Voting for Militants

• In Event: Civilian Targeting in Civil Conflict

Abstract

Conflict scholarship has increasingly turned to studying nonviolent tactics used by rebel groups, with particular focus on rebel governance, including social service provision in rebel territories. However, scholars have neglected one peculiar aspect of rebel governance: the fact that many rebel groups conduct popular elections in wartime. This paper provides an empirical and theoretical study of rebel groups’ wartime popular elections, defined as elections in which local civilians vote to elect rebel leaders. The paper documents the phenomenon through a new dataset of rebel leader elections in civil wars since 1950, and theorizes about why some rebel groups organize elections at the grassroots level in the context of violent conflict. It proposes that rebel elections are a characteristic of militarily strong rebel groups that have secured some degree of local support, and that holding local elections helps display their organizational capacity, allocate responsibility to the grassroots, establish the group’s pro-social bent, and create an image of the group as being more democratically inclined than the state against which it is fighting. More broadly, this study examines one of the myriad ways in which rebel groups attempt to not only fight, but also prepare for entry into formal politics.

Authors

• Reyko Huang, Texas A&M University

• Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, University of Maryland, College Park

• Katherine M. Sawyer, Stony Brook University