Rebelling against the Rebellion: Explaining the magnitude of insurgent group disintegration

In this project, I define disintegration as the loss of personnel experienced by an insurgent group. Existing scholarly literature has tended to equate disintegration with splintering or splits. However, there are many ways in which insurgent groups break apart, ranging from no disintegration to large-scale splits. In this dissertation project, I develop a novel theoretical framework centered around the unexplored role of intra-group leaders within insurgent groups to explain variation in the outcome. I posit that preference divergence and intra-group leader capacity are jointly sufficient for the occurrence of disintegration, and the form of disintegration is determined by variation in leader capacity. I test the predictions of this project’s theoretical framework by implementing a crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA) on a dataset with data on 102 intra-group leaders in 29 insurgent groups. The findings lend support to the project’s emphasis on intragroup leader’s capacity as a key determinant of the form of insurgent group disintegration. Another contribution of this project is an alternative conceptualization of fragmentation to remedy two major analytic drawbacks in how fragmentation is conceptualized in the literature. I draw on institutional theory to develop a resilience-fragmentation model based on this alternative conceptualization. I demonstrate the utility of this model by applying it to the Taliban during the Afghanistan War (2001-2021). Finally, this project’s outcome, the magnitude of disintegration, was developed by examining the trajectories of 153 intra-group leaders in 46 insurgent groups. The raw values show that there are nine discrete ways in which intra-group disputes can play out. Therefore, I contribute to the literature by presenting a multichotomous operationalization of disintegration instead of a dichotomous operationalization which condenses these diverse outcomes into a binary, the occurrence or non-occurrence of splintering. Understanding how and why insurgent groups disintegrate is critical for waging war and peace. This dissertation project’s focus on intra-group dynamics demonstrates the limits of external factors for explaining insurgent group disintegration. It highlights the internal sources of vulnerability and resilience for insurgent groups by focusing on intra-group leader capacity and identifies causal pathways through which groups stay resilient or disintegrate.