The Social Network

Paul Staniland: Networks of Rebellion- Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse

Some of the more serious stuff I read this year... it's about war, after all.
Paul Staniland explains the success and failure of insurgent groups through the social networks on which they are based. Specifically, two explanatory variables describe a rebel group's structure:

• Horizontal ties, i.e. the social relations between the (geographically mobile) organizers of a rebellion. Horizontal ties are central for a rebel group to develop and implement a shared political vision and concerted actions that go beyond beyond localized grievances.
• Vertical ties, i.e. the relationships between organizers of rebellion and local communities. Vertical ties are important to align the localized actions of the rank and file- say peasants or workers- with the goals of the organizers of a rebellion. 

A central assumption in Staniland's book is that the social networks the organizers of rebellion had before a civil war determine the structure of insurgent organizations during the war. This assumption helps Staniland circumvent endogeneity concerns: pre-war social networks are usually not the result of a deliberate attempt to create an insurgent organization (1).
Based on these two variables, Staniland derives four types of rebel groups:

• Vanguard groups with strong horizontal and weak vertical ties. The classic example are communist groups, consisting of a committed revolutionary core of organizers, often intellectuals based in urban areas. Those revolutionary cadres often lack ties to the local communities they want to organize, be they peasants or workers.
• Parochial groups with weak horizontal and strong vertical ties. Parochial groups typically consist of a weak leader acting as a broker between different factions or are headed by loose coalitions of military commanders.
• Integrated groups with both strong horizontal and vertical ties. This is the most resilient form of rebel organization.
• Fragmented groups with weak horizontal and weak vertical ties, the weakest type of rebel organization. There are  coalitions of leaders are fluid with little to no centralized control, The processes for recruiting the rank and file are shambolic, attracting for instance criminal groups and other elements with purely local incentives.

Staniland derives 13 different mechanisms how insurgent groups may change, i.e. develop stronger horizontal ("central control") or vertical ties ("local ties") or be driven towards fragmentation:

• Vanguard groups are especially vulnerable to leadership decapitation, as evidenced for instance with the Sendero Luminosos guerrilla group in Peru. They may at the same time become integrated groups and develop strong vertical ties by imposing themselves at the local level or entering into alliances with local interests, strategies for instance pursued by ISIS in Syria. 
• Integrated rebel groups may be defeated by comprehensive counterinsurgency, which breaks both the horizontal ties between an insurgency's leaders and destroys the local networks in which an insurgency is embedded. A good example is offered by the British counterinsurgency strategy during the Malayan Emergency in the 1960s. 
• Parochial groups may be become integrated groups through "factional fusing", usually when external sponsors push their clients to act in a more unified manner. A nice example has been offered by Jordan and the U.S. attempting to improve the cooperation of various Free Syrian Army factions through through "operations rooms". 

Without going too much into detail here, suffice it to say that Staniland convincingly tests his theory through detailed historical case studies of insurgencies in Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir (India), and South East Asia.

The book suffers from some problems and might be expanded upon in multiple regards. Above all, there are issues with the measurement of Staniland's independent variables. Where do I set the boundaries between different parts of a rebel organization? How do I  recognize for instance an integrated rebel organization when I see one? In the case of Afghanistan, Staniland assesses Ahmed Shah Massud's rebel group, the Shura-ye Nazar, as at first a vanguard and then an integrated organization, while he codes its "parental" country-wide organization, Jamiat-e Islami, as parochial. Can a parochial rebel group consist of various organizations that are "integrated" at the sub-national level? How do we assess the organizational characteristics of federations of rebel groups?
Moreover, Staniland also neglects the different origins of civil wars in his analysis. Are rebel organizations systematically different when they arise out of an army splitting after a military coup rather than a popular uprising against an incumbent government? Do separatist rebel groups face different organizational challenges than groups attempting to capture central government power?

In spite of these criticisms, this is still an important book which will surely become a must read for anybody interested in "technologies of rebellion". It also offers a nice complement to Jeremy Weinstein's Africa-centered account of rebel group organization based on their access to lootable natural resources. The typology of rebel groups can easily inform policy, as for instance demonstrated in Staniland's work on the Syrian civil war.

Random movie association:
The People's Front of Judea...

(1) Roger Petersen's work on the role of the Catholic Church and student associations in mobilizing Lithaunian resistance against the Soviet occupation in the 1990s offers a nice illustration.