In this chapter, we are interested in two questions: (1) What domestic events are most likely to trigger the declaration of a state of emergency? (2) Given that any kind of domestic turmoil is observed and a state of emergency has been declared: what are the consequences for civil and political rights? We find that a general conflict index is highly correlated with the declaration of a state of emergency. The events most likely to trigger a state of emergency are major government crises, riots, and revolutions. With regard to coups – both successful and unsuccessful – we find a significant correlation with states of emergency in autocracies only. We do find that a coup followed by a state of emergency does lead to a (further) reduction in civil liberties.

This chapter uses an original dataset of rebel governance historically and globally to statistically analyze the strength and robustness of the association between rebel goals and rebel governance. The chapter begins with a preliminary test for selection that assesses whether rebel goals are systematically correlated with structural factors that might ease rebel groups’ provision of governance such that rebel goals and governance appear to be systematically correlated when this correlation is an artifact of some latent variable. The results of this analysis suggest that rebel goals are not associated with other factors that might make it easier for rebels with revolutionary goals to implement challenging governance projects. Next, it presents the multivariate regression results of rebel goals on governance. Results are consistent with expectations and robust to a number of different specifications. Third, this chapter examines whether rebels who introduced governance to a broader array of people were more likely to be victorious. The results indicate that more extensive governance confers no military advantage, further suggesting that rebels’ governance is not necessarily militarily advantageous.

This chapter demonstrates that jihadist rebels with more transformative goals imitate the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) governance using the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon. When Hezbollah first formed, it defined its goals as revolutionary and imitated the CCP’s governance, building many of the same institutions as the CCP, despite Hezbollah leaders’ familiarity with more ideologically proximate models for political organization. Hezbollah, however, changed the content of the CCP’s governance institutions to match its jihadist ideology. Even today, Hezbollah leaders and members compare the organization to the CCP or leftist rebel groups that imitated the CCP and note that governance is a strategy for revolutionary change with its origins in the Chinese Civil War. The chapter further underscores that it is more transformative goals, and not ideologies, that determine governance strategies.

In Chapter 14, we turn to civil conflict, where the main protagonists are located within a political community. Scale is usually a background condition of little theoretical significance, and scholars have made little effort to theorize its impact on conflict. We begin by presenting a theory of why scale might have a curvilinear effect on civil conflict. While scale decreases social cohesion within a community, and also negatively affects the likelihood of a decisive military victory, it enhances the power of a jurisdiction, decreasing the likelihood that opposition groups will take up arms. We argue that the relationship is likely to be curvilinear because positive scale effects on civil conflict should attenuate quickly while negative scale effects seem likely to continue to grow indefinitely. We proceed to test this theory using a new measure of battlefield casualties, which tracks the number of battle deaths in countries around the world from 1946 to 2009. Our results show that increases in scale enhance conflict, but only up to a certain point. After this inflection point, increases in population are associated with decreases in conflict, proxied by battlefield casualties.