How Do Rebellions Succeed or Fail?

john connor

The panoply of factors affecting the success or failure of any single rebellion and the sheer number of rebellions throughout history makes identifying independent causes of success or failure a daunting task. Nevertheless, the challenge is worth accepting; once such overall causes are identified, other facets of rebellion – the role of atrocity, the causes of rebellion, or what elements must be present to start a rebellion – may be seen in a clearer light. 

“Rebellion”, in this essay, will be defined as an armed attempt to overthrow or expel the state by non-state actors, as with U.S. joint military doctrine’s characterization of insurgency as “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict” [1]. While some rebellions may seek simply to overthrow a government, some may regard the state itself as illegitimate. For the purposes of greater precision, this study excludes military coups, conflict involving organized crime (such as Mexico’s cartel conflict), or nonviolent state takeover by elite factions. This can help us achieve greater analytical precision as we proceed. 

This essay argues that rebellions can succeed in one of two ways: first, by achieving political concessions through a complete takeover of the state, or second, by state acquiescence to rebel demands. Neither scenario necessarily requires military victory. Both scenarios require four components - a weakened state, a partly sympathetic or neutral population, effective material and financial support, and a rebel movement capable of gaining some degree of legitimacy to administer a state, and material and financial support. It is important to note for the sake of clarity that sympathy is different from legitimacy; the former involves simple support for a rebellion’s ideals, while the latter involves recognizing it as a credible governing alternative to the state. 

Numerous other factors ranging from charismatic leadership to the presence of cross-border activity may strongly influence outcomes but do not necessarily have to be present for success. The path to success is also complicated by whether a rebellion involves domestic or expeditionary counterinsurgency by the state. Failure is possible through a lack of one of the essential components in either scenario, or because of other factors – it is easier for a rebellion to fail than succeed due to the state’s inherent asymmetric advantage over rebel movements. While the state always possesses a preexisting military, access to funds through taxation, and a governing structure, rebels must develop their own armed forces, political organization, and means of funding. One example of asymmetry is that state militaries will commonly possess superior technology and training to insurgents. This imbalance is often difficult but by no means impossible to overcome. 

Defining Success

Carl Von Clausewitz observed that war is “simply the continuation of policy by other means” [2]. Policy, for the rebel movements, means demands. These are not necessarily the same as the deep-seated structural grievances which cause revolts in the first place. Rather, they comprise the stated political objectives of the rebel movement. Success involves achieving these demands. This may fall along a wide spectrum from complete success (an example being American revolutionaries achieving independence) to complete failure (the destruction of Nat Turner’s rebellion and the subsequent imposition of even harsher slave laws) [3] to numerous gray zones in between. Success and failure, therefore, do not constitute a simple binary. There is no precise number of concessions to be gained that can make an insurgency an unqualified “success”. By placing individual insurgencies along a range rather than sorting them into discrete categories, we can avoid the problems that emerge when attempting to subsume the nuances of individual rebellions under rigid categorical guidelines. 

The success of insurgents in imposing their political goals is often, but not always, accompanied by military success. Like political success, military success falls along a wide spectrum, not necessarily corresponding to the spectrum of political success. At one end of the spectrum is complete victory – i.e., the expulsion of the enemy from the territory the rebels seek to control, or the destruction of the state and its replacement with a rebel regime; however, military victory can also occur in a more negative sense (exhausting and outlasting the state until it withdraws). At the other end of the spectrum, political success may still be achieved despite military defeat – Algeria is an excellent example. During the Algerian War of Independence, France mostly crushed an armed insurrection, only to give Algeria its independence after realizing that the colonial regime was unsustainable. Clausewitz further observed that war is “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will” [4]; in insurgency, the rebel has multiple paths to fulfilling their will, of which acts of violence are only one. 

Scenario One: Complete State Takeover

The first necessary factor is weakened state presence in the area of the insurgency. Insurgency is asymmetric by nature, and any state which completely succumbs to it must have existing problems of a political or military nature. Political problems often center around perceived lack of state legitimacy, which may be exacerbated by poor state control over remote areas (such as Pakistan’s tribal regions) [5], a proliferation of armed non-state actors (such as Lebanon’s sectarian militias) [6] and corruption [7]. Extant traditions of rebellion (such as Mali’s repeated Tuareg rebellions) [8] and the presence of minorities incorporated into the state against their will (such as Palestinians in the Israeli occupied West Bank and Gaza during the First Intifada of 1987-1993) may also create fertile conditions for insurgency. Colonial states faced unique political challenges due to the difficulty of convincing their subjects to accept the legitimacy of an occupying power, in addition to the task of frequently administering vast geographic areas through small colonial bureaucracies. Factors affecting a weakened state presence frequently overlap with factors affecting military weakness: remote terrain or geographic distance between a state and its colony can reduce state military capacity, and military corruption can result in poorly equipped troops and low morale (as seen in the Nigerian military’s campaign against Boko Haram) [9]. 

The second necessary factor is a primarily sympathetic or neutral population. Neutrality is more important than sympathy; T.E. Lawrence, an influential figure in the study of counterinsurgency [10], claimed that only 2% of a population needed to be actively sympathetic for an insurgency to succeed [11]. Rebels will face inherent difficulties with establishing legitimacy over a population with an actively hostile majority; a neutral majority, however, can be persuaded. This is closely related to state weakness in that the neutrality of a population is often assured through their disillusionment with the state rather than sympathy for the rebels. In addition to previously discussed factors such as lack of legitimacy, such disillusionment may be provoked by state violence aimed at rebels (an example being indiscriminate bombing against Viet Cong insurgents by the US) [12]. Winning the sympathy of the population can sometimes be made easier through insurgents’ adaptation of an ideology capable of appealing to broad swaths of the population. An example might be Islamism in Afghanistan, where the anti-religious ideology of Communism failed to gain popular support. 

The third factor is an effective means of funding and support, the form of which can range from material supplies such as food, money and weapons to other forms of assistance such as sanctions and advocacy on the international stage. This is closely related to support of the population, following Mao’s dictum that “the people are like water and the army is like fish” [13]. More scholarly sources have also noted that external support is key for the insurgent [14]. Insurgents may also support themselves by exploiting natural resources (such as gold in the Sahel) [15] or engaging in organized crime (such as the Afghan Taliban’s exportation of opiates). Such activities become easier with the presence of a porous, poorly policed border area (such as Colombia’s border with Venezuela, the site of cocaine smuggling by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) [16]. International support, especially but not exclusively from a cross border area, is also key. Obtaining support from an outside superpower is one of the easiest ways for insurgents to overcome their asymmetric disadvantage regarding the state (the American supply of missiles to Afghanistan’s Mujahideen being a classic example) [17]. 

Fourthly, the insurgents must be capable of establishing some degree of legitimacy over the territories they take. This is crucial because the destruction of the state will not necessarily lead to the insurgents imposing their political demands – it may simply lead to general anarchy if the insurgents are unable to establish control. For example, during Liberia’s civil war, multiple rebel factions succeeded in ousting the regime of Samuel Doe, only to fight each other in a chaotic civil war afterwards [18]. The standard for rebel groups establishing legitimacy is not as high as the standards for states – for instance, Taliban insurgents faced competitors in their own territory such as ISIS-Khorasan – but at least some degree of control must be established. An objection to this point is that some rebels may suffer military defeat and loss of their territories yet still eventually take over the state (again Algeria comes to mind), raising the question of why establishing legitimacy over territory was ever important for ultimate victory. The answer is that establishing an effective alternative to state rule – even temporarily – is a key method of weakening the state in the eyes of the population and lessening the confidence of the state’s rulers in their own ability to stay permanently in power, thereby opening a path to eventual political change. This is especially true if a rebel movement can demonstrate that it is more effective at governing than the government itself. 

While all four of the above factors must be present for any rebellion to succeed, numerous other elements can contribute to insurgent success in this scenario. These include the presence of experienced or charismatic leaders, effective propaganda, and most notably, military victory. It is possible for rebels to take over a state despite military defeat – as previously mentioned, this occurred in Algeria. However, this scenario requires significant military and financial exhaustion on part of the state – France only gave up Algeria after expending enormous amounts of blood and treasure. A more common scenario – observed frequently in expeditionary counterinsurgency – is for rebels to fight the state to a stalemate and then wait for it to withdraw to take over the colony, sometimes due to regime change at home (Portugal’s colonial wars in Mozambique and Angola are examples of this). Outright military victory on the battlefield is more difficult to achieve due to asymmetry (this may be increasingly true of modern warfare due to advances in technology) – however, examples do exist, such as the French army’s 1954 disaster at Dien Bien Phu [19] at the hands of Viet Minh insurgents. 

A word must also be said about the differences of scenario one in counterinsurgency’s domestic and expeditionary varieties – fighting an internal insurgency (for instance, Mali’s Tuareg Rebellion) vs fighting an insurgency abroad (for example, the U.S. fighting insurgency in Iraq, or imperial European powers fighting rebellions in their colonies). The complete takeover of the state by rebels is more easily achieved in expeditionary situations. Overthrowing a domestic government is typically difficult due to the state’s superior power, often requiring a significant loss of public legitimacy or support by the state. In contrast, expelling a colonial state or foreign invader only requires the domestic government’s withdrawal. Domestic insurgencies are also more likely to require regular warfare to achieve the goal of state capture, whereas expeditionary insurgencies can simply wear down the state through irregular warfare until it withdraws (though this does not preclude the possibility of regular warfare, as seen again the example of Dien Bien Phu) [20]. 

Why might rebels fail to achieve victory in a scenario one? A lack of any of the four crucial factors may be fatal. Some states may simply be too strong to take on: the Soviet Union faced no successful armed rebellions in its history, and few occurred inside of the Russian core (as stated earlier, our framework does not include nonviolent state takeover by elite factions – ie, the peaceful secession of republics from the Soviet Union). Lack of a sympathetic or neutral population can also doom an insurgency, as Che Guevara discovered when he failed to gain the support of Bolivian peasants in 1967 [21]. The anti-Castro Escambray Rebellion in Cuba is a case study in perils of lacking funding or support; insurgents were isolated by government forces in the mountains and unable to receive outside resources [22]. Failure to establish legitimacy also a fatal obstacle; Myanmar’s anti-junta insurgency has been hampered by rebel failure to establish a unified alternative to the government [23]. Adverse but not necessarily fatal factors can involve foreign intervention against domestic insurgency (for instance, the US support of South Vietnam’s government against the Viet Cong), lack of advanced technology, and situations in which support for the rebellion is confined to a small minority group within a country, against which ethnic or racial prejudices can be mobilized (see for instance Saddam Hussein’s weaponization of Arab identity against Iraq’s rebellious Kurdish minority) [24]. 

Scenario Two: State Compromise

First, the state must be weakened both militarily and through the loss of legitimacy, but not to the same extent as it must be in scenario one. Since this scenario does not require rebel capture of the entire state, the state does not need to be weak overall; it only needs to be weak at projecting force into a particular physical geographic area. If it fails to control this area, it may be forced into conceding to rebel demands. This is commonly seen in expeditionary counterinsurgency, such as those of empires struggling to maintain control over remote colonies (the French, Dutch, British, and Portuguese all being examples). Rebel forces in expeditionary counterinsurgency may often gain an advantage through the utilization of impassable or intractable terrain unfamiliar to colonial powers [25]. Another example is the desert region of northern Mali during the 1990-1995 Tuareg separatist rebellion. The central government’s failure to control the area forced it to compromise with the rebels by integrating them into the military and bringing their leaders into government [26]. 

Likewise, this scenario requires sympathetic or neutral civilians, but unlike cases of total state defeat, they need not comprise a majority, since only one segment of the country needs to be controlled (an example being the insurgency waged in southern Sudan by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, resulting in the eventual independence of South Sudan in 2011 following a 2005 ceasefire and negotiations) [27]. Ideologically, crafting a message that appeals to the entire population of the state may not necessarily be as important for this reason. Another example is the first Iraqi-Kurdish War of 1961-1971. As the Kurds were a minority, most of Iraq’s population was not sympathetic to their cause. As the goal of the Kurds was secession, not regime change in Iraq as a whole, they did not need to overthrow Iraq’s central government, but only to maintain control of their own territory. Kurdish leaders were able to obtain a compromise by the state in the form of an autonomous region after government forces proved themselves unable to exert control over Iraq’s Kurdish regions [28]. 

The issue of funding and support is mostly the same in this scenario: any rebel group will need access to arms, food, and funding regardless of its scope. Since this scenario again does not include taking over the state and only requires rebel control over a single area, it is possible that less funding is necessary, though it is important to be cautious on this point – rebels will still need enough support to inflict substantial military losses on the state, as gaining enough leverage to impose their demands without taking it over is quite difficult. It is tempting to think that this scenario represents an easier path to rebel success; in actuality, it simply requires a more difficult balancing act. Neither scenario is necessarily preferable for the insurgent; either might be suitable depending on the situation. 

Lastly, scenario two still requires a rebel movement capable of establishing a certain degree of popular support and legitimacy. While such legitimacy does not necessarily need to include international recognition (for instance, Somaliland has achieved de facto independence without this), it is critical for rebels to be seen as a viable alternative government – for instance by collecting taxes, enforcing laws, and performing other basic functions of the state within the territory they control. The challenge of compelling an unwilling state to negotiate concessions requires that the state has an organization to negotiate with. If the state faces a plethora of disunited rebel movements with competing claims to the population’s loyalty, they may be less likely to engage in dealmaking with any individual group. While the existence of rival groups does not necessarily preclude this process, it is vital that there be a single most prominent group capable of being seen as the primary representative for rebel demands. 

As in scenario one, military victory is unnecessary in this scenario. Forcing the state to the negotiating table does not require a decisive victory on the battlefield; it merely requires convincing the state that making concessions is more efficient than continued warfare. This can often be done through wearing down a conventional army using guerilla warfare; thus, regular warfare in this scenario is even less likely to be necessary than in scenario one. Insurgents can also target the state’s population as the center of gravity in this scenario, by encouraging them to view the conflict as unjust or unwinnable and put pressure on the state to end it. 

Other auxiliary factors in success are symmetrical to both scenarios one and two. Outside or cross border support may be particularly important as a supporting factor in this scenario, since it centers on putting pressure on the state to change its course – international pressure on a state can be highly effective (for instance, sanctions against Sudan and aid to rebels from international organizations during the Darfur genocide) [29]. High levels of international support do not necessarily translate into victory, however – Myanmar’s rebels have yet to gain victory despite longstanding sanctions placed on the country’s military junta for its atrocities [30]. 

Failure, like victory, lies on a spectrum. Rebellions may descend into protracted, low intensity conflict with the state, with no clear path towards military or political victory; such was the result of FARC’s 52-year insurgency against the Colombian government [31]. Another pitfall is that because this path to victory requires securing only part of the population’s support, that part of the population can be more easily isolated and repressed by the government – for instance, the mass internment of South African Boers by the British. In the case of expeditionary counterinsurgency, rebels may face greater difficulty convincing an authoritarian state to negotiate as opposed to a democratic state, or in turning sympathy among its population into an advantage; Portugal, under the authoritarian Estado Nuovo regime, was the very last nation to give up its African colonies. Rebels may also be unable to exhaust the state and force it to the negotiating table if the state is being supported by an international ally – the failure of El Salvador’s Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front to overcome a government adamantly supported by the U.S. being a prime example [32]. 

Conclusion

Success in insurgency consists of achieving political goals, which means either replacing the state to implement said goals or convincing the state to give in to some of them; neither requires military victory. In both scenarios, rebels must take advantage of state weakness, have a population which is at least partly supportive or neutral, demonstrate a degree of legitimacy, and have effective means of funding and support. A lack of any of these key factors may quickly doom an insurgency, which perpetually faces an inherent asymmetric disadvantage compared to the state.

Citations

[1] Glenn, “Counterinsurgency in a Test Tube”, 43.

[2] Clausewitz, On War, 19.

[3] The Nat Turner Project, “Laws Passed”

[4] Clausewitz, On War, 17.

[5] Jones, Lessons from the Tribal Areas, 38-42.

[6] Schwarz & de Corral, “States Do Not Just Collapse and Fail”, 216.

[7] Dix, Hussman, & Walton, “Risks of Corruption to State Legitimacy and Fragility in Fragile Situations”, vii.

[8] Lecocq & Klute, “Tuareg Separatism in Mali”, 432-433.

[9] Onuoha et al, “Counterinsurgency operations of the Nigerian military and Boko Haram insurgency”, 406-415.

[10] Oxnevad, “Beyond a Desert Revolt”, 1051.

[11] Sloan, Modern Military Strategy: An Introduction, 79.

[12] Kocher et al, “Aerial Bombing and Counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War”, 216.

[13] Katzenbach &Hanrahan “The Revolutionary Strategy of Mao Tse-Tung”, 328.

[14] Byman et al, Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements, 83-102.

[15] International Crisis Group, “Getting a Grip on Central Sahel’s Gold Rush”, 2-3.

[16] Boraz et al, Ungoverned Territories, 258-261.

[17] Westermann, “The Limits of Soviet Airpower”, 82.

[18] Kieh, “Irregular Warfare and Liberia’s First Civil War”, 72.

[19] Mack, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars”, 178.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Kruijt, “Che Guevara and Guerilla Warfare”, 6.

[22] Brown, “The bandido counterrevolution in Cuba, 1959-1965”, Nuevo Mundo [Online]

[23] Lumbaca, “Sequencing Burma’s Resistance: A Three Phase Approach to Defeating the Junta”

[24] Voller, “Identity and the Ba’th Regime’s Campaign Against Kurdish Rebels in Northern Iraq”, 390-394.

[25] Walter, Colonial Violence, 23-27.

[26] Lecocq & Klute, “Tuareg Separatism in Mali”, 427.

[27] BBC, “South Sudan Becomes an Independent Nation”

[28] Yildiz, The Kurds in Iraq, 18.

[29] Reno, “Complex Operations in Weak and Failing States: the Sudan Rebel Perspective”, 115-119.

[30] David I. Steinberg, “The United States and Burma: a ‘Boutique’ Issue?” 181-187.

[31] Lee, “The FARC and the Colombian Left: Time for a Political Solution?”, 28-30

[32] Rabasa et al, Money in the Bank, 44.

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