Jay C Colburn II Prcis 2 - Week 11

4/18/2011 GOVT 631

Weinstein, Jeremy M. 2007. Inside Rebellion: the Politics of Insurgent Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

On the question of revolutions, rebellions, and civil wars, much has been written on their origins and outcomes. In his book Inside Rebellion: the Politics of Insurgent Violence, Jeremy Weinstein addresses a different and largely unexplored question regarding violence against civilians. This topic is discussed at length both theoretically and concretely, including meta- and micro-analyses of the factors at work in shaping how insurgent groups' strategies of violence differ across the cases examined. Conflicts in three different countries are examined, between the governments of each country and the National Resistance Army (NRA) in Uganda (1981-1986), the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) (19761992), and the Shining Path and one of its regional groups (from the Upper Huallaga Valley (UHV)) in Peru (1980-1992). Through Weinstein's extensive research, which includes interviews with rebel commanders, civilians, and government forces, and his rigorous analyses using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, he aims to uncover why some rebel groups inflict widespread and indiscriminate violence against civilians and other groups are more selective and restrained regarding civilian violence. Weinstein's methodological framework and detailed explanations as well as his systematic analyses largely defend his assertion that the "task of social science" is one that he "takes seriously in this book" (p.59). Throughout the text, the author is in a constant dialogue with the reader, explaining the reasoning behind what he is doing and why, and noting both strengths and weaknesses of many of the aspects in his theory and application. Weinstein includes a useful research design (p.53-60) and additional information on his data and analyses (supplemented in the appendices), in which he clearly lays out the dependent variable: "the character and level of violence perpetrated by rebel groups against civilians" (p.53). The character of insurgent attacks refers to the extent of the use of force rebel forces impose on civilians for punishment and to deter defections, and level of violence is the aggregate number of killings, rapes, abductions, looting, etc. Weinstein provides an investigation into rebel groups in Uganda, Mozambique, and Peru to gain a broader understanding of the reason for the difference of these two key aspects of the dependent variable. His research and analyses point to a single independent variable, or explanatory factor: initial endowments. The author's theory then aims to show that groups in resource-poor contexts will lead to less or more selective and strategic use of violence, whereas organizations that develop in resource-rich environments are more likely to be associated with higher levels of indiscriminate violence. Weinstein traces a complex path from initial endowments to strategies of violence among different rebel groups by looking at the situation in which these organizations were formed, specifically at what types and amount of resources were available to them, ranging from natural resources to external support. The author explains how whether groups organize around either economic or social resources, depending on their initial endowments, affects factors like recruitment strategies and method of discipline. Conveniently provided on page 12 is a chart showing the relationship between resource endowments and rebel violence; this chart highlights some of the main characteristics of insurgent organizations, accounting for the constraints under which they are created and developed which influence their strategies of violence. These five challenges that rebel organizations face also act as the way Weinstein divides the chapters. After an introduction to the book's theoretical and methodological underpinnings and descriptions of the four rebel movements, each of the five challenges, specifically recruitment, control, governance, violence, and resilience, are examined with regard to the NRA in Uganda, Renamo in Mozambique, and the national and regional Shining Path groups. Throughout the
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Jay C Colburn II Prcis 2 - Week 11

4/18/2011 GOVT 631

book, numerous scholars and theories related to this and a wide array of topics are referenced. Weinstein draws from theories of control and contestation as well as studies of the organizational design of social movements. The influence of works such as James Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant is influential in some of the analysis, as are works on the collective action problem by scholars such as Mancur Olson and Elinor Ostrom. Weinstein employs a great deal of secondary as well as primary research into his study of civilian violence, and this diversity of source material positions Inside Rebellion within the newly important questions being asked and methods used in comparative studies of revolutions, rebellions, and civil wars. The cases selected for this study were carefully chosen to show a level of variance on the dependent variable; the National Resistance Army and the Shining Path both exhibited a lack of violence against civilian populations, while Renamo and the regional Shining Path group in the Upper Huallaga Valley both were shown to inflict brutal and often indiscriminate violence, including rape, abduction, and hacking of limbs, and many killings during their civil wars. Weinstein notes that in both of these cases, the organizations were centered around economic endowments as opposed to social ones. Renamo was the recipient of support from Rhodesia as well as South Africa, while the Shining Path in the UHV became reliant upon money from drug trafficking and cocoa production. Having these types of resources attracts certain types of recruits, labeled opportunistic recruits by Weinstein, those who are interested in wealth as opposed to motivated or committed by ideological beliefs. Leaders who need soldiers and have the resources to offer short-term gains like weapons, food, shelter, and salary will be able to attract recruits, but they will be low-commitment recruits, or consumers; it is often more difficult for an organization's leaders to maintain control over such short-term interested and weakly-committed members, thus leading to disorder and a lack of discipline among the ranks. It is in such circumstances that indiscriminate violence against civilians is likely to occur. In contrast to these examples, Weinstein shows how groups with few natural resources at their disposal and no sufficient external source of funding organize around social endowments, relying on relationships with the community and other ties to encourage support and recruitment. In the case of Uganda, the leader of the National Resistance Movement (and future president of Uganda), Yoweri Museveni, and 26 of his fellow rebel leaders were bound together by their shared Banyankole heritage and also facilitated support from local communities. The National Resistance Movement in Uganda was not rich in natural resources or external support and therefore relied on social endowments throughout their development. Instead of extracting resources, like food and money, from and indiscriminately attacking and killing civilian populations, the NRA were sustained through civilian support, both economically and in terms of recruitment. In addition to cooperative relationships with civilian populations, rebel leaders were able to enforce discipline and restraint of soldiers. Because of their lack economic endowments, the NRA attracted more highly-committed, investor recruits, leading to more easily managed and better disciplined members. With little material resources at the disposal of the Shining Path in Peru, their organization was also centered around social endowments, mainly along ideological lines and close and cooperative relationships with the surrounding communities. The Shining Path had a multi-stage membership process, with ideological education and political indoctrination an important part of the process. Those recruits who were not highly committed to the goals of the Shining Path were often weeded out in this process, and the hierarchical leadership structure and severe and public punishment for errors and breaking the rules also contributed to a much more structured and disciplined membership. It is through his detailed explanations and analyses of these four cases and the initial economic and structural conditions in which they organizations emerged and developed that the strength of the author's argument rests.

Jay C Colburn II Prcis 2 - Week 11

4/18/2011 GOVT 631

A number of factors contribute to the overall explanatory value of the book. The method of process tracing that Weinstein employs to link his independent and dependent variables makes his argument much stronger and clearer than leaving the causal mechanisms of the relationship implicit. The processes under investigation, like many other political and social phenomena, are complex and the nuances of the relationship between the variables equally so. The multiple methods utilized in this study, from field research interviews to data event analysis of newspapers articles to quantitative data comparisons and multivariate regressions, all lend strength to the argument, as the hypotheses are verified from multiple perspectives. Despite his strict adherence to social science methodology, Inside Rebellion is not without its shortcomings. Weinstein addresses the role of structure versus agency in the introductory chapter; he explains that in this book he removes agency from rebel groups' strategies for recruitment, organization, and use of violence. This implies that it is not the choices that individual leaders make about what type of soldiers they are able recruit, how the organization is structured or the ideology around which it is centered, and the intensity of violence used against civilians that accounts for differences in the use of violence by rebel groups against civilians. While many scholars of revolutions and rebellions use statecentered approaches in their analyses, the role of agency is often lacking. It is not that regime types and economic conditions and international contexts are unimportant factors in addressing broader questions, or initial material resources available to organizations in Weinstein's case, but that social, cultural, and individualistic factors can play very important roles in these processes, despite our inability to comprehend or measure them. The evidence which Weinstein provides is convincing, and his argument indeed provides numerous starting points for future research, but the transfer of agency in something like the use of violence towards civilians, something with a very personal, emotional, and human perspective and implications, to the structural factor of initial endowment should be supplemented with at least some serious discussion of agency. The nature of the argument, that initial structural factors of how an organization is established and managed, seems deterministic to a certain extent. While the author notes the imperfection of such studies, even with rigorous methodological underpinnings, and is wary of claiming necessary causality, there seems to be no other path that the Shining Path or Renamo or the NRA could have taken given their initial resource endowments. This again points to a deficit in the role of agency or individual leadership, which may be able to steer an organization in a different direction than the one implied by its initial endowments. It is the job of future researchers to tackle the many new questions that have arrived from Weinstein's important contribution on civilian violence Inside Rebellion.