Rebel Power: Why National Movements Compete, Fight, and Win

by Peter Krause

Many of the world's states—from Algeria to Ireland to the United States—are the result of robust national movements that achieved independence. Many other national movements have failed in their attempts to achieve statehood, including the Basques, the Kurds, and the Palestinians. In Rebel Power , Peter Krause offers a powerful new theory to explain this variation focusing on the internal balance of power among nationalist groups, who cooperate with each other to establish a new state while simultaneously competing to lead it. The most powerful groups push to achieve states while they are in position to rule them, whereas weaker groups unlikely to gain the spoils of office are likely to become spoilers, employing risky, escalatory violence to forestall victory while they improve their position in the movement hierarchy. Hegemonic movements with one dominant group are therefore more likely to achieve statehood than internally competitive, fragmented movements due to their greater pursuit of victory and lesser use of counterproductive violence.
Krause conducted years of fieldwork in government and nationalist group archives in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, as well as more than 150 interviews with participants in the Palestinian, Zionist, Algerian, and Irish national movements. This research generated comparative longitudinal analyses of these four national movements involving 40 groups in 44 campaigns over a combined 140 years of struggle. Krause identifies new turning points in the history of these movements and provides fresh explanations for their use of violent and nonviolent strategies, as well as their numerous successes and failures. Rebel Power is essential reading for understanding not only the history of national movements but also the causes and consequences of contentious collective action today, from the Arab Spring to the civil wars and insurgencies in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.

Genres: Political Science

264 pages, Paperback

Published May 9, 2017

Reviews

[Erin Crane]

I got about halfway through this, up to the chapter about Algeria, and quit. It wasn’t that it was a bad book, but I think I got what I can get from it. I’m not a scholar who wants to delve into all the details, and I won’t retain the details anyway. What I enjoyed about this book is the Movement Structure Theory piece of it. I’d never heard of it, and I read this book because I was interested in learning about what makes a movement, a rebellion, effective. This definitely helped me answer that question. It’s not a complete answer, and I’m sure a smarter person than me can point out the flaws, but I found it a very helpful framework to start from.

My takeaways, according to MST:
1) Hegemonic (meaning dominated by one faction) movements are more effective at achieving their goals. They are not necessarily good at running democratic states, however.
2) Factionalized movements have a Leader and a Challenger that is at least 1/3 the power and size (in terms of members) of the Leader.
3) Factionalized movements are less effective because the factions spend resources on internal power struggles. Challengers will even act to sabotage the Leader at the cost of strategic goals because they want to be the ones in power when the movement wins.
4) Willingness to take radical, violent action is higher with Challengers. The consequences of that action (from the state or general public) are likely to fall on the Leader. If the Challenger becomes the Leader, they then start to show restraint. This says nothing about the effectiveness or not of the radical action in terms of the strategic goals.

[Mills College Library]

320.1509 K915 2017