Not All Fragmentation is Equal: Insurgent Organizational Structure and Control of Collective Violence

46 Pages Posted: 2 May 2013

See all articles by Alec Worsnop

Alec Worsnop

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Date Written: April 5, 2013

Abstract

Expanding on a growing literature addressing the causes and consequences of fragmentation within insurgent organizations and across insurgent movements, this paper argues that different degrees and types of fragmentation have varying implications for insurgent organizational outcomes. In particular, I seek to identify the aspects of fragmentation which determine the extent to which the leaders of formal insurgent organizations can control when violence is employed. Such control includes ensuring insurgents fight when ordered and abide by agreements to cease violence. I contend that the extent of this control within individual formal organizations is related to two dimensions of fragmentation: (1) leadership embeddedness, or the extent to which leaders are rooted in strong underlying community and social structures — and (2) resource centralization, or the extent to which leaders directly, and exclusively, distribute both material and social resources. Moreover, these dimensions of fragmentation uniquely enhance the explanatory power of extant theories which, as I suggest, operate at different points along the causal pathways that connect organizational attributes with the control of when violence is employed. To develop the theory, I study how these dimensions of fragmentation affected the ability of Jaysh al-Mahdi in Iraq to regulate when violence was employed from 2003-2008.

Keywords: civil war, substate conflict, organization, iraq

Suggested Citation

Worsnop, Alec, Not All Fragmentation is Equal: Insurgent Organizational Structure and Control of Collective Violence (April 5, 2013). MIT Political Science Department Research Paper No. 2013-18, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2256581 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2256581

Alec Worsnop (Contact Author)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ( email )

77 Massachusetts Avenue
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
United States

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