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" Rebel Fratricide in Strong States: "
Evans, Tyler
Atzili, Boaz
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1107226
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2437092688
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| Main Entry
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Atzili, Boaz
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Evans, Tyler
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| Title & Author
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Rebel Fratricide in Strong States:\ Evans, TylerAtzili, Boaz
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| College
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American University
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| Date
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2019
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| student score
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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438
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| Abstract
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Why do rebels sometimes go to war with each other, weakening their position against their common enemy, the state? This dissertation compares two cases of intra-rebel war that pose an especially difficult puzzle for existing theories of intra-rebel war: the fighting between the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA in Belfast (1969-1980) and war among Kurdish revolutionaries in Turkey (1974-1980). These two cases are puzzling because both occurred in areas where the state was strong, and therefore able to capitalize operationally and politically on rebel fratricide. By comparing these two cases, this dissertation argues that broadly similar causal mechanisms can help to explain these intra-rebel wars. In both cases, rebel organizations were shaped by their involvement in defensive violence in response to repression from the state and state-aligned attackers. Learning to counteract this violence changed the operational and cultural character of these organizations, with downstream effects on how these organizations strategically appraised the costs and benefits of using violence against rivals. Furthermore, these organizational changes led to an increased frequency of violence that was non-strategic; that is, it was not performed as the result of a considered and thorough decision-making process. In combination, these mechanisms promoted repeated spirals of fratricidal violence that progressively altered threat perceptions, and thereby encouraged riskier, more concerted applications of violence against rivals. This dissertation fashions this comparative explanation into a generalizable argument about the causes of intra-rebel war in strong states, and provides initial testing of the arguments with two shadow cases, taken from the Algerian independence movement in France and the Sinhalese leftist insurgency in Sri Lanka.
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International relations
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