Rebel forces are armed opposition groups that oppose the government of a state. They are often a combination of secular militaries and moderate Islamists. This mix is necessary because they need to cooperate in order to battle both the Syrian government forces and radical Jihadists.
Rebel formation can occur in rural areas, where the state’s monitoring capacity is lower. In urban territories, however, nascent rebels will be more easily discovered and defeated because they lack the organizational endowments from which to clandestinely plan and conduct anti-state violence.
Despite this, no armed enemy group is untameable in terms of attrition or exhaustion. The aim of a rebel strategy must be to force it to renounce violence. That is not always done explicitly in words but it can and does happen through constant and unrelenting pressure to visit harm upon the enemy.
The emergence of rebel movements across the world has shaped global politics. They have challenged empires, toppled regimes, and inspired both hope and fear. They have redrew national boundaries and redefined concepts of justice, freedom, and power. They have fought protracted civil wars, inheriting devastated-but-hopeful countries eager for the change their new rulers promised them. Yet scholarly attention has largely focused on when, why, or how rebels win power rather than what kind of state they build. This article seeks to fill in that gap. It examines how rebel victory affects downstream state structures, and how variation in that effect explains variations in the strength and scope of rebel-created states.
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