Inherited Privileges and Coercive Repertoires: How Rebel Origins Shape Civilian Abuse.

Why do some rebel groups employ a wider range of human rights violations against civilians than others? Existing scholarship emphasizes wartime dynamics and battlefield incentives, paying less attention to organizational foundations established before conflict. This study examines how rebel origins shape the breadth of civilian abuse, drawing on Rebel Human Rights Violations and the Foundations of Rebel Group Emergence datasets, covering 182 rebel groups from 1990 to 2011. Findings show that groups originating from civil society organizations employ significantly narrower violation repertoires than groups with militarized origins, with expected repertoires approximately 42 to 45 percent smaller. The broader community-embedded category and parentless origins exhibit negative but statistically insignificant associations, although groups without an identified predecessor or community base record substantially fewer violation types. The civil society finding persists when examining aggregate severity. These results highlight the importance of organizational inheritance in explaining variation in rebel coercive repertoires.