How Civil Wars End: The Influence of Rebel Groups

Abstract

Outcomes of civil wars differ greatly across countries, even among states with comparable risks to conflict, such as poverty, ethnic cleavages, political instability, and state weakness. Understanding why some civil conflicts terminate through peace agreements and military victories while others often fail to end decisively requires attention to strategic interactions between rebels and states, including how rebel groups mutate and shape competition to reach different conflict outcomes. Yet, the critical link between rebel groups - their pre-war organisations, foundations, and coercive capacities - with conflict outcomes is under-theorised and lacks empirical attention. To address this gap, my research considers: How do rebel groups influence civil war outcomes? I deploy mixed methods, including quantitative analysis of 346 civil conflict outcomes from 1946-2012 and case studies on four conflicts in South and Southeast Asia - Bangladesh, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Myanmar - to examine the relationship between rebel groups and the war outcomes they influence.

The large-N and small-N analyses confirm several of my theoretical propositions. Pre-war organisations and backgrounds of rebels - including social and political movements, military breakaways, rebel mergers or rebel splinters, and rebels with ethnic identities - and their coercive capacities developed during war shape a rebel group's chances of victory, defeat, political settlements, or non-decisive outcomes. Conflict outcome models with new rebel factors predict the outcomes of the war with 83.6 percent accuracy. Case studies tracing rebel group formation and capacity changes during conflict delineate how rebel organisations shape conflict bargains to achieve different war outcomes. This study makes two contributions to the literature on war outcomes. First, it brings non-decisive outcomes of conflict into a civil war bargaining framework, demonstrating how choices to not negotiate or fight shape conflict and ways non-decisive outcomes evolve, often via rebel group changes. Second, it builds new theoretical and empirical links between rebel group features, the conflict bargaining process with states, and civil war outcomes. The results of this study have strategic implications for states and rebel groups at war and third parties seeking to shape intrastate conflict outcomes and resolve conflict. Show more