UC San Diego

Rebellion is more than a military contest. Though armed confrontation is often the most visible face of rebellion, rebels also face the challenge of accessing resources to maintain their existence and finance the fight. While rebels may harness lootable resources for this purpose, such resources are not universally available, and rebels must then build support at home and/or abroad. rely on domestic civilians for support. This project models how rebels mix three governance tools to produce quasi- voluntary support: coercion, public goods provision, and ideological congruence. How rebels mix among these tools has a profound effect on the lives of the civilians they claim to represent. This project develops a theoretical explanation for how and why rebel governance varies. In the model, much depends on rebels' own ideological preferences, and on the fact that compromise can be costly for them. The governance mix rebels ultimately implement depends on the preferences of the population whose support they need, the technological and financial constraints they face, and the enabling behavior of foreign donors. I test this theory's observable implications by leveraging natural quasi-experiments in Mindanao (southern Philippines), comparing across the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), bringing to bear both qualitative and quantitative data. I also undertake longitudinal studies of the MNLF and ASG, using the cases to explore both the theory's predictions and its underlying causal mechanisms