Paul Staniland is emerging as one of the most creative and influential scholars of political violence. His Networks of Rebellion will cement that reputation. Already the winner of two awards (the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize and the Peter Katzenstein Book Prize), the book is a model of cogent theorization, inventive but systematic research design, and effective writing. It constitutes a substantial contribution to the scholarship on political violence and a milestone for field-based, comparative research.
The book’s central research question is straightforward: What explains insurgent cohesion and collapse? The inquiry matters for at least three reasons. First, the puzzle is real. Some rebel organizations are durable and effective; others are not. That variation exists across and within countries. Why? As far as I know, political scientists have not asked or answered that question in any detail.
Second, civil wars take (at least) two to tango. States fight rebels, and vice versa. Understanding civil wars means understanding insurgent organizations. However, to date, the literature has privileged states and country-level characteristics that make civil wars more or less likely. Staniland’s work forces us to focus on the rebel organizations themselves. He is not alone. Jeremy Weinstein wrote a key book on the social and economic endowments of rebel organizations. Ana Arjona, Nelson Kasfir, and Zachariah Mampilly, among others, have examined how rebels govern. Fotini Christia explores alliances among rebels. Janet Lewis and Jason Stearns also look at the initial foundations of rebellion. Staniland’s book is thus part of a growing research agenda on insurgents and a core contribution to that area.
Third, the political violence literature often divides into macro-level and micro-level research. The former privileges national-level variables and processes, the latter individual-level ones, such as recruitment or participation in violence. With a focus on the social bases of insurgent organizations, Staniland’s research draws attention to the “meso” level.
Staniland’s core argument is that the characteristics of “prewar politicized social networks” (p. 9) shape the cohesion and effectiveness of insurgent organizations. The author cites political parties, peasant associations, kinship groups, religious associations, and student organizations as the kinds of organizations that influence the strength of rebel organizations once they form. He calls his theory a “socio-institutional” one.
Staniland identifies four types of insurgent organizations: integrated, vanguard, parochial, and fragmented. Integrated are the most durable, fragmented the least. He in turn analyzes organizational strength along two dimensions: vertical and horizontal. Vertical ties shape the relations between the top and the bottom, between the leaders and local communities. Horizontal ties connect people across space. They “make possible the consolidation of shared political visions at the regional or national level” (p. 21).
The initial ties shape the strength of insurgent organizations. Integrated rebel organizations exhibit strong cohesion among the leadership (horizontal ties) and strong cohesion from the leadership to the ground level (vertical ties). By contrast, vanguard organizations are cohesive at the top, horizontally, but do not extend their control to the local level. Parochial groups demonstrate strong vertical ties but weak horizontal ones; they are built on patrimonial connections to individual leaders. Fragmented groups cannot build on any kind of social ties to build their organization.
The argument is not deterministic. Staniland accounts for insurgent change. He identifies insurgent strategy, counterinsurgent policy, and external sponsorship as key sources of change. Through these and other influences, insurgent organizations may shift from being integrated to parochial, or vice versa, and from vanguard to integrated, or vice versa. Staniland’s effort to incorporate endogenous processes of change into this theory is one of the strengths of the book. Another is Staniland’s transparency: Throughout, he identifies how his theory is falsifiable. In the empirical sections, he is forthright when the evidence does not support his argument.
Staniland’s framework is generalizable. Scholars studying insurgents in any world region should be able to apply his theory. That said, the book’s empirical strategy and empirical sections are extremely compelling. The research design includes both cross-country and within-country comparisons. The most in-depth research covers South Asia. Staniland examines the fate of five insurgent organizations in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir; seven organizations in Afghanistan; and five organizations in Sri Lanka. In so doing, he is able to examine variation in insurgent fate while holding the conflict and country constant. In addition, he studies three communist insurgent organizations in Southeast Asia—in Malaya, French Indochina (Vietnam), and the Philippines. This provides “out of sample” validity to his arguments.
The case studies are carefully rendered and impressive. Insurgent organizations are not an easy subject to research. Staniland did 10 months of fieldwork in India and Sri Lanka. He also conducted in-depth secondary research in those countries and the others. This is an ambitious empirical agenda for a first book; mastery of multiple countries usually takes scholars many years.
For the reasons noted, Networks of Rebellion is a major accomplishment. All the same, I wish to raise a few concerns. First, there is a tension in the theory between initial structure and change over time. The book’s theoretical emphasis, it seems to me, is the initial social base. Yet the case studies are primarily about how insurgent organizations shift from one type to another. With few exceptions, organizations change; they do not start and stay the same type. Those trajectories raise a conceptual question about whether there are, in fact, four insurgent “types.” More importantly, the trajectories suggest that the key question is how insurgent organizations adapt to war and manage adversity. Staniland claims that the initial social base makes some organizations better at adaptation than others. But how is the initial foundation versus major factors thereafter, such as leadership, strategy, state behavior, the action of rival rebels, and international sponsorship, to be balanced? Staniland is aware of these dynamics. Still, the question remains: What is doing the work of social cohesion? And how do we know?
Second, the theory’s main causal variable is close conceptually to the main outcome. Crudely, more integrated prewar networks produce more integrated insurgent organizations; weaker prewar networks produce weaker rebels. I like Staniland’s emphasis on history and institutional footprint. Still, is there something tautological about claiming that strongly networked foundations lead to stronger organizations or that weakly networked foundations lead to weaker organizations?
Third, I would have welcomed additional clarity on, and measurement of, key concepts. For example, “networks” is the in the title, yet the text primarily refers to “social bases.” Are they the same? What is the working definition of a network? How is a strong vertical network or social base measured? How is insurgent cohesion or fragmentation measured? Staniland sometimes introduces tantalizing ideas, such as how “shared political meaning” (p. 217) is key to building an organization. Yet this idea remains underdeveloped in the text.
Those concerns aside, Staniland’s work is seminal. To understand civil war we need to understand insurgents, and to understand insurgents we need to look at the social foundations of insurgent organizations. Rebellions are, after all, hard to sustain. Rebel organizations face unusual types of strains and stresses; states and rival rebel organizations seek to destroy them. Staniland’s parsimonious theory provides a compelling and concrete answer about which rebel organizations are most likely to survive. Networks of Rebellion is impressive empirically. The writing is clear and compelling. The book deserves the recognition it has received and is likely to continue to receive.
