I have several projects underway that examine how rebels cultivate legitimacy and legitimacy-proximate outcomes in complex war contexts. Taken together, my work advances our understanding of rebel groups as pivotal actors whose strategic choices shape outcomes within civil wars and across the broader international system.
In my job market paper, I examine how rebel governance in civil war shapes intervention by foreign states. I theorize that the establishment of constituent-focused political institutions by rebel groups insulates them from the worst forms of negative international intervention and increases the likelihood that they will receive more intensive international support. Using an in-depth case study of US engagement with Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Salafi-jihadist rebel group in Syria, I investigate the pathways by which governance shifts engagement. Drawing on elite interviews with former diplomats, government officials, and regional experts, as well as over 600 public-facing government documents, I find that as HTS engaged in more extensive political institutionalization, the group was perceived as less threatening to US interests and the intensity of US negative engagement declined. I also provide evidence for the broader applicability of this theory. Deploying fine-grained cross-national data on rebel institutions and US relations with rebel groups, I find that rebel political institutionalization is associated with both broader and deeper US support.
(with Viivi Järvi, Princeton University)
Paper available upon request.
This paper examines how rebel governance in civil conflict affects the organizational capacity and performance of rebel successor parties in the post-conflict period. Specifically, we seek to understand the relationship between the nature of wartime rebel governance institutions, and indicators of postwar rebel successor party organizational strength, local presence, internal cohesion, and breadth of support. We hypothesize that parties succeeding rebel groups with a history of more extensive wartime institutionalization should be better-connected and have greater mobilizational capacity in the postwar period. A cross-national empirical analysis at the party-election-year level establishes the validity of our theory. Further, in a case study of the FMLN in El Salvador, we use archival materials to illustrate the link between the group's wartime institutionalization and their transition to a successful political party. We nuance this with an analysis of El Salvador's municipality-level electoral dynamics in the wake of the conflict as a function of the FMLN's wartime territorial control and institutionalization. Results show that territorial control was negatively associated with the capacity of rival parties to establish local presence, thus shedding light on the complex ways in which wartime institutionalization drives postwar electoral outcomes for rebel successor parties.
Manasi Bose
(with Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, University of Maryland)
(with Mark Berlin, Antonia Juelich, and Regine Schwab)
*Dissertation Chapter