Recruiting Rebellion: An Ecology of Affiliation in Civil War

• In Event: 261 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 10. Recruitment and Mobilization

Abstract

Informed by the reality that recruitment into organizations fighting in civil war is for many combatants involuntary, this paper argues for an organizational perspective in the study of mobilization. I propose a new question: in what social space do rebel organizations and those organizations who fight against them compete for members, and how can this social space of recruitment inform our understanding of who might fight in civil conflicts? There is a theoretical weakness in previous studies that assumed that fighters’ reported motivations for joining a group were a sufficient basis for studying the recruitment strategy of organization writ large. This paper applies conceptual and empirical tools from organizational sociology, social network theory and the literature on social movements in order to argue for a social-structural understanding of recruitment by groups in contemporary civil conflicts. This paper employs a Blauspace analysis to investigate the extent to which a rebel group (the RUF) and a counter-insurgent group (the CDF) competed in a demographic social space during the civil war in Sierra Leone (1991-2002). I find that competition among these groups shaped the size and recruiting capacity of the major rebel group. I also find, contrary to expectations of the literature on this particular war that in key years of recruitment ethnicity was a primary factor that shaped the constituency of these organizations. Applying these tools yields unique sociological perspectives to the study of civil conflict and contributes to understanding the nature of participation in contemporary civil conflicts.

Author

• Andrew Davis, University of Arizona