Do working men rebel? A call for papers.

[outletclock]

why the predicted results did not arise. If anything, I'd think it'd be more appropriate for me to refute the *outcomes* of the authors' "experiment" or paper rather than the *assumptions* they made in conducting and writing the experiment/paper. I was, again, just trying to come up with a parsimonious* approach toward explaining why predicted results were not found.

**I merely ventured a guess as to why: flawed assumptions.**

Besides, abundant labor/unemployment was not their only assumption - the most egregious assumption to me was that insurgency was a full-time occupation. To me the defining characteristic of an insurgency is that an insurgency (here I'm thinking of the archetypal Viet Cong) works during the day. Finally, that insurgencies are not vertically-integrated enterprises struck me as an assumption worth quarreling with.

I don't think the burden of proof is on me to come up with an explanation as to why the paper's/experiments outcomes failed to match the authors' prediction, through quantitative evidence or multiple case studies, and quite frankly, I'm not sure I could do it, certainly off the top of my head and without research. If that renders my post presumptuous (or the prior ones), I apologize. I simply think/thought it's adequate for me to posit one reason why (once more) results encountered were not the ones anticipated.

Regards,
OC

**
Parsimony: extreme or excessive economy or frugality; stinginess; niggardliness. :-)

[MikeF]

why the predicted results did not arise. If anything, I'd think it'd be more appropriate for me to refute the *outcomes* of the authors' "experiment" or paper rather than the *assumptions* they made in conducting and writing the experiment/paper. I was, again, just trying to come up with a parsimonious* approach toward explaining why predicted results were not found.

**I merely ventured a guess as to why: flawed assumptions.**

Besides, abundant labor/unemployment was not their only assumption - the most egregious assumption to me was that insurgency was a full-time occupation. To me the defining characteristic of an insurgency is that an insurgency (here I'm thinking of the archetypal Viet Cong) works during the day. Finally, that insurgencies are not vertically-integrated enterprises struck me as an assumption worth quarreling with.

I don't think the burden of proof is on me to come up with an explanation as to why the paper's/experiments outcomes failed to match the authors' prediction, through quantitative evidence or multiple case studies, and quite frankly, I'm not sure I could do it, certainly off the top of my head and without research. If that renders my post presumptuous (or the prior ones), I apologize. I simply think/thought it's adequate for me to posit one reason why (once more) results encountered were not the ones anticipated.

Regards,
OC

**
Parsimony: extreme or excessive economy or frugality; stinginess; niggardliness. :-)

OC,

Thanks for the reply and teaching me a new word. You did bring up an important point. Some (or many) insurgents may be employed during the day in legitimate jobs while working for the insurgency at night. Honestly, I don't know how you would track that figure unless you conducted a survey 10-15 years after hostilities were ceased.

We spend a lot of money on the assumption that if the people are employed, then they won't fight. That may be true in some cases, but it is not true in others. For instance, many Sunnis in Iraq felt that the gov't was illegitimate so they were going to fight regardless.

Contrastingly, in the case of perceived underemployment, the initial results (their paper is not published yet) is that there is a strong correlation to rebelling. That probably goes back to the original hypothesis of relative deprevation.

Mike

[Surferbeetle]

The Coevolution of Economic and Political Development by Fali Huang of Singapore Management University

This paper establishes a simple model of long run economic and political development, which is driven by the inherent technical features of different factors in production, and political conflicts among factor owners on how to divide the outputs. The main capital form in economy evolves from land to physical capital and then to human capital, which enables the respective factor owners (landlords, capitalists, and workers) to gain political powers in the same sequence, shaping the political development path from monarchy to elite ruling and finally to full suffrage. When it is too costly for any group of factor owners to repress others, political compromise is reached and economic progress is not blocked; otherwise, the political conflicts may lead to economic stagnation.

Walt Whitman Rostow

Walt Whitman Rostow (also known as Walt Rostow or W.W. Rostow) (October 7, 1916 – February 13, 2003) was an American economist and political theorist who served as Special Assistant for National Security Affairs to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Prominent for his role in the shaping of American policy in Southeast Asia during the 1960s, he was a staunch anti-communist, and was noted for a belief in the efficacy of capitalism and free enterprise. Rostow served as a major adviser on national security affairs under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He supported American military involvement in the Vietnam War. In his later years he taught at Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin with his wife, Elspeth Rostow, who would later become dean of the school. He wrote extensively in defense of free enterprise economics, particularly in developing nations. Rostow was famous especially for writing the book The Stages of Economic Growth: A non-communist manifesto (1960) which became a classic text in several fields of social sciences.

[SJPONeill]

Are there not two questions here? The first is why do working men rebel? The second is that described in the abstract for the paper: why do working men rebel in insurgencies? or perhaps why do working men support insurgencies? I wonder also does the paper include both sex's employment status as there may be some interesting differences between stats for men and those for women - which may or may not be related to local culture.

I'm thinking that perhaps the answers to the first question may be totally different to the answers to the second; and that there may also be distinctions between those who simply rebel and those who rebel and align to a cause (rebel by aligning to cause?).

This is a great topic and one which challenges a lot of preconceptions - certainly I am going to be following it with interest with a view to rethinking my stance on opportunity insurgents...

[outletclock]

on some of the issues you raise.

1) Are all rebellions insurgencies?

2) Are all insurgencies rebellions?

3) Should we substitute rebellions for revolutions? (Perhaps this is just me.)

4) Why do working men rebel (presumably, as opposed to the unemployed - an issue, I think, touched upon by Marx in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte")? That is, is there a differential propensity to rebel/be an insurgent depending on one's unemployment status, i.e., employed versus unemployed, not whether one has "high" or "low" unemployment status - e.g., Wall Street Titan versus (fill in the blank).

5) Is there a differential propensity to rebel/be an insurgent depending on one's sex? Here I'd be thinking hard about the opportunity costs of being a woman in an insurgent organization, or being a neutral, or being a government supporter; and - once more in regards to the industrial organization of insurgencies - the role of women within insurgencies.

6) Perhaps most interestingly, strategic and/or opportunistic behavior during insurgencies and revolutions: free riding off others (e.g., waiting until the insurgents appear to have won, and then joining the insurgents - or the counterinsurgents, as the case may be), waiting for tipping points, trying to gauge tipping points. I'm struck, I think, by Jeffrey Race's observation in "War Comes to Long An" that the war had been won by the Viet Cong by some *very* early stage - say, 1955 (I don't have the book available).

Don't claim to have any of the answers, but thought I'd try and sort out the some of the issues, although I might not have been any more successful at that, either.

Regards
OC

###

Are there not two questions here? The first is why do working men rebel? The second is that described in the abstract for the paper: why do working men rebel in insurgencies? or perhaps why do working men support insurgencies? I wonder also does the paper include both sex's employment status as there may be some interesting differences between stats for men and those for women - which may or may not be related to local culture.

I'm thinking that perhaps the answers to the first question may be totally different to the answers to the second; and that there may also be distinctions between those who simply rebel and those who rebel and align to a cause (rebel by aligning to cause?).

This is a great topic and one which challenges a lot of preconceptions - certainly I am going to be following it with interest with a view to rethinking my stance on opportunity insurgents...

[MikeF]

on some of the issues you raise.

1) Are all rebellions insurgencies?

2) Are all insurgencies rebellions?

3) Should we substitute rebellions for revolutions? (Perhaps this is just me.)

4) Why do working men rebel (presumably, as opposed to the unemployed - an issue, I think, touched upon by Marx in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte")? That is, is there a differential propensity to rebel/be an insurgent depending on one's unemployment status, i.e., employed versus unemployed, not whether one has "high" or "low" unemployment status - e.g., Wall Street Titan versus (fill in the blank).

5) Is there a differential propensity to rebel/be an insurgent depending on one's sex? Here I'd be thinking hard about the opportunity costs of being a woman in an insurgent organization, or being a neutral, or being a government supporter; and - once more in regards to the industrial organization of insurgencies - the role of women within insurgencies.

6) Perhaps most interestingly, strategic and/or opportunistic behavior during insurgencies and revolutions: free riding off others (e.g., waiting until the insurgents appear to have won, and then joining the insurgents - or the counterinsurgents, as the case may be), waiting for tipping points, trying to gauge tipping points. I'm struck, I think, by Jeffrey Race's observation in "War Comes to Long An" that the war had been won by the Viet Cong by some *very* early stage - say, 1955 (I don't have the book available).

Don't claim to have any of the answers, but thought I'd try and sort out the some of the issues, although I might not have been any more successful at that, either.

Some thoughts:

#1,2,3. My understanding of the literature is that insurgency, rebellion, and revolution are synonymous. I prefer to use the old language as it is easier to understand. When trying to differentiate between the different phases, I turn to Mao's Protracted War three phases. In every society, many rebellions will exist on the Phase 0 level (small, non-violent, non-influential). Basically, they start with an idea. Most insurgencies are uninteresting- they never build momentum, the government squashes them once they go violent, or they fight through the political system. It's the violent ones that we study. One key exception is the non-violent social movements of the 20th century. I suppose we can call them assymetric rebellions.

#5. Sex is another interesting case. Most serial killers and sociopaths are men, but some exceptions remain. We had a phenomena with female suicide bombers in Iraq that has not been analyzed in depth, but for the most part, it's the men who rebel. One thing that I recently learned is that in Afghan/Pakistan society, young men must receive permission from their mother's to join the rebellion. So, if we can influence the mothers through education, then over time, we may minimize the recruitment of young men.

For a man to take action (blow up his own roads, kill/behead his neighbors, or blow himself up), he's got to be pretty upset. My own thoughts are that grievances are a combination of utility and emotion.

Thoughts?

Mike

[outletclock]

Here are my thoughts:

1) I'd agree that we can and do use the three words mentioned synonymously. That said, I think they can and sometimes do carry different connotations. I hear a lot about the French Revolution, not the French Insurgency. Maybe the magnitude of the changes wrought cause it to carry a different name? Another thoughts: is using "Phases" to delineate stages of an insurgency overly dependent on Mao's theorizing? After all, isn't it the ostensible spontaneity or rapidity of revolutions that makes distinguishable from other phenomena? ("And all of a sudden, one day in 17XX, everything changed.") I'm probably picking nits here, or not disagreeing with you at all, but just some thoughts.

2) Sex IS interesting. No, seriously, my sense is some insurgencies integrate women into their operations far more than other insurgencies. At the other end of the spectrum, my understanding is there's a female warlord leader somewhere in the contested part of Burma/Myanmar. Presumably, everything being equal, one would want as many boots on the ground, so to speak, female or male. So it's interesting the power of culture (and obviously not one limited to small wars or insurgencies): to gain permission to fight, to decide to let women fight, and the ways they do it ("Well, you'll fight, by putting these rivets on these planes.").

3) Grievance, in my opinion, could be utility-maximizing or emotion, although I think in common terms we think of a grievance as something purely emotional rather than something purely utility-maximizing. I don't see why it couldn't run down the whole spectrum - "I do it partly because I think there will be wealth redistribution when we burn down X's farm because he's on A's side, and also, by the way, I don't like X, and if you asked me to tell you what proportion of my actions are driven by calculations of utility and what proportion are driven by calculations of emotion, I wouldn't be able to tell you; I see a window of opportunity to do something I want to do, for reasons I'm not quite sure of, and I act." Obviously long-standing grievances might differ greatly from my lame example, but nonetheless, why a grievance couldn't be both emotion- and utility-based in any proportion eludes me.

I think even the word "grievance" might be misleading, because it carries connotations of emotion: rationale might be better. That's Stathis Kalyvas's take on FM 3-24, based on my reading of the Perspectives of Politics article by him I read, and how it intersects with the greed versus grievance literature on civil wars; basically, FM 3-24 assumes insurgents operate because of grievances, not greed. Ergo, fix the host nation, one eliminates the rationale for the insurgency, and one eliminates the insurgency. But if insurgents aren't motivated by grievance, but greed (which is an emotion, now that I think about it), then "the solution" changes.

4) Regarding why a man blows himself up, I'd take a look at an article by Ehud Sprinzak in Foreign Policy from about 5-10 years ago (wish that I could recall more closely its date). You can probably pick up the big RAND works on terrorism (try Darcy ME Noricks's articles for citations, although I'm not guaranteeing it's there). Basically, people become socialized to kill himself or herself, but you can't make someone kill himself or herself (ie, upset enough to kill himself or herself.) You can identify would-be suicide bombers like the Columbine kids and nurture them along, but that's about the best you can do. That's what I recall from the article, though - don't hold me to it.

5) "Most serial killers and sociopaths are men" I think most would-be and actual presidential assassins are or have been white men of small stature, too.

Regards,
OC