Rebel Leadership and the Specialisation of Rebel Operations

Rebels groups adopt different organisational structures, emerging in various shapes and sizes. Some rebel groups construct distinct military and political wings, delegating their military and political operations to specialised units. While recent studies have made great strides towards understanding militant groups’ activities on and off the battlefield, the literature has been less attentive to the root causes of the structural arrangements which groups form for these purposes. I argue that rebel leaders’ pre-war military and political experiences shape the structure of the organisations they lead into war. Using original data, I find that differences in leaders’ pre-war military experience, rather than political experience, are associated with discernible probabilities of rebel operational specialisation. In addition to offering practitioners and academics a comparative framework with which to evaluate the patterns of militant leadership, this study demonstrates how leaders wield independent agency over group structure and operations in the civil war environment.