Gentili sought to develop a set of rules to help regulate warfare. However, given his positions on absolutism and the value of the reason of state tradition, it is hard to see what resources he had available for encouraging sovereigns to actually play by those rules. In this chapter, I argue that Gentili squared the circle through a dichotomy at the heart of his legal framework: the distinction between violence carried out by a “public” entity and all other forms of violence. In Gentili’s framework, those carrying out the latter would immediately be discredited as “pirates” or “enemies of mankind.” The key, of course, was what Gentili meant by “public.”

This Chapter examines the scope of this book and a number of essential definitions: rebellions and civil wars, ‘insurrectional movements’ and rebels, conduct (including wrongful acts) of rebels and governments, whether the outcome is the establishment of a new government or the creation of a new State, and the important distinction between Matters of ‘Attribution’ and ‘Responsibility’. This Chapter examines the structure of this book.

One way a target government can try to mitigate outbidding violence is to increase enforcement efforts to intercept contributions and arrest volunteers to militant groups. We expand the workhorse outbidding model to account for this decision. States with greater enforcement capacity indeed benefit, partially from directly stopping contributions and partially from deterring supporters from making contributions in the first place. The decreased prize therefore also tempers outbidding violence. As a result, competition is contingent on enforcement capacity, with the effect of another group growing larger as that capacity declines. Statistical analysis finds broad empirical support for our mechanism: competitive violence is most pronounced when governments incur higher marginal costs of enforcement. These results increase our confidence that competition drives violence more broadly, as competing explanations do not predict this conditional effect.

We directly assess the empirical evidence of the propositions derived in the previous chapter. First, we conduct a large-n analysis of terrorist violence in every country between 1970 and 2015. We then examine whether there is a relationship between the number of active militant groups in a state and the aggregate amount of violence. We find evidence to support the basic outbidding hypothesis: more militant groups are significantly associated with more violence at the state level. We subsequently analyze the effect of increasing numbers of groups on per group violence. In accordance with our model expectations, we find that while increasing competition appears to lead to more violence overall, per group violence declines on average. Finally, to more fully explore the causal mechanisms at work in this process, we examine in detail the multi-dimensional insurgency in Northeast India since 2009. We find that as aggregate violence in the country and the region increased, groups curtailed their own use of violence due to concerns over diminishing returns and increased costs.

It was in the context of codification that struggle over the internationalisation of protection against rebels played out in its most explicit confrontation, culminating in the League of Nations’ Codification Conference held at The Hague in 1930. If the rules coming out of the arbitral practice rested on shaky and contested authority, and were inextricably tied up with practices of intervention, formal multilateral codification offered Latin American international lawyers a means to set clear and mutually agreed standards that would restrict occasions for intervention. At the same time, Anglo-American international lawyers sought to codify responsibility on their own terms. This was codification as the technical practice of elite lawyers, simply a continuation of arbitration and scholarship – a surreptitious means to universalise US ways of doing things. The attempt to reconcile the two contrasting approaches to codification and responsibility ended in stalemate at The Hague.

In the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries, mixed claims commissions were established as a way of resolving claims for injuries caused to foreign nationals by rebels when political instability, especially in the form of revolution and civil war, threatened foreign imperial and commercial ambitions and interrupted periods of capitalist expansion in decolonised Mexico and Venezuela. Enforcing state responsibility for such claims was often the justification for intervention in Latin America during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. While not all of the mixed claims commissions were imposed by the threat or use of force, invasion, occupation and bombardment existed alongside arbitration as part of a spectrum of more or less coercive measures to protect foreign commerce and capital during this time. The system of mixed claims commissions – as a political intervention in decolonised Latin America – served to insulate global economic liberalisation against revolution and civil war in the decolonised world, by taking the question of who assumed the risk of harm by rebels out of the scope of national authority.

The idea that states have to exercise due diligence in protecting investments against non-state armed actors and Article 10 of the Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts have common origins in the emergence and contestation of the rules of state responsibility for injuries to foreign nationals (or ‘aliens’) by rebels during the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries. Tracing these common origins, the story starts with a series of arbitrations involving Latin American states that were set up between 1839 and 1927. It then follows the scholarly debates about state responsibility for rebels that proliferated particularly from the turn of the twentieth century onwards, finishing with the League of Nations Codification Conference at The Hague in 1930 where states failed to agree a convention on responsibility. This first chapter sets out the book’s main argument and situates it theoretically and methodologically.

With the failure to codify, state responsibility for rebels went quiet. After the 1930s, there were no more of the great suites of mixed claims commissions. Scholarship on the topic dried up. Nevertheless, we can follow the trajectory of state responsibility for injuries to aliens by rebels as it split in two. On one hand, we have the International Law Commission (ILC)’s half-century odyssey to codify state responsibility, and on the other, the emergence of international investment law. The story of state responsibility for rebels and its legacy for both the modern law of state responsibility and international investment law have a number of implications for international law scholars and practitioners today: for specific legal issues in the law of state responsibility and international investment law, for our understanding of the development of these fields and for the state of the law today when it comes to responsibility for the acts of armed groups across various fields including international human rights and humanitarian law. Finally, it allows us to put together these fragments of state responsibility for rebels and tells us something about the whole, exposing how today international law prioritises the protection of foreign investment against rebels, and non-state armed actors more generally, in the decolonised world.

The mixed claims commissions, which had a degree of autonomy from the agendas of the states that imposed them, produced a rich and extensive body of case law on state responsibility for rebels. The practice of the commissions to enforce claims based in contract greatly increased the scope of state responsibility for rebels, in a way that reduced the risks for foreign nationals of doing business in Latin America and insulated commercial relations from political instability; the arbitral practice had a politics, even if it did not necessarily or straightforwardly reflect the context of the commissions’ establishment. The commissions engaged with a number of important international legal rules and principles: the general principle of non-responsibility for rebels, with exceptions for successful rebels, rebels who establish de facto authority and negligence in failing to protect against rebels. The exceptions to non-responsibility, particularly the duty of protection, would end up being more important than the rule. At the same time, the practice of the commissions was at times contradictory and ambiguous, providing only the shakiest foundation for future obligations.

The first moves to develop rules of state responsibility for rebels were made by Latin American international lawyers who sought to resist intervention on the basis of enforcing revolutionary damage claims. Later, Anglo-American international lawyers sought to reconcile rules from the arbitral practice, rules that often justified intervention and reinforced the legal impact of intervention. This was something that took a lot of interpretive work given how inconsistent and unstable the practice was. This dynamic of resistance and development – a battle over the meaning and authority of the arbitral practice – drove the emergence of state responsibility for rebels as a flourishing, if disputed, sub-field of international law.While nearly all the various positions made responsibility for rebels the exception rather than the rule, Latin American international lawyers tended towards narrow exceptions defined by reference to national treatment. Anglo-Americans, in contrast, based expansive exceptions on an international standard of alien protection. These debates can be understood as a struggle over the internationalisation of protection against rebels, structured around questions of whether the standard of protection against rebels owed by states to aliens was nationally or internationally determined and whether it was domestic or international authority that adjudicated such standard.

This chapter explains the global-historical context in which rebel leaders make decisions about how to govern. The chapter argues that although rebel groups have undertaken governance for centuries, they have frequently saved costly and potentially burdensome governance projects until after war ends. Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), however, knowingly and repeatedly introduced burdensome and occasionally perilous governance during war, in addition to some more popular projects. By the 1930s, the CCP had begun propagating this governance strategy globally as a model for later rebel groups. The CCP’s eventual victory provided a larger platform to disseminate information about its experience and governance strategy, including introducing a training program for would-be and active rebel leaders. As a result of the CCP’s efforts, the international system was saturated with information about the CCP’s approach to governance. The CCP’s efforts made a strategy for relatively more burdensome wartime governance cognitively available to later rebel leaders, and it is within this international informational structure that rebel leaders make decisions about governance.

This chapter presents the first empirical test of the theory using a paired case comparison of two rebel groups that are highly similar organizationally, had the same knowledge of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) governance, operated in the same place and the same time in Eritrea, but had two different goals: the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). The ELF leadership articulated moderately transformative goals and although rebel leaders were familiar with the CCP’s governance, they decided to introduce but a partial imitation of it. By contrast, the EPLF articulated more transformative, revolutionary goals and explicitly decided to imitate the CCP’s governance almost exactly, even when the EPLF’s governance provoked violent civilian resistance. Because these two organizations were similar in all ways but the transformativity of their long-term goals, the empirical evidence strongly supports the theoretical claims. The chapter draws heavily from archival materials collected in the United States, United Kingdom and rebel primary sources.

Why do some rebel groups undertake costly, burdensome governing projects that undermine their legitimacy, and even trigger resistance and violence that could put their own combatants at risk, while other rebel groups do not? The introductory chapter uses the contemporary cases of three rebel groups’ control of the city Raqqa in Syria to illustrate the empirical puzzle that motivates the book. The chapter then outlines existing works related to rebel governance and details why these approaches cannot explain rebel governance in Raqqa. Specifically, research generally assumes that rebel governance is popular and desirable in ways that confer material and organizational benefits to rebel groups. This chapter then puts forth an alternative conceptualization of rebel governance as varied in terms of its costs and benefits such that rebel leaders make decisions about whether to introduce more or less burdensome governance institutions during war. The chapter then outlines the central argument of the text: that rebel groups’ goals determine their governance strategy. It then describes how the book empirically tests this argument before concluding with a discussion of the importance of the topic.

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).

The objective of this chapter is to evaluate whether rebel groups imitate the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) if they articulate more transformative goals but do not share the CCP’s communist ideology. To do so, the chapter examines the governance of the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETILIN). FRETILIN leaders articulated more transformative, revolutionary goals but were not communist. Consistent with expectations, FRETILIN leaders explicitly decided to imitate the CCP’s governance approach almost exactly and even continued to implement the CCP’s strategy despite encountering military challenges to it. The chapter includes archival data from East Timor, Australia and the United Kingdom.

This chapter argues that rebel groups’ long-term goals determine rebels’ governance strategies. Rebel goals are defined on a spectrum of transformativity, bookended by more transformative goals of revolution at one end and personal enrichment at the other. After rebel leaders determine their organizations’ goals, they are uncertain about how to pursue them and look to examples for guidance. Because of the CCP’s propaganda campaigns, almost all rebel leaders are familiar with the CCP and its intensive and extensive governance, but not all rebel groups decide to learn from and imitate the group. Rebel leaders learn from and decide to imitate the CCP’s governance almost exactly when they share revolutionary goals similar to the CCP’s, even if they do not share an ideology. As more rebel groups with revolutionary goals imitated the CCP’s governance, global expectations converged upon the CCP’s governance model as the appropriate strategy for revolutionary rebel groups, creating material and ideational incentives for revolutionary rebel groups to conform to the CCP’s governance. The less transformative rebel groups' goals become, the degree of compatibility with the groups’ goals and the CCP’s objectives declines, so the extent to which rebel leaders decide to imitate the CCP's governance also declines.