jack Hirshleifer, a pioneer of neo-classical economic theories of violent conflict, suggested that thanks to low opportunity costs the poor had a comparative advantage in violence, Weinstein provides a factor endowment theory of atrocity: the model is Hecksher-Ohlin to Hirshleifer's Ricardo. Thus, chapter six explains patterns of violence across the case study insurgencies. In rebellions with high economic endowments, low commitment rebels (consumers) go on the rampage, looting, raping, slicing at and shooting civilians. Management has to put up with this to maintain the labour force of rebellion so the abuses go unpunished. Rebels get a bad reputation and civilians avoid them: they become more difficult to control. This encourages further abuse and the pattern is set. In resource-poor insurgencies this behaviour is both less likely – because of a higher share of investors among recruits – and when it does happen more likely to be punished – because of a tighter organisation relying more on relations with non-combatants.
Inside Rebellion is brilliantly done – clear, tightly argued, in good command of its cases, and nicely attuned, at the end, to possibilities for further research and analytical probing and to the relevance of the argument for international policy. Some of the most interesting passages are those that engage with the question of what happens – for example, to the FARC in Colombia or to UNITA in Angola – when endowments change; and those that briefly point out the implications of the book's argument for the value of naming and shaming strategies or for international criminal courts.
Students and researchers will benefit greatly from this book, which will enrich scholarly and policy debates. A number of questions are likely to be raised as a result. The explanation of violence and atrocity, like so many studies, leaps from organisational rationality to the observation of outcomes: it leaves the reader none the wiser about why even low-commitment recruits or consumer-rebels are so vicious. Because of anti-civilian ideologies? Or because of a ‘culture of violence’? Or something else? It is not clear how the model would illuminate, for example, the violence of the Spanish Civil War. Could the savagery of General Queipo de Llana, the cruelty of Franco himself and his early mentor, the beserk General Millán-Astray, or the violence of Lorca's killers in Granada really be explained by the fact that the Germans and Italians came to the Nationalists’ aid financially while European democracies dithered behind a veil of non-interference? How do we explain the way these rebel leaders and followers were both investors and consumers? How can Republican communist and anarchist viciousness be explained? There are plenty of more recent examples, in which the violence of rebel groups is at least partly a function not of low-commitment rebels poorly controlled by central leaders but of the violence of leaders, their ideologies, and their treatment of lowly recruits.
There are also other ways of exploring the organisational sociology of insurgency, including the Durkheimian ‘grid-group’ matrix allowing for different combinations of institutional lock-in (rules) and institutional bonding, explored by Fithen and Richards in No Peace No War. The book does not help think through the way access to resource rent may help insurgent groups to invest in cultivating social resources of local legitimacy, for in Afghanistan, Angola and elsewhere economic and social resources have been complements rather than only substitutes.
Nor does the book really engage with the origins of insurgency. Is it always the case that prospective rebel entrepreneurs spot gaps in the market and then calculate which resources they can draw on to organise rebellions, rather than rebellion emerging from protracted social processes, in which violent uprising may be a contested option among a number? Might rebel behaviour be linked to the political economy of areas where it emerges? This might involve complex variations in how labour is mobilised or land allocated, and how these are regulated by institutions of local power. Finally, the richest way to explore the arguments of this book further might be through a different case selection, where there might be more intriguing combinations of economic resources and social ties, where atrocity and legitimacy have both been present, and where, perhaps as with the RUF in Sierra Leone, it was perhaps not so much the resource curse of diamonds that explained atrocity as the ‘endowment’ or history of fiercely felt social experiences of relational abuse and exclusion among many young people.