I would like to thank Lisa Mueller for providing a careful and kind review of my book, Insurgent Fragmentation in the Horn of Africa. I am particularly gratified that Mueller has, in an illuminating fashion, captured what I hoped to be the dual contribution of the work: to build a theory of rebel fragmentation and test it, and shed historical light—through new evidence and interpretive lenses—on the intractable series of conflicts that have bedeviled the Horn of Africa since the 1960s.
Mueller raises two important issues that merit response. The first is related to the quantitative data presented in the opening chapters, which she appreciates but believes could have been expanded to provide more rigorous testing of the book’s underlying causal claims. Mueller is correct that the statistical data that have been analyzed are limited, and this is why the book treats them as an analytical point of departure rather than a confirmation of its causal claims. The major reason why the data were not expanded was feasibility. While one could collect some useful panel data on the full sample of African rebel groups with some time and effort, this would have been a tall order on the core independent variable of interest, battlefield shifts. The same is true for many alternative variables one might want to control for: organizational structure, ethnic diversity, external support, and so on. This type of panel data on rebels is hard to glean from press reports and requires a lot of case knowledge. Impressive data initiatives like ACLED might make this task easier, particularly as it relates to battlefield shifts, but ACLED was released after work on this project began and the data only go back to 1997.
Developing more substantial panel data on Ethiopian and Eritrean rebel groups—beyond the core independent and dependent variables—was more of a possibility, but for the subset of groups that were not case studies included in the book, feasibility was again a concern. Faced with these hurdles, and recognizing the inevitable trade-offs involved in large-scale data collection efforts, Insurgent Fragmentation focused on what Mueller calls “thick description,” an orientation that she agrees probably made for a better book.
The second issue that Mueller raises is the book’s discussion of policy implications. Her points here are perceptive. The common trend has been for political science books to conclude with a discussion of why their arguments matter—that is, what their findings mean for the “real world” of policymakers. But as she rightly points out, policymakers might use these discussions selectively, or in a manner not intended. For those of us who work in security studies, this is a particular area of concern, as the level of interaction and feedback between academic and policy communities is intense.
I am not sure there are many good answers to this dilemma. Insurgent Fragmentation tries to think through the issue of policy implications in as politically neutral a way as possible: from the perspective of counterinsurgents, peacemakers, and even insurgents themselves. But this does not really resolve the underlying problem that Mueller so eloquently identifies. One could simply avoid a discussion of policy implications altogether, but my sense is that if academics cede this ground, others may do the policy framing for them. Either way, she has raised a vital issue that absolutely merits further discussion.
