These varied societal foundations should have bearings on dynamics of rebel organizational structures, governance, diplomacy, alliances, and so on. Conversely, countries such as Myanmar, Ethiopia, and India combat a considerable number of insurgencies with myriad organizational backgrounds, from university student groups and opposition political parties to preexisting rebel groups and terrorist organizations. Some governments such as those in Chile and Ghana have only ever faced significant antigovernment violence from within their own militaries. The new information on rebel foundations introduced in this research note should help scholars to reconsider and newly explore a variety of conditions before, during, and after civil wars including rebel-civilian interactions, structures of rebel organizations, bargaining processes with the government, participation in postwar governance, and more.ĭissident organizations that wage civil wars against their government rarely arise from nothing more than 95 percent of rebel groups active during intrastate conflicts included in the Uppsala Conflict Data Program's (UCDP) Armed Conflict Database drew their initial membership from some sort of preexisting named organization or, at the very least, from an identifiable ethnic or refugee community. In an effort to fill this gap, we present the Foundations of Rebel Group Emergence (FORGE) dataset, which offers information on the “parent” organizations and the founding processes that gave rise to rebel groups active between 19 in intrastate conflicts included in the Uppsala Conflict Data Program's Armed Conflict Database. One element of the civil war process that has gone largely unstudied from a cross-national perspective is the role preexisting organizations in society play in the formation of rebel groups, principally due to a lack of comparable data on the origins of these armed actors across conflicts.

Scholars have spent decades investigating various sources of rebellion, from societal and institutional explanations to individual motivations to take up arms against one's government.

Ucdp armed conflict database