Introduction
TRADING BULLETS FOR BALLOTS
It is easier to start a war than to end it.
—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Confronted with life’s hardships, some people snap, and others snap back.
—Diane Coutu, 2002
In January 1992, after twelve years of fighting in the Salvadoran Civil War, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN; Farabundo Martí Liberación Nacional) signed a ceasefire and power-sharing agreement with the country’s central government. The Chapúltepec Peace Accords included a clause unorthodox for their time: if the FMLN demobilized its combatants, it could form a political party and run both legislative and presidential candidates in the 1994 elections. In spite of a few hitches, the FMLN was officially registered just months after the accords were signed. From the outside, the next eighteen months looked like a whirlwind as the FMLN morphed from a battle-hardened insurgency into a skilled political party. The group held rallies, ran campaigns, mobilized constituents, and won parliamentary seats under the same name—and the same flag—it used in the war. To date, the FMLN has persisted as one of the central parties in Salvadoran politics.
A very different story emerges, however, if we turn to militant organizations in Sierra Leone, Colombia, Turkey, and elsewhere. Groups like the Revolutionary United Front (RUF; Sierra Leone) and the Ejército Popular de Liberación (EPL; Colombia) were presented with nearly identical power-sharing opportunities, but their parties barely got off the ground. While the FMLN managed to secure votes from some of its wartime rivals, the RUF, for instance, could not even count on its own members to show up at the polls.1
In light of conventional understandings of rebellion, the failures should be the unsurprising cases. Yet, in the face of individual, organizational, and environmental obstacles to forging a political party out of an ebbing rebellion, nearly 50 percent of militant groups given the opportunity to transition at the end of war manage to do it successfully. The divergent trajectories of rebel successor parties raise the question at the heart of this book: Why are some militant organizations able to seamlessly transform into political parties on the heels of war while others die trying?
To explain how rebel groups survive the existential risks that accompany the electoral opportunities, this book offers a new theory of rebel-to-party transformation that places the militant organization at the center of the analysis. At its core, rebel-to-party transformation is an organizational phenomenon. It involves taking a militant organization—a group with a preexisting set of roles, relations between them, institutions governing their behavior, and goals2—and transforming it into an organization of a fundamentally different type, and then demanding that it function in a very different environment. Success and failure happen at the organizational level. Building a theory that explains both the process and prospects of successful transformation demands a dedicated organizational approach.
Drawing on insights from organizational sociology, I develop a new framework for modeling the inception, structure, and transformation of militant groups. I argue that the answer to the book’s core question lies in the surprising diversity of noncombat structures built during conflict. Specifically, some rebel groups have what I call proto-party structures: wartime subdivisions staffed with experienced individuals who work together performing tasks relevant to electoral politics. Governance wings, social service wings, and political-messaging wings carry out sophisticated political tasks during war that mirror the core functions of party organizations. Beyond providing tangible skills that translate into the electoral arena, proto-party structures also provide a source of stability—anchoring rebel organizations during a period of intense disruption. Crucially, however, not all rebel groups have them. Leveraging qualitative evidence from El Salvador and a novel global dataset of rebel successor parties, I show that wartime organizational structures hold the key to rebel-to-party success.
Current Explanations, Continuing Puzzles
The end of the Cold War marked a watershed for domestic conflict resolution. As funding for proxy wars dried up overnight, provisions allowing rebel groups to participate in elections were a quick and reliable way to entice belligerents to the negotiating table. The stakes were clear. Countries recovering from civil conflict usually have a bleak prognosis. They face an uphill battle of healing from collective trauma, navigating the legal and interpersonal dynamics of reintegrating former combatants and wartime refugees, rebuilding damaged infrastructure, and, perhaps most pressingly, dealing with the risk of conflict resurgence.3 Even in the presence of robust demobilization programs, ex-rebels not only retain close social ties but also frequently continue acting in an organizational capacity “outside the institutional channels of the state,” thereby increasing the risk of remobilization.4
Rebel-to-party transition promises to mitigate these risks. The logic is straightforward: giving former rebels the opportunity to participate in electoral politics and voice dissent through legal channels should reduce the likelihood that they express dissent through violent ones. Scholars have demonstrated that completed rebel-to-party transitions are associated with postwar stability, development, and democratization.5 The question is, how do the rebels do it?
Answering this question is difficult because it demands that we rethink what we’re studying and how we’re studying it. First, the rebel-to-party process is actually two outcomes rolled into one phenomenon.6 On the one hand, rebel groups undergo an internal transformation: a set of structural and institutional changes needed to forge a party organization. On the other hand, rebel groups undergo an external transition: a shift toward operating in a new (electoral) environment. Building a party organization and participating in electoral politics are related, but they capture different processes, entail different challenges, and have different observable indicators. Understanding the formation and performance of rebel successor parties demands a thorough explanation of both outcomes. Yet, the balance of inquiry is tipped heavily toward explaining transition, while the process of organizational transformation remains elusive.
From descriptive accounts of the process to theories explaining electoral participation, existing research has made critical inroads into a multifaceted phenomenon. Taken together, descriptions of the rebel-to-party process make up an extensive end-of-war to-do list for militant groups to complete as they look ahead to electoral politics: (1) dismantle combat units, (2) reformulate decision-making structures, (3) restructure finances, (4) recruit “competent candidates for public office,” (5) build party structures, and (6) adapt to the postconflict environment.7 Accordingly, transformation unfolds by a process of structural replacement—building party structures to replace decommissioned combat units8—spearheaded by elites who are simultaneously renegotiating their command structure to more closely resemble that of a political party.
The intuitiveness of structural replacement masks the scope of its omissions. To build party structures, we must first ask, what are party structures? And, for that matter, what are rebel structures? Even a rudimentary description of organizational change demands an inventory of the new and discarded subdivisions of the group, yet the content of “party structures” remains unspecified. Without it, arguing that rebels transform by “building party structures” is tantamount to explaining that metamorphosis proceeds by “building butterfly structures.” It may be technically true, but it is analytically unhelpful.
Even if we were to fully specify party structures, we would find that the structural replacement hypothesis buckles under scrutiny.9 Changes to a group’s structure are “rare and costly” and the more extensive the change, the more it “subjects the organization to a greatly increased risk of death.”10 According to organizational theorists, nearly every item on the to-do list—for example, “dismantling one structure and building another,” replacing leadership from the outside, and “reformulating established power systems”—is a direct threat to both organizational stability and the capacity to adapt to changing environments.11 Consequently, the first four items on the list are not only difficult on their own, but succeeding at them would make the fifth item even less attainable.
Lastly, existing descriptions place an undue emphasis on leaders’ agency over the process. In some descriptions, leaders have the power not only to decide whether their organizations adapt but also to strategically time transformation to capitalize on recent military successes.12 However, treating elites as the sole arbiters of transformation is problematic because it exclusively locates organizational challenges in the upper echelons of the rebellion without defining the scope of elites or the bounds of agency. While rebel leaders play important roles, reducing transformation to elite negotiations quickly falls into the trap of what Paul Staniland calls “unrealistic voluntarism”: that leaders could effect change “if only they put enough thought or effort into it.”13 Broadly, we should be skeptical of emphasizing elite agency absent organizational constraints.14
In sum, existing accounts of the transformation process underestimate how brittle rebel groups can be. They assume too easily that rebel-to-party transformation can truly proceed—and succeed—by completely refashioning the organization in the interlude between the last bullet and the first ballot. By not acknowledging the existential risks of major organizational overhauls we are liable to overlook what organizations need to insulate themselves against collapse.
Moving beyond description, current approaches to explaining transformation and electoral participation can be disaggregated by the locus of their effects: institutional context, demand-side explanations, and supply-side explanations. The first branch of theories examines whether electoral participation provisions in negotiated settlements facilitate transition either by providing a smooth path to electoral politics or by incentivizing third parties to monitor elections.15 Others draw on the party-systems literature arguing that different electoral institutions affect the barriers to entry for new parties.16 The exogenous obstacles (and advantages) that rebels face are indispensable considerations as they attempt to transform and pivot into electoral politics. However, without considering the internal obstacles, these theories are unable to parse success from failure.
Demand-side explanations turn their attention to the factors driving voter mobilization. Some argue that popular support during the war means former rebels enter the electoral arena with a built-in constituency.17 More recently, Sarah Daly paved a new path aimed at explaining why belligerents with violent wartime legacies are nonetheless able to secure an ample vote share on election day. She theorizes that voters are equally likely to mobilize out of fear of conflict resurgence as they are out of policy preferences.18 Since the stakes of rebel-to-party transition hinge on the party’s long-term political integration, explaining voter mobilization is a crucial piece of the puzzle. However, demand-side explanations ask a subtly different question that makes a large analytic difference. Asking what incentivizes people to vote for a rebel successor party assumes that party consolidation has already happened. Accounting for success and failure in party formation is analytically prior to demand-side explanations of electoral victories.
By specifying wartime organizational traits that affect postwar party success, supply-side theories should come the closest to getting traction on organizational dynamics. Scholars in this tradition posit five explanations: (1) prewar party experience, (2) centralization and cohesion in the organization, (3) the presence of “convertible capabilities,” (4) wartime territorial control, and (5) resource endowments.19 When scrutinized through an organizational lens, however, each trait raises questions that compromise its theoretical viability.
The prewar party hypothesis is intuitive: if you were a party before, all you have to do is do it again. But is party politics really just like riding a bicycle? If the average conflict lasts ten years, will prewar electoral skills be as sharp when the war ends as they were going in? Much like playing an instrument or writing in cursive, “organizations remember by doing,” and the corollary (sadly for former parties and my jazz saxophone days) is that skills “decay with disuse.”20 This theory lacks a clear transmission mechanism whereby party-relevant skills are kept intact and deployable at a moment’s notice.
Other hypotheses draw directly on organizational concepts, but they do so without acknowledging some sticky countervailing effects. Centralization, bureaucratization, and cohesion are great if the goal is to avoid fragmentation at all costs, yet they quickly become liabilities if the goal is to swiftly adapt to a changing environment. In practice, bureaucracy and centralization are a double-edged sword: what organizations gain in effective control, they sacrifice in flexibility.21 Steven Levitsky drew attention to this apparent paradox in party dynamics when finding that, in Argentina, the Justicialist Party’s capacity for adaptation was primarily attributable to its weak institutionalization and decentralized structure.22
Convertible capabilities, territorial control, and “bush bureaucracies” have distinct referents but operate through the same demand-side mechanism: each represents a capacity to mobilize wartime supporters into postwar voters.23 This branch of theories further illuminates shortcomings of demand-side explanations. Though wartime support may well predict postwar willingness to vote for the rebel successor party, it does not explain their ability to cast votes come election day. Voter mobilization requires registration (which itself requires official identification and basic literacy), knowledge of election timing, transportation to the polls, and a measure of confidence in the safety of showing up and voting for the party they want in office. Without accounting for the nascent party’s organizational capacity to assist in the logistical undertakings required to convert supporters into voters, demand-side theories will only ever explain voter galvanization, not voter mobilization.
Last, although access to sufficient resources is an incontrovertible factor in rebel-to-party success, the value of resources is presented as organizationally invariant. However, not all organizations have equal capacity to efficiently deploy resources or the desire to allocate them in the same way. Rather, as Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman observe, “the politics of resource allocation” prevent some organizations from quickly redirecting resources in response to upheavals.24 As such, theorizing about resources in the absence of structural mediators will overlook this critical source of variation in whether more resources can make the rebel-to-party difference.25 As with the other explanations, we can get more precise traction on the outcome when we consider explanations like resource endowments through an organizational lens.26 Crucially, rebels understand the interplay between resources and organization. An FMLN analyst demonstrates this reasoning explicitly: “For some time, it has been possible to organize groups of military operatives in each base, but mostly in name only. Until today, these groups have not operated. The causes? Weakness in the organization, and lack of shoes.”27
From the outside, electoral participation provisions seem like winning the postconflict jackpot: former rebels are not only granted amnesty but also given influence over the future of the country for which they ostensibly fought. From the inside, however, the end of war and demand for immediate restructuring is a massive shock to the organization.28 Even for mature organizations with abundant resources, undergoing extensive internal changes while learning how to function in a new environment poses severe existential threats. Hannan and Freeman offer a quip that both encapsulates and complicates the phenomenon: “failing churches do not become retail stores.”29 But in the case of rebel-to-party transformation, they sort of do. What we need then is an approach suited to modeling both outcomes—and the actors at the heart of them.
Organizational Approach and Theory of Rebel Successor Party Formation
Angelo Panebianco began his treatise on political parties by noting that “most contemporary analyses resist studying parties for what they obviously are: organizations.” Thirty years later, Sarah E. Parkinson and Sherry Zaks argued that the same is true for many of their precursors.30 This is not to say that political scientists ignore organizations.31 In recent years, conflict scholars have leveraged organizational traits to explain everything from patterns of violence and restraint to wartime resilience to fragmentation to conflict resurgence and even rebel-to-party transformation.32 Yet, our existing toolkit is systematically incomplete. We have imported a limited vocabulary of traits capable of describing the shape of organizational structures (e.g., centralized, hierarchical, fragmented), but we lack the vocabulary to describe the content of those structures or trace the other implications of those traits. The result is a good intuition served by inadequate tools.
A central goal of this book is thus to offer a corrective and a path forward by building a theory of rebel-to-party transformation on organizational foundations. Doing so is not simply a matter of adding new concepts to the mix; rather, it entails recognizing that organizations behave in unique ways, are bound by unique constraints, and are vulnerable to unique risks—all of which must be baked into our theories. Building an organizational theory of the rebel-to-party process involves three conceptual and analytic moves: recasting the outcomes of interest in organizational terms, expanding our language for describing and theorizing about the organizational structures that affect the outcome, and examining the full scope of traits that affect the group’s operations, dynamics, and potential.
First, consider the outcome. Rebel-to-party transformation involves taking an organization with a structure optimized to wage war and turning it into an organization capable of running campaigns, winning elections, and governing once in office. In organizational terms, this outcome is fundamentally a puzzle about how groups execute a massive organizational change. Providing a veritable blueprint for theory building and analysis, the organizational literature identifies four questions a comprehensive theory of change must answer: What changes? How does the process of change unfold? What is the context of change? And what traits allow some organizations to survive the overhaul?33
The second step examines how structure affects the prospects for change. When it comes to surviving the risks of transformation, scholars agree that change is easier to the extent that groups have structures with “preexisting competencies” relevant to their post-transformation needs.34 Put simply, rebel-to-party transformation will be less difficult if some parts of the organization are as useful for being parties as they were for being rebels. Assessing the variety of competencies demands an expanded understanding of rebel organizational structure. Namely, specifying the roles and subdivisions present in an organization tells us the variety of skills the group has at its disposal. From there, it is not a far leap to imagine the importance of a nuanced structural inventory when that same organization has to suddenly perform a different set of tasks.
The irony is that the necessary structural insights are prominent in the conflict literature, we just need an organizational lens to see them. Specifically, the literature on rebel governance is built on the observation that rebels engage in diverse behaviors beyond the combat realm. Rebels govern civilians; they provide social services; they distribute propaganda.35 Undergirding these behaviors, however, are robust structures that make the governing, provisions, and distribution possible. Taking an organizational approach enables us to take critical insights about what rebels do and translate them into insights about what rebels are.
Finally, groups will be more likely to survive major overhauls if they have traits conducive to resilience. Resilience describes an organization’s capacity to survive in the face of major shocks. Of course, militant groups operate in volatile environments, but the shocks of war are usually short-lived: lost battles or augmented counterinsurgency operations. Conflict scholars who have adopted resilience frameworks usually do so to explain rebels’ capacity to weather these temporary shocks of war as they continue the fight.36 In other words, the literature as it stands is well equipped to explain resilience within rebellion. Not all shocks, however, are temporary. An end to the conflict and the opportunity to transform into a political party permanently change the demands placed on the organization. As such, rebel groups must not only be able to weather the shock but also fundamentally alter their structure to function under the new order. The formidable tasks and risks associated with this disruption demand a theoretical framework capable of explaining resilience beyond rebellion—one that captures both the capacity for survival and the process of transformation.
The Content of Change: Rebel vs. Party Structures
The first part of the theory addresses the content of change: what about the organization changes and what traits make it possible? Taking an organizational approach allows me to specify what parties need, what rebels have, and why some rebel groups are better poised to close that gap than others. Some—though not all—rebel groups build structures during war that mirror the core structures of party organizations. These proto-party structures hold the key to successful transformation. Subdivisions dedicated to governance, political messaging, and social service provision imbue militant organizations with relevant skills, expertise, and organizational routines that meet the demands of electoral politics. When they exist alongside traits like self-reflection and flexibility, these structures enable rebel groups to more effectively pivot from the battlefield to the campaign trail than their more homogeneous counterparts. However, militant groups vary considerably in the number of proto-party structures they build. To foreshadow the dataset I constructed to test the theory statistically, figure 0.1 depicts the range of proto-party diversity across rebellions. Along with other wartime traits that facilitate adaptation and resilience, proto-party structures (or the absence thereof) form the foundation of my theory.
FIGURE 0.1. Distribution of proto-party structures across rebellions
The Process of Change: Reconstruction vs. Repurposing
Explaining organizational change demands more than just a more comprehensive inventory of rebel and party structures. How do you actually build a party out of the pieces of rebels? The answer is, it depends. Different structural legacies give rise to different processes of party formation. Crucially, however, they are not equally likely to work. Groups that end the war with relatively homogeneous organizations—comprising structures dedicated primarily to combat and logistics—will have no option but to build a party from scratch. Recall, however, that rebuilding an organization from the ground up is difficult and destabilizing.
By contrast, groups that end the war with proto-party structures intact face a much less treacherous path to change. Beyond accruing relevant experience throughout the war, rebel groups that include proto-party structures are able to transform by redirecting resources through established channels to augment existing subdivisions staffed with experienced personnel. For these groups, the transformation process unfolds by repurposing what they already have rather than building, staffing, and integrating new structures from the ground up. While organizational change is never simple, forging a party by repurposing existing resources is not only more efficient but also less destabilizing than gutting the organization and building a new one in its place.
These depictions, of course, represent the extremes in party building. Rarely will groups need to entirely gut the organization, and just as rarely will they have a built-in party ready to hit the campaign trail on day one. In reality, militant organizations will have some divisions that retain their utility as well as gaps that demand rapid construction. Thus, we should expect to see some combination, but the more a rebellion can lean on repurposing, the more stable the transformation and the greater the probability of success. The theoretical objective is not to simplify the world beyond realism, but instead to highlight that differences in wartime structures critically affect the process of postwar transformation. The extent to which rebel groups have embedded skills is the extent to which their organizations are structurally anchored during turbulent times.
Figure 0.2 summarizes the organizational theory of transformation.
FIGURE 0.2. Overview of theory
The Context of Change: Transition to Electoral Politics
Organizational transformation is only half of the rebel-to-party battle. After surviving the end of war, the demobilization process, and the internal dynamics of party building, rebel successor parties still have a monstrous task ahead: convince people that they are worth voting for.37 Since the stakes of transition hinge on political integration of the rebel successor party, a comprehensive theory must explain not just how parties form, but why some parties stick. The final part of the theory explains how wartime structures can—and do—translate into voter mobilization and long-term integration.
Taking an organizational lens to insights from the rebel governance literature is instructive here as well. Organizations with subdivisions dedicated to governance, local administration, and service provision enter the electoral arena having already forged the type of political linkages conducive to galvanizing potential voters.38 Beyond currying favor with local populations during the war, these structures confer the skills and organizational capacity to convert wartime support into postwar votes. Specifically, civilian-facing structures built during war are prime candidates for repurposing to manage the heavy logistical lift of voter registration and mobilization.
Here I summarize the testable propositions from the theory:
• Rebel organizations articulate clear organizational ideologies, which reliably predict their wartime organizational structures and priorities.
• Groups whose organizational ideologies center on the importance of local engagement are more likely to build proto-party structures than those whose ideologies focus on battle readiness and militancy.
• Militant organizations that end the war with proto-party structures intact will transform by repurposing existing structures.
• Militant organizations that end the war with homogeneous organizations (or structures that do not bring “portable skills”) will transform by building party structures anew.
• Militant groups with legacies of organizational flexibility and self-reflection will be more likely to survive transformation.
• Rebel groups with proto-party legacies are more likely to both successfully transform into parties and exhibit electoral longevity when they enter the party system.
Assumptions
The organizational theory of transformation accounts for each stage in the rebel-to-party process. As with any theory, it is built on a few core assumptions that must hold for it to accurately describe the formation, consolidation, and integration of rebel successor parties. First, I have to demonstrate that proto-party structures are not epiphenomenal to the outcome. In other words, if some prior (antecedent) condition shapes both the wartime structures and rebel-to-party success, then organizational structures may be incidentally correlated with the outcome, but not consequential. To address this issue, I precede the rebel-to-party theory by first accounting for the origins of wartime organizational structures. In addition to explaining the source of the theory’s key explanatory variable, this analysis directly addresses whether the factors purported to influence structure—prewar networks, resources, ideology—also account for transformation.
Building on prior work, I argue that prewar networks, resources, and ideology play critical organizational roles, but only insofar as they are filtered through the organizational ideology of rebellion. Organizational ideology affords new insight into why groups that subscribe to identical doctrines nonetheless have distinct beliefs about what rebellion entails on the ground and exhibit different capacities to bring that rebellion to life. Through this lens, prewar networks, resources, and doctrine combine in predictable ways to shape the structures groups build in service of their goals, but they are inextricable from the organizational dynamics that mediate them. I test this theory (and the underlying assumption) in chapter 2 and demonstrate that no one factor is independently sufficient to explain wartime structure or postwar transformation.
Second, for proto-party structures to operate via the mechanism I propose, I must find evidence of dedicated structures—rather than just behaviors or individual skills. Otherwise, the specific utility of organizational subdivisions is less consequential than I anticipate. Moreover, groups must exhibit significant variation in proto-party structures from one insurgency to the next. If all groups (or no groups) invest resources into building robust noncombat subdivisions during conflict, then we must look elsewhere to get traction on how to parse rebel-to-party success from failure. In chapter 3, I elaborate on the logic of why dedicated subdivisions are necessary for the theory to hold, and throughout the book I provide both qualitative and quantitative evidence illustrating the extent and variation of these structures.
Third, not only must the relevant structures persist until the end of war, but groups must also exhibit plausible “transmission mechanism.”39 If, alternately, groups emerge with proto-party structures, but the structures wither as the war progresses, then these structures are not an enduring organizational legacy with the capacity to influence postconflict politics. Similarly, if, at the end of war, skilled rebels “jump ship” to find better jobs, then these structures are significantly less likely to be converted into competent subdivisions in the new party.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, rebels must understand the organizational value of proto-party structures. While the theory does not require that rebels intentionally build structures with future transformation in mind, it does demand evidence that the composition, diversity, and evolution of their organizations occupy a central role in wartime strategy. Subsequently, those leading the transformation must indicate that they understand the postwar utility of wartime structures. If, instead, rebels build partylike structures during war, but then scrap those wings to start anew in the electoral arena, then wartime features are likely playing less of a role in successful transformation than the theory predicts. In short, for this theory to hold water, we need evidence that rebels are good organizational theorists, too.
Scope Conditions
Broadly, the theory applies to nonstate armed groups engaged in a violent political conflict with an incumbent power, who have the opportunity and desire to compete in electoral politics. Groups must be engaged in a localized conflict, since becoming a party requires a target government in which to participate. Thus, the theory is only apposite to groups for whom a within-state political solution is conceivable. As such, transnational groups, such as al-Qaeda or Boko Haram, which seek to expand their influence over many states (rather than vie for political influence within a single state) are outside the scope of this theory.40 After all, one must be able to specify where a group would become a party (or fail) to assess the legality of transitioning into politics.
Additionally, the theory only applies to groups that have the willingness and opportunity to participate in legal, competitive politics. While the desire to build a party is insufficient to account for organizational transformation, it is nonetheless necessary. If a central goal of this book is to parse why some groups succeed at party formation while others fail, we will only get meaningful answers by comparing groups that all tried, but had different results. Legal opportunity is the institutional complement to willingness. To assess the success or failure of a rebel-to-party transformation, the group must have attempted party formation in a place where party formation was legal.41
Here, I turn to a few key areas where my theory does not draw exclusionary lines. First, I make no distinction between groups involved in civil wars—particularly as the literature conventionally defines them—and groups involved in lower-level violent conflict. The theory explains how militant organizations transform into political parties. The severity of the conflict and number of battle deaths per year do not bear consequentially on this outcome.42
Second, the mode of conflict termination is inconsequential so long as the group has the legal opportunity to form a party. Whether party formation was a built-in condition of a negotiated settlement (e.g., Renamo or the FMLN) or it was a choice the organization made independent of conflict termination, the process of transformation and salience of organizational factors remains. Of course, if the group is defeated militarily, it is unlikely to have a legal path to politics or the organizational capacity to get there. More controversially, perhaps, conflict termination—or at least disarmament—is not a scope condition at all. Previously, disarmament has featured as a scope condition both for the range of groups considered in a given analysis and as a defining feature of rebel-to-party success.43 As I have argued in previous work, retaining an armed wing does not inherently prevent the organization from functioning as a political party. To wit, treating “failure to disarm” as synonymous with “failure to transition” gives rise to ambiguous measurements and prevents scholars from asking important questions.44 Many “former” rebel groups go on to have long-standing, electorally successful careers while maintaining an armed wing. Omitting these groups from analyses prevents us from asking important questions about whether and how political integration shapes patterns of violence.
Finally, while I do not draw a hard line on regime type, the theory works best in cases where rebel successor parties enter at least a semicompetitive electoral system. In contrast, some groups transitioned into one-party statehood after military defeats or deposing their colonial governments. Here, I anticipate that their organizational transformations likely unfold in similar ways to that of other groups, yet we will find less of a tie between the group’s capacity for voter mobilization and its governmental staying power.45
Research Design and Data
The formation, consolidation, and integration of rebel successor parties is many outcomes rolled into one phenomenon. As such, my research design tracks with the disaggregated outcomes that structure my theory: the formation of the organization and then the content, process, and context of change. Broadly, I use a mixed-method approach combining intraorganizational process tracing in the FMLN with cross-national and subnational statistical tests on two original datasets.
Case Selection and Qualitative Data
The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front is the empirical through line of the book. The unique circumstances under which the FMLN coalesced are important for understanding the analytic purchase of the case. Beginning in 1970, leftist revolutionary movements began to crop up across El Salvador. The FMLN originated as five different politico-military organizations (OP-Ms) with different structures, different views on rebellion, and different sources of funding. At the behest of their patron, they reluctantly came together under the same name, in the same country, to fight for the same outcome, drawing on (essentially) the same support system. The FMLN waged an eleven-year civil war against the government, which in 1992 culminated in a negotiated settlement providing a legal path for the organization to transition into party politics. Beginning with El Salvador’s first truly democratic elections in 1994, the FMLN party has been consistently successful at both the local and national levels; since 2009, two FMLN candidates have held the presidency.
Two key details, however, make the FMLN an unparalleled opportunity for this analysis. First, due to the severity of internal rivalries and the haste to get a rebellion off the ground, the leaders allowed each of the five OP-Ms to retain its own organizational structure and routines. Crucially, the component OP-Ms differed considerably in whether and to what extent they valued and built proto-party structures. Second, after failing at their initial attempt to overthrow the Salvadoran government, each constituent OP-M retreated to a unique area of the country. As a result, local populations typically only interacted with one of the five groups throughout the war. Thus, the Salvadoran case exhibits a pronounced geographical phenomenon, the implications of which are analytically invaluable. Five militant organizations, with different levels of proto-party diversification, occupied different territory and interacted with different populations. As a result, this case holds constant every other factor purported to shape the emergence, structure, and behavior of militant groups.
To exploit the intraorganizational variation, I conduct comparative process tracing within a single organization. For the qualitative analysis, I draw on over three hundred archived documents from six archives in both El Salvador and the United States, dozens of recorded interviews and radio broadcasts from the war, and published individual histories. The wartime documents vary in type, though the most useful primarily fall into three categories: internal memoranda, diaries, and propaganda. Along with secondary sources, I use these documents to construct organizational biographies of the FMLN’s constituent groups—tracing their structures, operations, and territorial occupations through space and time.46 I rely primarily on archival data to test a core assumption underlying the theory: that rebels think about organizations about as much as I do. Again, while leaders need not have their organization’s full trajectory planned out at the start of war, they cannot be ignorant of organizational dynamics either.
In contrast, asking former (let alone current) FMLN members about wartime organizational structures carries a few risks that could call into question whether the mechanisms I propose reflect reality. The most benign hitch is that people may simply have an inaccurate or incomplete memory about where they were situated in the organization and what the organization looked like beyond their rank. Second, and more problematically, asking directly about organizational structure risks imposing an abstract and post-hoc framework on actors whose dynamics and decision-making were driven by other considerations entirely. This concern mirrors what Sarah E. Parkinson calls “doctrinal bias.” Doctrinal bias refers to the empirical blind spots that emerge when researchers’ questions are shaped by their own (narrow) understanding of a phenomenon.47 Even asking about organizational structures risks forcing my own theoretical lens on others’ experiences and interpretation of their pasts.
Finally, since internal wartime documents serve strategic purposes, they are likely to give accurate representations of the organization’s structure. Relying on archived documents from wartime prevents some (though not all) intentional misrepresentation of the organization. Specifically, since the FMLN is currently concerned with its political standing, members may be liable to portray the wartime organization through rose-colored glasses—playing up social services, downplaying violence. To be sure, I would expect this bias anywhere—post-hoc justifications of involvement with violent organizations are commonplace and do not always reflect the motivations to participate at the time of joining. Yet, I expect the bias to be more severe where individuals have a vested interest in their party’s future success. As a result, this form of misrepresentation would bias results in favor of my theory, which I aim to avoid.
Of course, archival sources are not devoid of bias. My access to any information from the war demands that it was written down in the first place, preserved, curated, and made available. Each stage in that process brings a new risk of loss: sensitive information may be destroyed during the war, incriminating information may be destroyed after it, archivists may curate or avoid information that paints the group in one light or another. While these biases cannot be avoided entirely, triangulating across sources and document types can help counterbalance some of the effects. Moreover, many of the documents central to my analysis were captured and preserved in their entirety during the war. As such, the group did not have the opportunity to strategically edit or destroy sensitive information.
Quantitative Data
To complement the qualitative case work, I constructed two quantitative data-sets to help get traction on my theory. The primary data contribution is a novel cross-national dataset that includes fine-grained data on rebels’ wartime organizational structures and their postconflict electoral performances. The Insurgent Structures and Outcomes data comprise seventy-eight rebel groups that operated between 1974 and 2018. I draw on primary sources, secondary sources, and consultation with country- and group-level experts to code wartime organizational characteristics, including but not limited to proto-party structures, sources of finance, and the types of local security engagement groups exhibit.
I also bring quantitative data to bear on the Salvadoran case. I created a municipality-level dataset that exploits the geographic variation in the FMLN’s wartime presence and the groups’ differing commitments to building proto-party structures. Drawing on hundreds of primary source and secondary source documents, I code whether an OP-M (and which) occupied territory during the war. I then merge this dataset with municipal-level electoral results from El Salvador’s 1994 elections to test whether proto-party structures built during war predict the FMLN’s postwar electoral performance.
Empirical Tests
The first set of tests I devise aim to assess key features of organizational content. How do militant organizational structures originate? Do wartime structures develop (and diverge) in line with my expectations? To ensure that wartime organizational structures are not epiphenomenal, I employ process tracing to test my hypotheses about the organizational origins of the FMLN’s different sects. The first analysis begins ten years before the war. I test the organizational ideology theory against alternative explanations of militant group structures from the literature using prewar documents and interviews and comparing those accounts to the FMLN’s actual structure on the eve of the insurrection. Then, I trace the evolution of their structures and key traits throughout the conflict to ensure that proto-party structures (1) vary and (2) do not exist in name only.
Next, I test the theory’s mechanism: the process of transformation. Specifically, given the divergent organizational development between FMLN subdivisions, I ask whether transformation proceeds as I expect. I use process tracing to map the parallel transformation processes across the FMLN’s constituent groups. In line with my predictions, the organizations that developed robust proto-party structures during the conflict consciously repurposed those structures into comparable roles in the new party. Conversely, the more combat-centric group (the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo—ERP) was forced to build party structures from scratch and, as a result, was marginalized from the process.
The final set of empirical tests pivots from testing hypotheses about internal transformation to test whether organizational traits also predict rebels’ successful transition into electoral politics (i.e., the context of change). Not only is political integration the more observable outcome (relative to transformation), but the stakes of allowing rebel groups to participate in politics also hinge on their integration into the electoral system. Alongside important contextual factors like the electoral system, I expect that proto-party structures provide distinct electoral advantages to groups that build them. To test this expectation, I construct an original cross-national dataset comprising detailed organizational information and rebel-to-party outcomes on seventy-eight militant organizations that had the legal opportunity to transition into politics. In addition to the cross-national test, I leverage the municipality-level dataset to test whether the FMLN received more votes in municipalities under the control of OP-Ms that built more robust proto-party structures during the conflict. This subnational test helps confirm that the aggregate proto-party measure in the previous test is not capturing a different dynamic entirely.
Contributions
In explaining the structure, evolution, and transformation of rebel organizations, this book contributes to several literatures in comparative politics and international relations. First and most directly, the insights that follow from the organizational approach advance the rebel-to-party literature by illuminating the scope of challenges militant groups face on the heels of war as well as the organizational traits enabling them to overcome those challenges. In short, this approach reveals both new questions and new answers that are central to this field. Moreover, armed with tools apposite to tracing the structural evolution of rebel groups, this framework allows us to test—and upend—the assumption that party building begins only once the war ends. In doing so, the book reveals a new mechanism of organizational transformation, the applications of which transcend rebel-to-party studies.
The second contribution is a set of powerful tools for modeling rebel organizations and their dynamics. By taking the consolidation and structure of rebel organizations as the analytic starting point, this book reveals new and critical dimensions along which militant organizations vary. Insights about structural variation and the organizational ideologies that shape those structures together lay the groundwork for conducting more incisive comparisons among rebel groups. In turn, these comparisons may help us get valuable traction and new perspectives on the dynamics central to conflict research, including rebel governance, patterns of violence and restraint, recruitment tactics, and conflict resurgence.
For example, scholarship examining the microdynamics of civil war has a distinct behavioral focus: we ask who joins rebellions and why, under what conditions groups forcibly recruit participants and from where, how and when rebels deploy different forms of violence, and, more recently, when and why rebels engage in behaviors beyond violence.48. To be sure, understanding the motivation, timing, and variation in these behaviors is critical. Organization, however, is what makes those behaviors possible and predictable. This study contributes the conceptual and theoretical foundations needed to model the organizational structures underlying the behaviors we observe. Layering an organizational approach onto the microdynamics of civil war sheds light on the institutions, structures, and constraints that govern coordinated behavior during conflict.
Zooming out from conflict research, this book addresses an apparent tension in the literature and provides a unified path forward. Despite studying an outcome that, at its core, concerns the process of changing institutions to respond to exogenous demands, rebel-to-party scholars rarely take historical institutionalist approaches. This apparent oversight is both shocking and understandable. On the one hand, the rebel-to-party literature is sidestepping a set of theoretical approaches aimed at explaining both change and stasis in the face of exogenous shocks (i.e., critical junctures). In short, the type of phenomenon at the heart of historical institutionalism describes the rebel-to-party trajectory to a T. On the other hand, these approaches primarily emphasize the difficulty of change. Noting that patterns of institutional reproduction give rise to path dependence (even in the face of inefficiency) and that change is risky, scholars in this tradition note that change is rare and (usually) incremental. As such, historical institutionalism seems like an odd choice to bring to a subfield where major changes are more the rule than the exception.
The organizational approach derived here works toward resolving this tension and putting scholars of change in productive conversation with one another. Bringing key organizational characteristics like role diversification and flexibility into the analysis allows us to see that the same change (here, rebel-to-party transformation) is not actually the same challenge from one group to the next. These concepts and the organizational framework that contextualizes them can help historical institutionalists account for—and even predict—the major changes that happen in the face of path dependence. Conversely, this framework also makes historical institutionalism more compatible with inquiries that deal in major transformations.
Road Map
The book proceeds in three parts. Part I (chapters 1 and 2) lays the conceptual and empirical foundation for building an organizational theory of rebel-to-party transformation. Chapter 1 takes a critical step back and develops a comprehensive organizational approach in service of modeling rebel-to-party transformation. While political scientists have often turned to organizational traits to help explain various important political dynamics, I demonstrate that when we hold our existing analytic toolkit up to the empirical reality of militant groups, even our capacity for accurate description falls short.49 Developing an organizational theory of rebel-to-party transformation is impossible without a more complete understanding of the actors at the heart of this process. Drawing on organizational sociology and empirical evidence from rebel organizations, I expand our conceptual and theoretical toolkit, use it to model the origin of rebels’ wartime organizational structures, and build an organizational theory of rebel-to-party transformation.
Chapter 2 uses intragroup comparative process tracing to follow the organizational development of the FMLN’s five subgroups from 1970 to the onset of war. In so doing, this chapter serves a threefold purpose. Most broadly, it serves as a contextual introduction to the primary case of the book, the FMLN. It also tests the theory of organizational origins presented in chapter 1—thereby allowing me to test the assumption that organizational structures are epiphenomenal to the outcome. Finally, examining the FMLN through the lens of the new framework highlights the descriptive shortcomings of our existing organizational toolkit.
Part II, comprising chapters 3, 4, and 5, leverages the organizational approach and empirical insights laid out previously to build and test the organizational theory of rebel-to-party transformation. They proceed in lockstep with the theory—exploring the content, process, and context of transformation. The front end of each chapter develops the theoretical framework and the back end employs comparative process tracing to test each theoretical component. Focusing on the content of change, chapter 3 develops the framework mapping proto-party structures in rebel groups to the core structures of party organizations. It also specifies key wartime traits that facilitate adaptation: the ability to repurpose existing resources in response to shocks. Then, the empirical section traces differences in the formation and evolution of proto-party structures across different sects of the FMLN.
Chapter 4 then lays out the mechanism: the process of organizational transformation. Drawing on structural insights from chapter 3, I derive two pathways to party building. Which path they take is contingent on their organizational endowments at the end of conflict. Rebel groups with largely homogeneous, combat-centric structures will come to the negotiating table (mostly) empty handed. These groups will be forced to build party structures from scratch. However, militant organizations that developed robust proto-party structures during war have the option to repurpose and augment existing structures. To test this theory, I trace the FMLN’s internal restructuring as it builds a party ahead of the 1994 elections. While the group’s initial plans entailed giving the five component organizations an equal role in the nascent party, I demonstrate that the OP-Ms with the most developed proto-party structures wound up spearheading the transformation, while the more combat-centric group was marginalized, despite its preeminent role in the FMLN during the war.
Chapter 5 pivots to theorize and test the conditions under which rebel successor parties actually transition and integrate into electoral politics. I argue that the utility of proto-party structures transcends the organization’s boundaries. Specifically, organizations with functioning proto-party structures are forging politically salient relationships with local populations and other organizations (e.g., unions, student groups, and professional associations) during war. Nascent rebel successor parties can then leverage these relationships when their priorities turn from war making to voter mobilization. I test this theory both cross-nationally and at the municipal level in the Salvadoran case. Proto-party structures far outperform alternative explanations of rebel-to-party transition from the literature when it comes to predicting long-term political integration.
Part III looks outward and ahead. Chapter 6 transports the theory beyond the borders of El Salvador. Here, I trace the organizational evolution and divergent rebel-to-party prospects of two organizations outside of Latin America: Renamo in Mozambique and the RUF in Sierra Leone. For different reasons, both cases constitute hard tests of the theory, which nevertheless explain the overall trajectories and the seemingly idiosyncratic counterexamples in each case. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the core findings, enumerates the book’s contributions, outlines salient areas for future research on rebel-to-party transformation and militant organizations more broadly, and engages the central implications for counterinsurgency and postconflict policy.