Insurgent groups are key military and political players throughout the contemporary world. Networks of Rebellion seeks to improve our understanding of the ways in which they mobilize, organize, and fall apart. I am deeply grateful to Scott Straus for his careful assessment of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. While Straus generously assesses it as “seminal” and “a milestone,” he also identifies three areas of concern that will be my focus here.
The first is my argument about the sources of change over time. As Straus rightly notes, insurgent change is complicated. There are numerous variables that can come into play, from individual leaders’ decisions to macrohistorical shifts in the international system. Chapter 3 of Networks systematically links the origins of groups to their most likely pathways of change. Consequently, vanguard groups are likely to change in different ways than parochial or integrated organizations. These differences are caused by the tensions and opportunities created by the underlying social bases.
This is an important advance over existing theories, which have either made the case for path dependence or taken organizational structure as a given and used it to explain other outcomes. Networks provides a new framework for conceptualizing and measuring variation over time. It puts theoretical structure on the processes of change that we are most likely to see, and, importantly, identifies pathways that are unlikely for eachtype of group.
Straus is right that this approach is not comprehensive or able to explain everything; far from it. There are real limits to what the book achieves in this area. It aims to launch a scholarly conversation rather than to decisively end it. I hope other scholars will expand on this agenda to deepen our understanding of insurgent evolution.
Straus is also concerned about the linkage between social bases and organizational outcomes. They are certainly, and importantly, connected, but the theory is not tautological. I repeatedly identify cases in which social bases and organizational structure do not align. Differences between the two can be easily measured empirically, while alternative theories provide explanations concerning how these disjunctures may occur. I further show in the empirics that founders of prewar social bases often did not create these structures with an eye to protracted future insurgency. The claims of Networks can be evaluated and disconfirmed.
Finally, Straus has several fair concerns about operationalization. The problem I faced in Networks is that the manifestations of social bases are specific to individual societies: Politicized prewar networks in 1980s Egypt likely take on different forms than in 1910s China or 2014 Iraq. This leads to theoretical sparseness that can risk under specification. I try to make up for some of these problems by using detailed sub- and cross-national comparisons, but the most important test of the book will be whether future researchers can concretely apply the concepts to a wide range of cases.
I appreciate Straus’s excellent critiques. They identify crucial areas for further research that can both build on and move beyond Networks of Rebellion.
