Bowden, David and Paul F. Diehl. 2016. “Law and Legitimacy in Territorial Changes.” Connecticut Journal of International Law. 32(1): 49--72. (pdf)
Bowden, David. "Late to the Party: Why New Rebel Groups Join Ongoing Conflicts."
Bowden, David. "I Didn't Sign Up for This: Repression and the Fragmentation of Regime Security Forces."
Bowden, David and Paul F. Diehl. "Legalized Territorial Transfers and Bilateral Trade Flows."
Why are some civil wars are contested by a single rebel group, while in other cases including Syria, the opposition is fragmented into many factions? In a book manuscript based on my dissertation and tentatively titled I Didn’t Sign Up for This: Military Cohesion During Civil Unrest, I show that one of the primary drivers of multi-rebel conflict is defection from the regime military. I argue that such defection tends to occur in the wake of repressive shocks in which the level of government repression suddenly increases, repression is suddenly applied to new targets, or both. Whereas states are typically able to use their recruiting and socialization practices to ensure that their militaries carry out attacks on longstanding threats, soldiers are likely to dissent when asked to suddenly turn their weapons on civilians. I find strong support for this theory in quantitative analyses covering the entire world, 1946-2017, and in case studies of the Free Syrian Army and the M23 rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the final empirical chapter, I explore the behavior of these groups, finding that military defectors are much likelier than other rebels to sign and comply with peace agreements, and less likely to harm civilians. I am currently proposing this manuscript to top university presses, and an article manuscript based on the first quantitative chapter is in final preparation for submission.