Files
Abstract
What role do rebel leaders play in driving the dynamics of intra-state warfare?More specifically, does variation in rebel leader type have implications for the type, severity, and tenure of a leaders combat campaign? I theorize that a rebel leaders background is key to explaining the dynamics of their combat campaigns. By examining a leaders motivation for conflictdefined in terms of their pursuit of public versus private goodsin conjunction with the depth and quality of their military experience, I offer a novel conceptualization and theory of rebel leaders in warfare. I introduce four distinct types of rebel leaders: the Ideologue, Insurgent, Operator, and Warlord. Each type yields testable implications for violent outcomes in war. To test these implications, I introduce a new dataset, Rebel Leaders in Civil War (RLCW), 1989-2014 (Willingham & Doctor 2017), in which rebel leaders serve as the unit of analysis. Overall, I make four important contributions to the field: a theory, typology, dataset and results indicating that even in the presence of multiple conflict and group-level factors, rebel leaders exhibit independent effects on the type, severity and tenure of intra-state combat campaigns.