Introducing ROLE: A database of rebel leader attributes in armed conflict
| Author | Benjamin Acosta,Reyko Huang,Daniel Silverman |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221077920 |
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Special Data Features |
Special Data Features
Introducing ROLE: A database of rebel
leader attributes in armed conflict
Benjamin Acosta
Arcturus Intelligence
Reyko Huang
Bush School of Government & Public Service, Texas A&M University
Daniel Silverman
Institute for Politics and Strategy, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
Existing literature on civil wars relies predominantly on state- and organization-level variables to understand conflict
dynamics and outcomes. In this article, we propose that rebel leaders’ personal backgrounds and experiences are also
key to explaining the behavior of the organizations they lead. Just as scholars have long highlighted the importance of
state leaders’ biographical characteristics in interstate war and diplomacy, we argue that the attributes of rebel leaders
affect their organizations’ decisions and actions in civil war. To substantiate our claims, we introduce the Rebel
Organization Leaders (ROLE) database, which contains a wide range of biographical information on all top rebel
leaders in civil wars ongoing between 1980 and 2011. We first describe the contents of the database and present a
number of novel descriptive findings about rebel leaders. To illustrate its utility, we then examine the influence of
rebel leaders’ attributes on their organizations’ use of terrorism in civil war. Ultimately, our work encourages – and
enables – a new research agenda that goes beyond rebel organizations and campaigns as units of analysis and brings
individual leaders more fully into modern conflict and peace studies.
Keywords
armed conflict, leader attributes, original data, rebel organizations, terrorism
Do rebel leaders’ personal beliefs, backgrounds, and life
experiences matter in armed conflicts? Would the fight
for South Sudanese independence have unfolded differ-
ently had someone other than John Garang led the seces-
sionist rebel organization? Would the Lord’s Resistance
Army (LRA) exist without Joseph Kony? How central
were Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to the turn of events in the
Afghan civil war in the 1990s or Yasser Arafat to the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict?
A large body of political science scholarship asserts
that individual leaders’ attributes, life experiences, dispo-
sitional traits, and beliefs influence their decisions during
their time in office, thus affecting the course of political
events (Saunders, 2011; Kertzer & Rathbun, 2015; Gift
& Krcmaric, 2017). In their book on state leaders,
Horowitz, Stam & Ellis (2015: 11) write, ‘the formative
experiences of political leaders influence everything from
the way they evaluate the costs and benefits of using force
to the types of military grand strategies they view as most
likely to be successful’. Yet, in contrast to rich evidence
about how individual differences matter among states
leaders, few studies systematically examine how the range
of personal backgrounds and life experiences of rebel
leaders affect world politics.
In this article, we introduce a new database of rebel
leader attributes that will enable the kinds of studies of
Corresponding author:
dmsilver@andrew.cmu.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2023, Vol. 60(2) 352–361
ªThe Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221077920
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