Conclusion

ORGANIZATIONS WITHIN AND BEYOND REBELLIONS

This book set out to answer a single question: why are some rebel groups able to seamlessly transform into political parties while others falter?

The existing literature tells an intuitive story about how rebellions morph into parties. First, the fighting stops. Ceasefire agreements give way to negotiated settlements. More and more, settlements allow rebel groups to participate in electoral politics in the hopes of giving them incentives to drop their weapons for good. Finally, to continue their fight at the ballot box, rebel successor parties disarm, dismantle combat units, build party structures in their place, and mobilize voters to ensure their electoral success.1

This account, however, rests on two core assumptions about what militant organizations look like during war and what they can feasibly accomplish in its aftermath. An assumption of organizational homogeneity characterizes wartime structures as primarily combat-oriented, which, in turn, leads scholars look elsewhere for party-relevant skills. The next assumption—that transformation unfolds by building party structures from scratch—is the logical corollary to the previous one. Absent a usable legacy, scholars portray the preelection period as a scramble to dismember their organizations, hire skilled personnel, select candidates, and build party structures from the ground up.

Much like Italian cities, parties are not built in a day. Rebel-to-party transformation is a complex and protracted organizational process that unfolds over years and often begins long before the war ends. And the deeper we dig into the process, the more unanswered questions we find. How do rebels know what they need? What does the transformation process look like in practice? Once it starts the change, how does the organization survive it? Once it survives it, how does the party mobilize voters? When we consider rebel-to-party transformation for what it is—a massive organizational change—the questions are nearly endless, yet the answers are sparse.

My earliest attempts to get traction on these questions consistently led me back to the same insight: rebel-to-party transformation is an organizational phenomenon. Whether I was addressing the process of transformation, the group’s transition into the electoral environment, its internal negotiations, or how it survived any of these outcomes in the first place, rebels’ wartime organizational legacies always emerged in the answers.

This book took a novel approach to answering these questions by placing the militant organization at the center of the analysis. Beginning with a critical step back, I demonstrated that our existing organizational toolkit was ill equipped to even describe the groups at the heart of this phenomenon—let alone to theorize about how variation across rebellions affects postwar outcomes. I developed an organizational approach that forms the foundation of my theoretical and analytic framework. Taking an organizational approach yields a more accurate description of both militant organizations and the nature of the changes they must endure.

To make a convincing argument about the unique nature and effects of wartime structures, I began by accounting for their origins. The organizational approach first allowed me to predict and trace the origins of militant group structures. I expanded on the concept of organizational ideology to identify the distinct set of unified and consistent beliefs that govern militants’ approach to rebellion. Resources, prewar networks, and doctrine are filtered through organizational frames, which in turn shape the structures rebels build.

Chapter 3’s exploration of the FMLN’s consolidation demonstrated that groups originating in the same doctrinal tradition can nonetheless exhibit vastly different organizational ideologies, which in turn give rise to fundamentally different organizational structures. This concept adds a new and critical dimension to existing frameworks accounting for other aspects of insurgent origins.

Building on these insights, I identified two variable features of militant groups that facilitate rebel-to-party transformation: one structural, one institutional. First, some groups construct proto-party structures: subdivisions built during war that mirror the core functions and forms of structures found in party organizations. Second, some groups develop traits that facilitate resilience: self-reflection, deference to expertise, and repertoires of flexibility. Proto-party structures imbue militant groups with relevant skills and routines needed to operate in legal politics. Resilience inoculates groups against the precarity of transformation. Together, these organizational features explain diverse outcomes in the face of equal opportunities.

Proto-party structures, in turn, beget a unique transformation strategy: repurposing analogous structures into the “new” party organization. This tack not only leads to a more efficient transformation but also mitigates the risks and challenges of building a party organization from scratch. I tested this hypothesis using within-case, comparative process tracing in three cases and further validated it with quantitative data. In the FMLN case, the subgroups with robust proto-party legacies exhibited a transformation process that tracks in lockstep with the repurposing hypothesis. The FPL, PCS, and PRTC not only directly place wartime subdivisions into related party roles but also made explicit reference to the postwar relevance of those subdivisions while they were still in the throes of conflict. Meanwhile, notwithstanding the ERP’s size, influence, and military success throughout the war, its combat-centric structure proved to be its Achilles’ heel when it came time to function as a party. Its process of party formation reflected the conventional portrayals of transformation in the rebel-to-party literature: hiring outside personnel and building new structures from scratch. Despite the formal arrangement decreeing that each group would have equal representation in the new party, I find that the ERP was marginalized to the point of separation, in large part because it had less to contribute to the organization’s new objectives.

Finally, I demonstrated that proto-party structures also create distinct electoral advantages at the ballot stage. Specifically, groups with proto-party structures, by virtue of the diverse noncombat tasks they perform and their work beyond the conventionally understood boundaries of the organization, are able to forge politically salient linkages with local populations. While all militant organizations will have some relations with citizens, the nature of those relations can range from violent and extractive to symbiotic or even magnanimous. The organizational approach helps parse the nature—and implications—of different wartime relations with greater precision. I argue that linkages formed by providing governance, health care, education, and political messaging are especially conducive to political mobilization when it comes time for rebel successor parties to marshal votes. Both cross-national and subnational statistical tests provide support for this aspect of my theory. In the cross-national analysis, I demonstrated that proto-party structures more consistently predict successor parties’ levels of integration than common explanations from the literature. The subnational tests leveraged municipal-level data on both the FMLN’s different wartime strongholds and its postwar electoral performance. Crucially, I found comparable subnational evidence in both the RUF and the Renamo case. The results strongly support the mobilization hypothesis: municipalities occupied by OP-Ms with robust proto-party structures during war voted for the rebel successor party at considerably higher rates than municipalities occupied by less politically diverse groups.

Together, the findings demonstrate that the formation and integration of rebel successor parties cannot be divorced from their wartime legacies. The organizational structures militant groups build during war vary considerably on unforeseen, yet crucial dimensions. Paying close attention to the variable diversity of roles and subdivisions within militant organizations adds color to a previously grayscale model.

Scholarly Implications

This book has several important implications for scholarship, all of which follow from the same question: What can we learn when we take organizations seriously? The answers to this question address and transcend our understanding of rebel-to-party transformation. This section identifies contributions and new avenues for research both within and beyond the conflict literature.

Rebel-to-Party Literature

At the most specific level, this book represents a number of important advancements in how we explain the formation, consolidation, and integration of rebel successor parties. Recasting the outcome as an organizational phenomenon reveals unforeseen challenges in the rebel-to-party process while simultaneously revealing the traits that enable some groups to overcome them. Future rebel-to-party studies—irrespective of their theoretical or analytic approaches—must account for the full scope of difficulty associated with transformation in order to provide a complete explanation of how it unfolds. Doing so forces us to look beyond conventional explanations, calling into question the plausibility of rebels timing their transformations to capitalize on military gains.

The book tests one of the central assumptions in the literature underlying the purported mechanism of transformation: that party building only begins once the war ends. In line with my theory, I demonstrate that this assumption, while sometimes valid, is highly variable. Only militant groups that did not build proto-party structures during war will take this approach to party formation. Parsing the different mechanisms of transformation—and the organizational roots of the respective mechanisms—lays an important foundation for future work aimed at further unpacking the power dynamics and internal negotiations of the different transformation processes. Furthermore, since party formation is only one type of organizational change militant groups undertake, this model of the transformation mechanism can shed light on a host of other outcomes that fall under the umbrella of “change.” This framework lays the theoretical and analytic foundation for future work to explore the postwar formation of a wide variety of nongovernmental organizations as well as organized crime syndicates and joint policing forces.

Following from the previous contribution, the organizational approach provides more precise tools for specifying a mechanism of transformation. Rather than supplanting previous theories, this approach may illuminate previously unspecified mechanisms. Take, for example, the prewar party hypothesis: the theory that rebel groups born out of prewar political parties will be better equipped to reassemble parties at the war’s end. Reevaluated under an organizational light, we might find that the salience of party legacies is less about an evergreen capacity to resurrect bygone party experience (which often occurred decades before the postconflict elections) and more about the types of organizations that former parties build when they transition to the battlefield.

Finally, building on an argument introduced in my 2024 article, the book elaborates on the distinction between transformation and transition. By distinguishing the internal organizational change and the environmental transition into electoral politics, future studies of rebel successor parties can more precisely identify the challenges and catalysts of the outcome they wish to engage. This distinction opens the door to asking new questions about the interplay between organizational change and electoral participation. The conceptual ambiguity is baked into the literature, but so too is the desire to better parse and measure the two outcomes. This need is no more clear than in the heading to Rachel M. Rudolph’s conclusion to her discussion of Hamas’s transition, which is titled, “A Successful Transition, but Will It Succeed?”2 What at first glance looks like a tautology should instead be read as a call to distinguish between transformation, nominal transition, and long-term integration.

Taking these distinctions seriously allows us to ask important substantive questions as well. For example, if rebel successor parties are initially allotted seats by quota (as was the case of the new FARC party in Colombia), we can ask questions like, does this assisted transition into politics facilitate the organizational transformation(s) groups were ill equipped to make beforehand?3 In short, does transition before transformation buy time or induce complacency? If indeed groups are better at consolidating party organizations once they are forced to govern, this result would suggest that negotiated settlements may better facilitate long-term stability by including early quota systems as part of the rebel-to-party provisions. However, the opposite may well be true. Introducing legislative quotas may disincentivize (or allow groups to procrastinate making) the type of radical changes needed to successfully participate in democratic processes.

Organizational Approaches to Conflict

Zooming out from the specific outcome at the heart of this book, I examine a few key areas of conflict research in which taking an organizational approach can shed new light on old questions. The scholarship dedicated to unpacking the microdynamics of civil war has a distinct behavioral focus: who chooses to join rebellions and why, when and under what conditions do rebellions forcibly recruit participants, how and when do rebels deploy different types of violence, and, more recently, how and when and why do they engage in behaviors beyond violence.4 When do rebels govern, provide social services, or engage in international diplomacy? Important as these behaviors are, it is organization that makes both service provision and coordinated violence possible in the first place. The framework developed in this volume illuminates the organizational structures, institutions, and constraints undergirding the behaviors that characterize civil war. In so doing, it provides novel insights into the capacity for and variation in these behaviors and a newfound understanding of the sheer breadth of people whose behaviors we are trying to explain.

Outside of explaining rebel-to-party transformation, the book’s most central contribution is a powerful set of tools for modeling rebel organizations and analyzing outcomes at the organizational level. The approach integrates disparate insights about rebel group behaviors into a unified framework for modeling rebels’ organizational structures. Incorporating diversification and the types of subdivisions rebels build into our analyses of them allows scholars to gain new insight into groups’ behaviors, recruitment profiles, and goals. In doing so, it reveals consequential dimensions along which groups differ from one another and opens the door to comparing and even categorizing militant organizations in new ways.

Moreover, the organizational approach has specific implications for how we use commonly invoked traits. Traits that describe the arrangement of roles or the nature of command-and-control institutions have been wielded in the absence of referents. Moving forward, the new framework forces us to specify the content of hierarchy, the locus of cohesion, and the dimension of capability, rather than applying those concepts to the organization as a whole without naming the structures or roles to which they refer. After all, it really only makes sense to discuss organizational capabilities in terms of the specific dimensions on which they are functioning. This approach, in turn, will yield more specific insights about variation both within and across groups. Finally, the Insurgent Structures and Outcomes dataset lays the empirical groundwork to continue exploring both the causes and implications of varying wartime organizational structures among rebel groups.

One new avenue for research stems from one of the central questions in the rebel-to-party literature: How do violent rebels become good democrats? This question wrestles with the presumed gulf between those who participate in rebellion and those who staff party organizations. Conventional explanations of participation in rebellion tend toward broad-strokes dichotomies: the greedy or the aggrieved, the opportunists or the ideologues.5 These motivations may be accurate, but they do little to bridge the participatory divide. However, when we consider participation in light of the diversity of rebels’ organizational structures, the next logical step is to probe the diversity of people they recruit to staff them. What skills is a given group seeking? Are they looking for fighters or writers? The answer is more often the latter than previous work suggests. Yet, when we think about the participants who are recruited for their résumés—rather than their lethality—the gap between “rebel” and “politician” becomes imminently traversable.

Crucially, the motivating question is pertinent beyond the rebel-to-party inquiry. Armed with a more comprehensive understanding of how militant organizations vary, we can approach the study of recruitment and participation at a more nuanced level. As I demonstrated in both the FMLN case and the Renamo case, recruitment profiles are a function of both the organization into which members are being recruited and the broader political and socioeconomic context in which the organization operates. In the case of the FMLN, a marginal opening of the political landscape led to some of the OP-Ms targeting participation from people who worked in industry or labor organizations. In the case of Renamo, we observed a shift toward high-skilled recruits (to the extent that was possible) when the group switched to an autonomous funding model. Moving forward, this framework can be leveraged to parse a broader range of recruitment profiles, which in turn may shed light on other important wartime dynamics.

Another natural extension of this project is to apply organizational approaches to the study of rebel governance. Specifically, examining rebel governance through an organizational lens allows us to take what is conventionally understood as a behavioral outcome and reframe it as an organizational one. After all, the routinized administration of local populations or provision of social services is impossible without dedicated subdivisions to support these activities. Of course, these frames are not mutually exclusive. Rebels who govern do behave differently than rebels who do not. However, understanding governance as an organizational outcome can provide insight into the types of structures rebels build to support governance activities, who they recruit into those structures, and how those structures are situated within the broader organization.

Related to its contributions to the rebel governance literature, the book raises important questions about the intersection of organizational structure and territorial control. In the FMLN case work, I revealed that the group with the strongest territorial stronghold was unable to convert its wartime capacity to administer territory into the type of postwar mobilization we are often led to expect.6 Moving forward, careful specification of organizational subdivisions can provide scholars a more precise and direct indication of armed groups’ governance capacity. In doing so, this approach would allow us to move away from proxies for governance (like territorial control) and toward a set of indicators that captures both the strength and nature of governance tasks. By divorcing governance from territorial control, scholars could move toward a broader typology of rebel governance strategies, including the variety of governance tasks that take place in urban areas.

Following from the application to rebel governance, the organizational approach developed in this volume can be used to bridge two emerging trends in civil war research: wartime orders and the local dynamics of rebellion. A wealth of recent scholarship has illuminated the variety of wartime political orders that characterize interactions between rebels, states, and civilians.7 Noting that civil war is often characterized by a mix of violence, coordination, and cooperation, scholars in this tradition elucidate the wide scope of rebel-state (or rebel-civilian) interactions. In a related tradition, scholars like Ana Arjona and Séverine Autesserre have demonstrated the utility of taking subnational institutional dynamics of civil war into account.8 A significant part of this manuscript is built on evidence of subnational geographical variation in wartime structures and the analytic tools for studying it. While the application here was limited to modeling structures conducive to rebel-to-party transformation, the approach can be extended to illuminate how different local structures give rise to different wartime orders. Alternately, we may find that the causal arrow is reversed, at which point we can ask whether the intention to build different wartime orders requires different organizational structures to manage them.

This line of research would provide both scholars and practitioners new-found insight into the local dynamics of civil war. Understanding how groups are structured differently across different regions can, in turn, shed light on both wartime and postwar phenomena. For example, scholars have established that patterns of violence against noncombatants often differ across space within the same rebellion. A nuanced understanding of local organizational structures may help elucidate how and why rebels organize violence differently in different regions. Insights on local organizational variation during war will likely have equally important implications for postwar dynamics as well. Different wartime organizational structures may explain why demobilization and reintegration are more difficult in some places than others, where the risks of remobilization and conflict resurgence are most salient, and why we see local variation in postconflict development.

The final contribution to the conflict literature is a revamped understanding of militant group ideology. Chapter 1 expounded on the concept of organizational ideology to capture the unified principles of conflict that arise when a broad ideology is filtered through an organizational body. In this book, I leveraged the concept of organizational ideology to explain how groups with similar doctrinal bents can harbor very different approaches to organization building and conflict. Specifically, organizational ideology helped parse unanswered questions about why groups with similar ideologies that emerged in the context of similar prewar networks with similar resource endowments nevertheless built very different organizational structures.

Combined with a more thorough understanding of militant organizational structures, organizational ideology can help scholars get newfound traction on the various ways ideology guides and manifests in rebel groups. Specifically, this concept can provide a template for understanding the structure, institutions, decision making, and goals of armed organizations. As such, organizational ideology builds a conceptual bridge between the tractable, yet often blunt, concept of ideology and the more comprehensive, yet elusive, concept of organizational culture.

Zooming out from conflict studies, an additional contribution of this research is that it brings the postconflict literature into more direct conversation with the party formation and democratization literatures. By centering preparty organizational structures, the book’s core approach can answer elusive questions in both traditions. In the first place, patterns in rebel successor party formation can and should be integrated into the broader party formation literature. A lot of ink has been spilled on tracing extant party systems back to their origins in entrenched social cleavages, revolutionary groups, religious organizations, or labor and trade unions.9 Yet, for every party traceable to a social movement or cleavage, we are left with dozens of movements that do not develop into parties—either because they never try, or because they try and fail. As Henry Hale astutely notes, “Many outstanding works on the formation of party systems tend to treat the ‘pre-party period’ as a shapeless transitional phase.”10 By identifying the pretransition structures that make the transformation from rebel group into party organization more likely, this book helps gives shape to the transitional phase and highlights new paths to party formation.

As a corollary, by getting traction on success and failure in party formation, this framework also has important implications for what we know about democratic transition. Postconflict democratization is an especially high-stakes outcome.11 Despite the wide acceptance that democracy is untenable without political parties—and more specifically, without strong parties—scholars of democratic transition rarely acknowledge that party failure in transitional periods could result in a party system lacking in true competition. We can only learn so much about postconflict democratization without accounting for the players in the new political system.

The fact of the matter is that the lion’s share of the party formation literature was not written on (or for) postconflict societies. The insights derived in this book have critical implications for postconflict democratic transition. Unsuccessful rebel-to-party transition—that is, total failure or even becoming a party in name only—can leave a group’s competitor(s) with effective monopolies over power in government, potentially giving rise to a de facto autocracy and even re-creating the conditions that incited the conflict. Insights from this book can help scholars get traction on where democracy is more or less likely to take root across postconflict societies.

Finally, the organizational approach I propose lays the descriptive and analytic foundation for studying political organizations beyond the battlefield. Organizations are the core of political order. Everything from the smallest social movements all the way up to states themselves function more reliably and predictably to the extent that they develop “formalized roles and procedures for enforcing their rules.”12 Any time collective action is routinized, organizational approaches can help us get traction on its dynamics.

Until recently, however, political science has had a limited vocabulary of organizations and we have used that vocabulary in the absence of a syntax: the rules for how different traits combine to give rise to different outcomes. The conceptual and analytic building blocks laid out in chapter 1 help fill in these linguistic gaps: how to describe organizations, how to model organizational outcomes, how the same trait can be helpful or harmful depending on what the group needs to achieve. Additionally—as we saw with rebel-to-party transformation—organizational approaches can reveal new questions (and answers) when applied to familiar problems at the core of our discipline.

For one among countless examples, consider regime change. In political science, at least, regime change is the organizational transformation par excellence: an overhaul in leadership, institutions, operations, and goals. Yet, we rarely describe or study it as such. The result is an intellectual divide between scholars who take voluntaristic approaches—emphasizing the role of elite actors—and scholars who focus on the role of macrostructural constraints.13 However, a state is no less an organization than a militant group—and regimes, therefore, are states’ operational and organizing principles. Understanding regime transition in terms of organizational change can yield new insights about the internal microdynamics that govern and constrain change. This approach can add nuance to the work explaining where and why we observe institutional continuity.14 It can explain the trends and implications of transitioning personnel from the ancien regime into new roles in the regime’s successor. It can reveal new dynamics in our understanding of how party organizations change contemporaneously to accommodate regime overhauls.15

Policy Implications

Beyond its implications for past and future scholarship, the research presented here can provide key insights into some of the most pressing and intractable problems of global and regional security. Each academic contribution enumerated here has a corresponding implication for policy.

Armed with a framework capable of assessing rebels’ prospects for successful transformation, policy makers can construct tailored negotiated settlements. For groups with promising postwar trajectories, settlements may be constructed with an eye toward facilitating the transformation and transition processes. Providing additional resources to the nascent successor party may help tip the balance toward party survival, thereby attenuating the risk of conflict recurrence or de facto one-party systems. Alternately, for groups lacking in key areas that make party formation and integration a likely outcome, settlements can be constructed to dedicate more resources to demobilization and other contingencies to reduce the likelihood of a return to conflict. For example, earmarking resources for job training, land allotments, resettlement, or education may help ensure that demobilized and disintegrated members have a tenable path to societal integration if political integration is outside the group’s reach.

The second policy implication suggests a ground-up reimagining of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs. Although we can trace the origins of DDR programs back to the broader social, political, and economic vision of United Nations peace-building missions, DDR processes themselves have a narrow focus: disarming warring factions, decommissioning senior military personnel, and “breaking command and control” structures.16 In short, DDR programs are aimed at removing soldiers from battlefields. Yet, in light of the organizational insights in the preceding pages, the question is, how do we square a policy aimed at soldiers with an organization that comprises so much more?

An artificially narrow view of militant organizations leads to a narrow understanding of who participates in them, which in turn gives rise to narrow policy directives for demobilizing those participants at the war’s end. Ultimately, practitioners are not talking about what it means to demobilize or reintegrate members who occupy the host of noncombat roles that are just as essential to rebellion. As I have demonstrated, these individuals comprise wings that specialize in administration, communication, and outreach. Thus, when our postconflict policies treat all former rebels as though they are all former soldiers, these policies disregard the people who may retain the greatest capacity to remobilize former members after the war has ended.

If we think back to the FMLN—in which a significant number of leaders hailed from professional posts and their wartime roles transcended the military domain—it becomes clear that providing a path to integration into the state military or police forces would do little to incentivize DDR participation for people who still have university jobs. Understanding the variable diversification of militant organizations can illuminate new—and nuanced—policy options for post-conflict reintegration. Looking ahead, reconstructed DDR policies should take into account wartime roles and not just wartime ranks.

When we consider this open policy problem in light of the established heterogeneity in local wartime dynamics, this insight may shed light on why demobilization and reintegration are more difficult in some places than others. Together, these insights may help policy makers identify areas where the risks of remobilization and conflict resurgence are most salient.

Furthermore, taking local organizational variation seriously can yield more nuanced counterinsurgency policy. Understanding the variation in wartime orders between rebels and local populations is critical if state forces are expecting to leverage civilian cooperation. Building on and applying the organizational and relational insights in this manuscript can help practitioners identify a priori where these strategies are more likely to succeed.

Finally, the book’s descriptive insights about militant organizational diversity also have implications for how policy makers understand and address rebel groups’ recruitment profiles. A central aim in counterinsurgency strategy is to cut off participation at its source. Conventional portrayals of militant organizations, however, lead practitioners to identify a narrow source of potential recruits. For example, it is common to see crackdowns on youth groups and radical student associations. Yet, structurally diverse militant groups will be recruiting for a wider array of roles. As such, understanding the scope of recruits (and skill sets) a given organization is seeking can yield a more nuanced approach to forestalling recruitment.

From Rebellions to Parties

This book offers a novel solution to a long-standing puzzle: how do violent rebels become good democrats? Parsing the question further revealed that it is not merely about accounting for the sequence by which rebel groups move from the battlefield to the ballot. After all, given the prevalence of electoral participation provisions, making a ballot appearance in the first postconflict election is not especially puzzling at all. As long as groups disarm and agree on a slate of candidates, much of the work is done for them. What I wanted to know instead was how a coalition of sometimes loosely bound militants becomes something so different from what they once were that political scientists rarely study the two types of actors in the same classroom.

The scale of change involved in rebel-to-party transformation would turn the heads of even the most optimistic organizational sociologists. Yet, they are the ones who bring a decades-long legacy of modeling organizational change, so I started my investigation with their tools. Taking an organizational approach led me to break from the conventional wisdom about what rebels do and how they are structured to do it. I showed that when we focus on the structures that produce violence to the exclusion of the structures that function in noncombat domains during war, we overlook important dynamics that affect both wartime and postwar outcomes.

Breaking from convention, however, is never costless. A colleague who read an early version of the manuscript said to me, “This is an interesting insight about rebel groups, but where’s the violence?” It was one of those unfortunate deer-in-the-headlight moments that punctuate every research process. And I am certain that at the time I provided an unsatisfying answer. After all, violence is a (or the) defining feature of conflict studies, and the evidence in this book is skewed heavily to illustrate the diversity of structures that often—though not always—exist beyond the armed forces. So, if my civil war book wasn’t about violence, was it even a civil war book? At the risk of indulging staircase wit, I conclude the book with the real answer.

Violence is neither absent from nor inconsequential to this narrative. Rather, the theory and findings demonstrate how much more we can learn when we stop focusing exclusively on how groups organize violence and begin focusing on how they organize, period. In doing so, we glean a more complete picture of how groups’ technologies and repertoires of violence dovetail with their other decisions and activities. While breaking from convention may come at a price, the tools we get in exchange can push the field forward on many dimensions. We can learn about how groups justify and advertise violence in their propaganda; we can learn about how groups recruit and whether (or for which roles) recruitment itself is a violent or coercive act. We can learn about how rebel successor parties mobilize voters from communities beset by violence during wartime and the extent to which nonviolent relations with former rebels weighs more heavily in their electoral calculations. Violence remains central to civil war studies. What I have shown here is that we can get a more incisive understanding of the dynamics of violence if we understand how rebel groups are structured beyond that.