Peter Krause's Rebel Power is a formidable new look at power dynamics within nationalist movements. The book provides a novel argument and hypotheses about the role of power structures within movements, and provides extensive hypothesis testing across four cases: the Palestinian movement, the Zionist movement, the Algerian national movement, and the Irish national movement.

Krause argues that existing conceptualizations (and particularly existing operationalizations) insufficiently capture the dynamics of movement cohesion and fragmentation. He suggests that a key missing piece is an understanding of power relationships among organizations in the same movement. Krause offers a novel typology of national movements oriented around power distributions. On the one hand, “hegemonic” movements are led by one organization with vastly superior resources and more power than all other organizations within the movement. On the other hand, there are movements with two or more organizations without one being dominant. When these organizations work together in an alliance, they can be considered “united.” When organizations oppose one another or fail to cooperate, the movement can be considered “fragmented.”

Whether a movement is hegemonic, united, or fragmented has substantial implications for both its likely success and for understanding the behavior of individual organizations. Among the united and fragmented movements, organizations are divided into “leaders,” “challengers,” and “subordinates.” For Krause, only leaders and challengers are consequential within these movements, because they have the ability to impose costs on one another through violence. Whether there is cooperation among these organizations or not, there are incentives for the lead group and challengers to direct their attention to one another rather than the overall struggle with the state. Because of this, these “united” and “fragmented” movements are much less likely to succeed than hegemonic movements.

In a detailed study of the four national movements, Krause identifies forty-four discrete campaigns that include forty organizations. He carefully traces the power dynamics among organizations within each movement in each campaign to determine the overall structure of power dynamics at that point in time. For example, he identifies six discrete campaigns in the Zionist movement between 1921 and 1949, the first five of which include a lead organization and between two and four challenging organizations. Only in the 1940s, with the emergence of a hegemonic campaign led by Mapia/Haganah, was success achieved. Likewise, between 1965 and 2016 the Palestinian movement included ten campaigns with variation over time that shows periods of fragmentation, unity, and hegemony.

The book builds on a growing body of work that addresses the internal politics of nonstate actors, such as my own book Inside the Politics of Self-Determination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), Fotini Chrisita's Alliance Formation and Civil Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Wendy Pearlman's Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). These studies address internal dynamics in a number of ways. The central contribution of Krause's project is to bring to the fore the role that power plays within these movements. While others acknowledge differences in power structures, no other work to date has offered a clear typology of power dynamics. Of particular strength in this study is Krause's ability to hypothesize about the behavior of specific organizations. Because he identifies hegemons, leaders, and challengers, he can explore the different incentives that these actors face and show how their place in the power structure dictates their behavior. As such, the book speaks not only to scholars of fragmentation and the Middle East, but also to a broad set of scholars focused on coercive power (whether in international politics or the domestic realm). This book will be a great resource to scholars of nationalism, civil war, and social movements.