6 - Changing Goals and Changing Governance

Summary

This chapter leverages a within-case variation in the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), a rebel organization that operated in a country that neighbored Eritrea at the same time as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) from Chapter 5. The SPLM/A initially articulated less transformative goals, and despite knowing about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) governance, refused to introduce any elements of it, consistent with expectations. In 1994, however, the SPLM/A articulated a new set of moderately transformative objectives and correspondingly introduced governance initiatives that more closely approached, but did not replicate exactly, the CCP’s strategy, also consistent with expectations. The SPLM/A in conjunction with the EPLF and Eritrean Liberation Front cases in Chapter 5 offers a comprehensive test of the theory using the full range of variation in the independent variables (transformativity of rebel goals) and the corresponding range of the dependent variable (rebel governance strategies).