I find that another organizational characteristic-how leaders distribute social and material resources-determines whether or not leaders who are embedded in strong communities can leverage the bonds within those communities. As Selznick observed over a half century ago with respect to Bolshevik insurgents in Russia, "rganizations become infused with value as they come to symbolize the community's aspirations, its sense of identity." Only by capturing the social base can formal leaders shift fighters from simple participants to "deployable personnel." 5 This challenge is evidenced by the major dissimilarities between insurgent organizations built upon similar communities, for example: Islamic Jihad and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah and Amal in Lebanon, the Taliban and Hizb–i–Islami in Afghanistan, the Badr Organization and Jaysh al–Mahdi in Iraq, or the Viet Minh, the Dai Viet, and the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang in Vietnam. Organizations face the unique challenge of co–opting such community mechanisms for their own use. However, my research suggests that organizations embedded in such communities are not able to simply absorb and then employ these communal mechanisms to support the aims of the formal organization. Such communities are able to employ status rewards based on solidarity, enforce norms of fairness, ensure monitoring and concomitant sanctioning of undesired behavior, and share information leading up to and during rebellion. Indeed, many authors have found that strong community structures are crucial in both starting and sustaining rebellion. During civil wars, insurgent organizations often try to develop such relationships with their fighters by building on pre–war community structures and social linkages. This theory is derived from the need for formal military organizations to actively motivate and gain the allegiance of their fighters. Second I will briefly elaborate how this theory can explain JAM's ability to control when violence was employed from 2003 to 2008.Ī THEORY OF ORGANIZATIONAL CONTROL OF COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE In the remainder of this piece, I will first lay out the basic tenets of this theory and underscore how it clarifies current approaches to fragmentation. ![]() Embedded leaders must provide resources in a manner which leverages control of the community mechanisms needed to motivate and sustain collective violent behavior. My research indicates that the degree of this control within formal organizations is related to the interaction of two organizational characteristics: (1) leadership embeddedness, or the extent to which leaders are rooted in strong underlying communities and social structures and (2) resource centralization, or the extent to which leaders directly, and exclusively, distribute both material and social resources. ![]() Such control includes ensuring insurgents fight when ordered and abide by agreements or orders to cease violence. In particular, I seek to identify the organizational characteristics which determine whether the leaders of formal insurgent organizations can control when violence is employed. Rather than treating the causes and consequences of fragmentation uniformly, I find that the impact of factors such as state tactics, internal disagreements, imbalances in power between and within groups, or geographic stretch is dependent on the institutional context in which organizations operate. My research addresses this puzzle: how did a seemingly fragmented and disjointed organization adhere to a costly ceasefire? Resolving this question requires better specifying when organizations will fragment as well as how and when such fragmentation will limit insurgent organizations' ability to employ and calibrate the use of violence. At first, I expected about half of the Mahdi Army members to ignore him." 3 Instead, compliance was substantial and stuck despite intrusive operations by Coalition and Iraqi forces. 2 As a professor in Baghdad told the International Crisis Group: "Everybody was surprised by the degree to which militants obeyed Muqtada al–Sadr. Pointing to JAM's internal divisions and geographic over–reach as well as Iran's attempts to divide and rule Iraq's Shiites, they argued that Sadr did not have sufficient control of the organization to ensure that his fighters would put down their arms. 1 However, few analysts in academia, the government, or the private sphere expected the ceasefire to hold. As a result, sectarian violence declined drastically as Baghdad became more stable. A CENTRAL MOMENT during the United States surge in Iraq came with the August 2007 stand down of Muqtada al–Sadr's Jaysh al–Mahdi (JAM).
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