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Weiner, Joshua Daniel Fawcett

University of British Columbia

My dissertation consists of three chapters that analyze important but understudied aspects of the organization and behavior of armed groups. In the first chapter, I address how armed groups fund themselves long-term. We do not understand why armed groups choose between various extraction strategies or how they change their behavior to compensate for lost revenue. I argue that rebel groups with the ability to tax the people in their territory will raise taxes to substitute for lost resource revenue. I test this theory in the context of the Syrian civil war by examining the Islamic State’s institutional response to a negative oil-price shock. I use microlevel Islamic State tax data at the month-year level from 2013 to 2017 across 19 Syrian districts. Leveraging an oil-price shock and using a difference-in-differences design, I find that Islamic State provinces that received oil revenue levied new taxes after crude oil prices declined, substituting tax revenue for lost resource revenue. In my second chapter, I test the assumption behind leadership targeting, which is that eliminating an armed group leader degrades the capability of the group. However, unlike prior studies of leadership targeting, I go beyond the group-level to examine the effect on the conflict overall. I demonstrate that assassinating rebel leaders decreases the battlefield efficacy of the group, who suffer more casualties after losing their leader. However, while these attacks degrade individual groups, they do not reduce the level of violence in the Syrian civil war overall. I show that combatants defecting between groups drives higher levels of violence as fighters leave weakened groups for their stronger rivals, suggesting leadership targeting has limitations we have not currently theorized. In my third chapter, I explore whether the background characteristics of rebel leaders, specifically their prior military, nonstate actor, and combat experience, shape the organizations they lead in a cross-national design. Using data on rebel leaders from 1980 to 2011, I find that leaders’ past experiences affect the organizational structure of rebel groups. I also show that leader selection processes, which were not studied in previous work on rebel leaders, condition the effects of leaders.

Text

2024-02-16

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87454

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/