Ilayda B. Onder

The Rebel Internal Governance (RIG) Dataset codes original, time-variant information on internal institutions and practices of rebel groups to provide new leverage for examining how their sanctioning of misconduct and insubordination (or its absence) shapes rebels’ violent behavior and relations with civilian populations.

The article introducing the RIG is forthcoming at International Studies Quarterly. The pre-print version of the article can be found here.

Existing scholarship on rebel governance has documented in rich detail how armed groups regulate civilians: taxing them, providing public goods, holding courts. Far less is known systematically about how rebels regulate their own fighters: how their behavior is codified, monitored, adjudicated, and punished.

Many groups that develop institutionalized systems for governing civilians do not build comparable structures for regulating their own fighters, and vice versa. Existing data on rebel governance of civilians cannot serve as a proxy for how groups govern their own members.

Seven coders with relevant regional and thematic expertise were trained on a standardized coding protocol, including a common set of internal governance keywords (discipline, punish, code, conduct, dissent, insubordinate, misbehavior, misconduct, defect, disobey, trial). Coders fluent in French, Hindi, and Turkish reviewed local news articles, government statements, and rebel-produced publications alongside English materials. Spanish-language sources were not systematically incorporated because Latin America comprises a small share of the 1990–2012 sample.