Insurgency in Ethnically Divided Authoritarian-led Societies: A Comparative Study of Rebel Movements in Ethiopia, 1974-2014

Current literature on collective violence and civil war has emphasized underlying structural, psychological, geographic, informational, international and other variables in explaining insurgency. Some of these variables are indeed important to understand the phenomenon in question, but explaining level of insurgency requires putting emphasis on other variables that the literature either neglects or downplays. This dissertation amplifies the significance of rebel organizations as well as the nature of their foreign relations (foreign state leverage and interest, in addition to foreign support, a variable the existing literature stresses) in accounting for the great divergence in the intensity and durability of insurgency in authoritarian-led ethnically divided societies. In its quest for comprehending rebel organizations, it further explains the origins of organizational strength and weakness by a resort to societal and voluntarist variables, in addition to social-institutional ones that the literature already acknowledges. These arguments are illustrated by an in-depth comparative study of several insurgent groups in post-1974 Ethiopia that varied widely in their intensity and durability—both across regions and time-periods. Since the outbreak of the Ethiopian Revolution in 1974, Ethiopia has been engulfed by numerous armed movements that fought the state and one another with varying degrees of violence and persistence. The Dergue’s period witnessed high intensity, high durability; high intensity, low durability; and low intensity, high durability insurgencies. The regime that came after it, in sharp contrast to its predecessor, enjoyed relative peace, despite the physical existence of armed groups, most of which however fought low intensity, low durability insurgencies. Holding many variables more or less constant and de-emphasizing the value of others, this study underscores the significance of the internal structure of rebel organizations--whose determinants it also traces—in explaining these variations. It also equally highlights the degree of leverage foreign states have over the rebels they support and their agenda towards the state/regime that the rebels fight, besides the mere amount of support rebels get from those states.Ph.D