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What is rebel governance? Introducing a new dataset on rebel institutions, 1945–2012

Document Cited in Related
AuthorKaren E Albert
Published date01 July 2022
Date01 July 2022
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/00223433211051848
What is rebel governance? Introducing
a new dataset on rebel institutions, 1945–2012
Karen E Albert
Independent Researcher
Abstract
In the course of civil war, it is not unusual for armed rebels, who are fighting to either take control of a state or create a
new one, to create state-like governing institutions. For example, nearly 64% of rebels between 1945 and 2012
created at least one governing institution. One challenge to moving the literature on rebel governance forward is
getting data on the many possible institutions that comprise rebel governance. I introduce new data, the Rebel Quasi-
State Institutions dataset, which covers 235 rebel groups and codes annually for 25 institutions during the entire
existence of the group. I demonstrate the usefulness of this new dataset by exploring a relationship important to
scholars: that of rebel strength and rebel governance institutions (Stewart, 2020). These analyses show two things.
First, there is value in disaggregating rebel governance and looking at institutions separately because not all govern-
ance institutions are correlated with strength in the same direction. Second, taking into account the time dimension
is important. Since rebel conventional capability increased as a result of the end of the Cold War (Kalyvas & Balcells,
2010) and rebel institutions became more prevalent, there is an important time component to rebel governance that
correlates with events in the international system.
Keywords
civil war, institutions, rebel governance, rebel strength
In 1973, POLISARIO initiated an armed struggle to
liberate the territory of Western Sahara in Morocco.
Soon after, POLISARIO declared the independence of
Western Sahara, created the Saharwi Arab Democratic
Republic, and established its own government. The
Saharwi Arab Democratic Republic holds regular elec-
tions, usually electing POLISARIO members to key
leadership positions, and its government manages a pub-
lic education system, issues drivers’ licenses, and main-
tains a national archive. It held a seat at the Organization
of African Unity (OAU) and opened an embassy in
Mexico. But, POLISARIO is not alone in its creation
of various governing institutions. In fact, nearly 64% of
rebel groups active in a civil war between 1945 and 2012
created at least one governing institution.
1
Recently, a burgeoning literature on rebel governance
has emerged, and has begun to highlight how rebel
governance is central to civil war processes and postwar
outcomes. Rebel centralization (Heger & Jung, 2017),
territorial control (Mampilly, 2011; Stewart, 2020), and
long time horizons (Arjona, 2016), for example, have all
been found to affect rebel governance. And in turn, rebel
governance has been shown to lead to postwar democra-
tization (Huang, 2016). Even though this literature is
still relatively new, there has been disagreement over
whether territorial control is required for rebel govern-
ance (Mampilly, 2011; Kasfir, 2015) or if it simply
makes rebel governance easier (Huang, 2016; Stewart,
2018; Uribe, 2017), and whether rebel governance
makes negotiated settlements more or less likely (Heger
& Jung, 2017; Albert, 2020). It has also been noted that
the relationship between rebel governance and rebel
strength is more complicated than initially thought
(Stewart, 2020).
Corresponding author:
karen.albert82@gmail.com
1
Calculated using the Rebel Quasi-State Institutions dataset.
Journal of Peace Research
2022, Vol. 59(4) 622–630
ªThe Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00223433211051848
journals.sagepub.com/home/jpr

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