Special Feature Article

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2021, Vol. 65(1) 108-134
ª The Author(s) 2020
Rebel Justice during Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Armed Conflict DOI: 10.1177/0022002720939299
journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

Cyanne E. Loyle1,2

Abstract
Research on rebel behavior focuses on the violent conduct of these groups. Work
on rebel governance, however, has documented the myriad ways in which rebel
groups seek to gain legitimacy, project strength, and govern civilian populations
beyond direct violence. These efforts stress the importance of governance institu-
tions for securing cooperation and compliance from the civilian population, a central
concern for rebel groups. Judicial processes are one avenue through which this
cooperation and compliance can be secured. These efforts encompass a range of
processes including ad hoc trials, truth commissions and commissions of inquiry,
offers of amnesty, and reparations programs. Using new data on the rebel use of
judicial processes from 1946 to 2011, I examine the argument that rebel judicial
processes can best be understood as a mobilization strategy by the group, offering
concessions to a supportive civilian population or coercion when support is weak.

Keywords
rebel governance, transitional justice, during-conflict justice, civil wars, Nepal

In 1996, a civil war broke out between the government of Nepal and the Communist
Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M or Maoists) political party. Originally poorly armed
and organized, the Maoists quickly gained support throughout the rural population
and mounted a ten-year civil war that ended with a negotiated peace agreement and a

1
Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
2
Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Oslo, Norway

Corresponding Author:
Cyanne E. Loyle, Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, 203 Pond Lab, University
Park, PA 16802, USA.
Email: [email protected]
Loyle 109

promise to rewrite the Nepali constitution. There are many factors that lead to the
high levels of popular support for the Maoists in regions throughout Nepal including
their populist, anti-caste message, and promise of land redistribution. Among these
factors, the Maoists themselves maintain that their judicial system, the “People’s
Courts,” helped to entrench popular support for their ideological goals and to
demonstrate to civilians the ability of the group to effectively govern along those
ideological lines.1 People’s Courts were local courts set up in territory under Maoist
control to try people for crimes under a newly written Maoist code of law. Punish-
able violations included property crimes and domestic abuse but also “war crimes”
committed during the conflict such as collaborating with the government (Sivaku-
maran 2009). While civilian support was initially weak, the Maoists attribute their
ultimate popularity and military success to the organizational strength demonstrated
through their governance systems including their ability to punish individuals in
opposition to the Maoist cause.
Understanding rebel governance strategies is an important factor in studying how
these groups mobilize, function, and often thrive. The dominant work on rebel
behavior has focused on the violent conduct of these groups (e.g., Wood 2010),
concentrating on civilian victimization (e.g., Eck and Hultman 2007; Cohen 2013;
Humphries and Weinstein 2006). The rebel governance literature, however, has
documented the myriad ways in which rebel groups seek to gain legitimacy, project
strength, and ultimately govern civilian populations beyond violence (e.g., Arjona
2016; Mampilly 2011; Arjona, Kasfir, and Mampilly 2015; Staniland 2012). This
literature stresses the importance of rebel governance for securing cooperation and
compliance from the civilian population, a central concern for rebel groups.
Justice and rule-of-law strategies are one avenue through which this cooperation
and compliance can be secured. While judicial processes are increasingly being
studied in regard to government behavior, new data on the use of judicial mechan-
isms during armed conflict find that this is a tactic of governance which is also
employed by many rebel groups. The During-Conflict Justice (DCJ) data set records
over 200 instances of rebel-initiated justice efforts across fifty-seven conflicts
(Loyle and Binningsbø 2018). These efforts comprise a wide range of judicial
behavior including ad hoc trials, truth commissions or commissions of inquiry,
offers of amnesty, and reparations programs. While different in nature, all four of
these processes are attempts to address wrongdoings that happened during the con-
flict outside of violent channels.
Building from the rebel governance literature, we can view rebel judicial pro-
cesses as a strategy of control used by rebel groups in an attempt to either co-opt
support from the local population (as with offers of amnesty given to government
informers by the Provisional Irish Republican Army [PIRA] in Northern Ireland) or
to coerce compliance through the direct punishment of detractors as a demonstration
of strength (as in the case with the Maoists in Nepal, discussed above). Testing this
argument, I find that while many of the standard predictors of rebel governance
behavior also predict rebel use of judicial processes, such as group capacity and
110 Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(1)

political context, there is an important variation across the type of judicial process a
rebel group selects. In particular, I find variation between the factors that drive co-
opting tactics such as the implementation of truth commissions, offers of amnesty, or
reparations payments and the use of more coercive judicial tactics such as the
adoption of trials.
These findings offer at least three important contributions to the literatures on
armed conflict, rebel governance, and transitional justice. First, understanding rebel
use of judicial processes expands our understanding of the use and misuse of rule of
law during armed conflict. This work further expands our understanding of how
rebels choose to govern and under what conditions. Second, this is the first study to
systematically investigate the patterns of rebel judicial behavior across time and
space. New data from the DCJ data set (Loyle and Binningsbø 2018) allow us to test
previously unexamined hypotheses about the conditions under which rebel groups
are most likely to use different types of judicial strategies, drawing attention to an
underexplored rebel governance approach. Finally, while most of the work on rebel
governance has focused exclusively on the use of rebel-initiated trials or court
systems, this study expands our inquiry to alternative judicial and quasi-judicial
mechanisms by including an analysis of the rebel use of truth commissions, repara-
tions programs, and amnesty agreements.

Rebel Governance and Rule of Law

The growing literature on rebel governance engages the question of “why would
rebels, almost always the weaker party in asymmetric conflicts create and sustain
governments for civilians during civil war?” (Kasfir 2015, 21). While early com-
munist rebellion philosophy focused on the need to demonstrate capacity and capa-
bility through the construction of institutions, Mampilly (2011) argues that this
traditional focus on the importance of governing institutions attributed to Guevara
and Mao is not the reason for rebel investment in governance in most civil wars.
Moreover, a singular argument regarding rebel ideology is insufficient to explain the
great diversity of cases of when and how rebels choose to govern. In recent years,
scholars of rebel government have put forth a variety of factors which contribute to
the development of formal governance institutions, such as cultural beliefs and
social values, territorial control (Kasfir 2015), a democratic tradition (Huang
2016), rebel time horizon (Arjona 2016), domestic resources, and foreign aid to the
rebel group (Huang 2016). Moreover, the adoption of rebel governance strategies
can be used strategically to advance rebel group aims (Mampilly 2011).
The need for civilian support is a strong factor in determining whether or not a
rebel group will expend resources and incur the costs of governance. As Mampilly
(2011) argues, “many insurgencies find civilian support to be an essential concern in
pursuit of their organizational ambitions” (p. 53). Rebel groups have an incentive to
secure civilian loyalty and punish collaboration with the government (Wood 2010,
603). For this reason, groups choose among a variety of strategies to mobilize
Loyle 111

support, encourage cooperation, and prevent defection (Mampilly 2011, 54; Moore
1995; Weinstein 2006). Governance provision is one strategy through which rebel
groups can strengthen civilian perceptions of group legitimacy which in turn influ-
ences civilian mobilization and support (Förster 2015, 204; Revkin 2021).

Patterns of Rebel Use of Judicial Processes

In an effort to build legitimacy and project strength, rebel groups strategically adopt
judicial or quasi-judicial mechanisms2 such as ad hoc trials, truth commissions,
reparations schemes, or amnesty offers. While different in type, the unifying factor
across these processes is their desire to address wrongdoings that occurred (or are
occurring) during the conflict. These processes range in complexity from groups
such as the Maoists in Nepal and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri
Lanka, which both wrote their own legal code and prosecuted crimes accordingly, to
groups such as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone which
employed one-off trials of captured government officials often resembling show
trials. As these diverse examples highlight, there is no assumption of “justice” or
rule of law in this conception of rebel judicial processes. In fact, it is often the case
that there are serious concerns regarding issues of due process, independence of
proceedings, and impartiality in these practices. This article addresses four promi-
nent judicial strategies of rebel governance: trials, truth commissions, reparation
payments, and amnesty agreements. Each is described in detail below.
A trial is a process whereby there is a formal examination of an alleged wrong-
doing within a (quasi-)legal structure. For a rebel group, trials are often held through
a rebel-initiated court structure such as the Maoist People’s Courts described above.
These courts are used by the rebel group to prosecute crimes committed as deter-
mined by the rebel’s legal code or rebel commanders, often (but not exclusively) in
rebel-held territory. Rebel courts can be used to try civilians, rebel fighters, or enemy
soldiers. Furthermore, there are a range of crimes tried in these courts such as petty
theft and domestic violence, but important for the study here, these courts can be
used to try individuals accused of conflict-related crimes such as informing, aiding,
or collaborating with the government.3
Elaborate court structures such as those maintained by the Maoist and the LTTE
are relatively resource intensive; however, one-off trials rarely require a heavy
resource output. Often, rebel trials do not resemble state courts. For example, in
1997, the RUF in Sierra Leone held a trial for captured government officials where
their crimes “against the RUF cause” were publicly proclaimed to the crowd. The
captured officials were pronounced guilty of those crimes and executed (Keesing
1997). While rebel courts are rarely up to international legal standards, what is
important for this analysis is the choice of the RUF to hold a public proceeding
resembling a trial rather than simply executing the captured officials.
Truth commissions or commissions of inquiry are official investigations into a
particular event or pattern of abuse. These processes are a public and transparent
112 Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(1)

forum through which actors can reckon with past crimes and identify those accoun-
table for those crimes (Gahima 2013; Hayner 2011; Mendeloff 2004). Rebel groups
often use truth commissions to address particular events that have sown discontent
among their target population for recruitment. For example, during the civil war in
Angola, there was a public outcry surrounding the deaths of two internal National
Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) opponents, Tito Chingungi
and Wilson dos Santos and their families. While UNITA originally denied involve-
ment, movement leader Jonas Savimbi later appointed a commission of inquiry to
address this public outcry and investigate the deaths. Following the findings of the
commission, Savimbi made a public announcement confirming that these individ-
uals were killed by UNITA (Department of State Dispatch 1993). The commission
further reported on “irregularities” under the command of Miguel N’Zau Puna, the
head of UNITA’s security commission. These irregularities included the forced
disappearances of people along with “increased acts of brutality by the public sector
force.” The report released by the commission argued that UNITA had “nothing to
hide during its long history as a liberation movement” and concluded that these
infractions were the result of individual commanders, who were subsequently pun-
ished (BBC 1992).
Not all truth commissions established by rebel groups are so well-documented.
For example, a commission of inquiry organized by Laurent Kabila (leader of the
Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire) shortly before he
took power in DR Congo investigated allegations of Kabila’s soldiers opening fire
on a crowd of unarmed demonstrators and killing up to 275 people. This commission
never issued a formal or pubic report (The Associated Press 1997).
Reparations are payments or other forms of compensation given by the rebel
group to an individual or group who was harmed in some way during the conflict
(Loyle and Binningsbø 2018, 447). Rebel groups are able to use reparations to
directly repay individuals for grievances caused by their group or as a material
payment tied to government atrocities to increase support for the rebel cause. The
Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) provides an example. In 2008, there
is documentation of the group paying Rs. 50,000 (approx. US$1,000) as reparation
to a widow of a Maoist cadre who was killed in an encounter with Indian security
forces in 2006. The Maoists also covered the cost of school fees for both of her
children. Over two dozen families throughout the Latehar district were thought to be
receiving similar payments. These payments were seen as a response to similar
reparations being paid by the Indian state to policeman killed in anti-Maoist oper-
ations (Indo-Asian News Service 2008). Other examples of reparations include a
payment by the National Liberation Army) in Colombia to the hamlet of Machuca
which was demolished when the group blew up an oil pipeline. The funds were
invested in rebuilding the local infrastructure and compensating the families of
seventy-three people who were killed (Agence France Presse 1998). Reparation
payment can be one-off events, but often they are systematic policies on the part
of the rebel group to address conflict-related wrongdoings.
Loyle 113

160

140
Total Number of DCJ Processes
120

100

80

60

40

20

0
Trial Truth Commission Reparaon Amnesty

Figure 1. Rebel use of judicial processes by type.

Amnesty offers are a promise or agreement on the part of the rebel group to not
prosecute or punish violators of an alleged conflict-related crime (Loyle and Bin-
ningsbø 2018, 448). In the case of a government amnesty process, this usually
applies to violators of domestic or international law. For rebel groups, however,
amnesty is most commonly given for alleged violations of the rebel’s own code of
conduct, for crimes such as informing on the rebel group or collaborating with the
government. For example, in 1982, the PIRA offered informers a two-week amnesty,
publicly stating that anyone who confessed to having provided information on the
rebel group to the police or British army would be spared execution by PIRA death
squads (The Associated Press 1982).
There is clear variation among rebel groups that do and do not employ judicial
processes as a part of their governance program. Based on the DCJ data set, 11.5
percent of the 466 rebel groups included used some form of judicial process during
conflict (Loyle and Binningsbø 2018). Figure 1 shows the total number of judicial
processes used by process type. While trials (72 percent) are the most common
form of rebel judicial process, amnesty offers (20 percent) are frequently employed
as well.
In addition to differences in the type of process used, there is variation in the
target of rebel judicial processes. The target of a process refers to the individuals or
groups who are subject to a particular process. Rebel judicial processes could target
members of the government, members of the rebel’s own group, or “other” groups
that include civilians not directly associated with the conflict. As shown in Figure 2,
the most common target of rebel judicial processes are individuals associated with
the government or suspected government collaborators. These trials are often highly
punitive in nature, punishing individuals for their support of the government. For
example, the New People’s Army in the Philippines tried and executed a village
chief in Sison town in 1985 for aligning with the government and failing to
114 Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(1)

0 20 40 60 80 100

Trial

Truth Commission

Reparaon

Amnesty

Government Rebel Group Other

Figure 2. Rebel use of judicial process by target.

50
45
40
Number of Rebel Groups

35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
1 to 4 5 to 10 10 to 24 25 to 49 49 and greater
Total number of judicial processes per group

Figure 3. Number of judicial processes used by rebel group.

“support” the rebel group (United Press International 1985). Other judicial pro-
cesses, such as reparations, are most frequently offered to noncombatants.
While 11.5 percent of rebel groups in conflicts between 1946 and 2011 employ
judicial processes during armed conflict, they do not all do so with the same fre-
quency. Figure 3 presents a breakdown of the total number of judicial processes
(across all process types) used by each rebel group over the course of the conflict.
The majority of groups use less than five separate judicial processes over the course
of a conflict, though there are outliers to this trend such as the large number of trials
used by the Shining Path in Peru.
Figure 4 displays rebel use of judicial processes by region. Colombia, India,
Israel, and Peru stand out as countries that host conflicts with high usage of judicial
processes by rebel groups. At times there are multiple rebel groups operating within
the same country. For example, in their conflicts against the government of Israel,
Loyle 115

Figure 4. Rebel use of judicial processes by location. Darker shading represents a higher
aggregate use of judicial processes in a given country by a rebel group.

both Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization adopted judicial processes. In
Peru, it is the Shining Path which accounts for the high usage of judicial processes.

Explaining Variation in Rebel Judicial Strategy

The variation in rebel use of judicial strategies during conflict, calls us to question,
as Mampilly (2011) does, why rebel groups choose a particular governing strategy?
One of the primary goals of a rebel group is the cultivation and consolidation of
civilian support. Unlike a government that can rely on a standing army for its ability
to wage war, rebel groups must recruit or remobilize members in order to present and
maintain a credible challenge to the state (Walter 2004, 374). Furthermore, while
governments benefit from independent revenue streams, such as trade or taxes, rebel
groups frequently rely heavily on civilians for supplies, intelligence, and cover
(Lyall 2009, 336-38; Staniland 2012, 148-56; Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay
2004, 384; Wickham-Crowley 1990, 223-26). Civilian support is “an essential con-
cern in pursuit of [a rebel group’s] organizational ambitions” (Mampilly 2011, 53) as
it is central to the “strategic success of a rebel group” (Kalyvas 2006, 87-110).
Therefore, a large proportion of the rebel group’s resources are likely apportioned
to the twin goals of cultivating and consolidating support and compliance from the
civilian population (Clayton 2013; Förster 2015; Hegghammer 2013; Gates 2002).
Civilians exist in an uncertain environment and therefore have to make informed
conjectures about the type of rebel group they are interacting with. Rebel governance
strategies are an important mechanism through which groups can communicate their
type to civilians in an attempt to establish authority and build legitimacy to max-
imize potential civilian support (Förster 2015, 203-4). As Wood (2013, 466) writes
“civilians often base their decisions to extend or withhold support on expectations
116 Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(1)

regarding war outcomes and the ability of the group to provide selective benefits.”
Because governance strategies carry costs for the rebel group, rebel groups are able
to use these approaches to provide information to civilians about the group’s
strength and intentions (see Appel and Loyle [2012] for a similar argument regard-
ing state use of transitional justice processes). In this way, rebel use of judicial
processes can be conceptualized as part of a strategy to communicate with the
broader civilian population, which is an essential component of a rebel group’s
recruitment and retention plans as well as critical for their ability to resupply
(Gates 2002).4
If judicial processes are a means of communicating to a rebel group’s (existing
and potential) support base, what are these groups trying to say? As Guevara (2006)
asserts, “The first task [of the guerilla band] is to gain the absolute confidence of the
residents of the zone; and this confidence is won by a positive approach to their
problems, by help and a constant orientation program, by defending their interests
and punishing anyone who attempts to take advantage of the instability in which they
live . . . ” (p. 95). Civilian support during civil war, therefore, is based on both
coercion and persuasion; “on fear and sympathy” (Kalyvas 2006, 101-04). Rebel
judicial processes are able to achieve both ends. Based on a group’s needs, judicial
processes are able to be used as either a tool of co-optation of the general population
(taking a “positive approach to their problems” in Guevara’s words) or coercion
(“punishing” those who do not support the rebel cause).
Given their plurality of functions, not all judicial processes will transmit the
same information to the civilian population. Judicial processes can be a power-
ful indicator of the services a rebel group is willing and able to provide as well
as the potential benefits that an individual can receive from supporting and
assisting rebel efforts. To this end, judicial processes can co-opt the civilian
population by addressing grievances resulting from either rebel behavior or
government actions and potentially increasing sympathy toward the rebel group
among their target recruitment population. Alternatively, certain judicial pro-
cesses can be used to demonstrate the authority of a rebel organization securing
compliance through coercion or punishment. If a judicial process is used this
way, individuals will be more likely to support the rebel group or comply with
their demands out of fear of future punishment or sanctioning (Wood 2010,
604). I argue that judicial processes that address grievances, such as truth
commissions, amnesty agreements, and reparations programs, are used when it
is the rebel group’s intention to co-opt the civilian population. Conversely, trials
are employed when the group seeks to demonstrate its strength and authority,
compelling compliance through coercion (or the threat of coercion). Rebel
groups will adopt judicial strategies designed to maximize their potential for
civilian support. However, as the Nepal case demonstrates, the chosen strategy
will likely be a product of the group’s initial mobilization capacity (Mampilly
and Stewart 2021).
Loyle 117

Conciliatory Judicial Processes

When confronted with the challenge of cultivating and sustaining civilian support,
rebel groups may choose a strategy of co-optation. A co-optation strategy is one by
which the rebel group chooses to reward supporters and demonstrate a public will-
ingness to address the grievances of the civilian population with the intention of
cultivating, maintaining, or increasing civilian support. Pursuing this conciliatory
strategy, a group will adopt judicial processes designed to publicly address grie-
vances within the population and demonstrate the rebel group’s willingness to con-
tinue to address grievances in the future. Truth commissions, reparations payments,
and amnesty offers are avenues through which this can be achieved.
While the conciliatory aims are the same across all the three of these judicial
processes, the mechanisms through which each process type accomplishes these
aims vary. Truth commissions, or more commonly commissions of inquiry, demon-
strate a conciliatory strategy by acquiring information on an event or pattern of abuse
and making that information public. Through this information revelation, commis-
sions provide recognition for the aggrieved of the abuses they have suffered and
offer greater transparency around a particular event or experience. Truth commis-
sions during conflict are often implemented to address a particular event that has
sown discontent among a rebel group’s target population for recruitment, such as the
UNITA case presented above.
Reparations are a public way to address grievances and provide direct payment to
those individuals the rebel group is seeking to persuade to support their cause.
Reparations can also be used as a means of materially rewarding rebel group sup-
port. In this way, reparation payments can reshape individual incentives to back the
rebel group, essentially buying compliance.
Amnesty offers are another mechanism through which rebel groups can demon-
strate a more cooperative relationship with the civilian population by exhibiting
lenience for past crimes or infractions against the rebels. Rather than a more coercive
approached based on punishment, amnesty offers allow rebels to gain necessary
information from civilians and then offer them reprieve for that assistance.5
Given the importance of solidifying and maintaining support within the civilian
population, rebels, by necessity, must pay attention to the dynamics of mobilization
when adopting governance strategies. Rebels who have established authority over
the civilian population, maintain support from this population, and are effectively
mobilizing should be more likely to pursue strategies that reward that support and
benefit supporters (Gates 2002) providing selective incentives to those aiding the
cause. Given these conditions, we would expect the rebel group to create and sustain
institutions that offer public goods and benefits to a sympathetic population (what
Gates [2002] would distinguish as nonpecuniary and pecuniary benefits). Further-
more, rebel groups who are effectively mobilizing are more able to expend resources
and incur the costs of rebel governance. Conciliatory justice processes address
grievances within the population and demonstrate a rebel group’s intention to
118 Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(1)

continue to address the population’s grievances in the future. As such, we would

expect conciliatory justice processes such as truth commissions, reparations pay-
ments, and amnesty offers to be more likely under conditions where the rebel group
has established support within the civilian population.

Hypothesis 1: Rebel groups are more likely to use conciliatory judicial pro-
cesses to solidify and maintain civilian support when they have established
high levels of support within the civilian population.

Coercive Judicial Processes

While conciliatory strategies are used to maintain cooperation in more supportive
environments, coercive strategies are employed under different conditions. Coercive
judicial processes are those processes put in place by the rebel group with the intention
of securing the compliance of the population through intimidation and fear (Bueno de
Mesquita 2013). “Coercion can form the basis of a rebels’ political order if civilians
consistently obey rebel rules because they fear the consequences, with the rebel
leaders commanding their compliance on a regular basis” (Kasfir 2015, 38). Trials
accomplish this coercive potential through demonstrating the ability of the rebel group
to identify and hold individuals accountable for their actions, capturing, and punishing
(often violently) those who do not support or contribute to rebel efforts (Osiel 2000,
141-44). Trials are a strong message to the civilian population about the rebel group’s
capacity to identify dissent and punish dissenters accordingly.6
When rebel groups do not have the sustained support of the population, we would
expect the group to be more likely to adopt coercive strategies to secure compliance
(Bueno de Mesquita 2013; Wood 2014). Under these conditions, rebel groups seek
to assert their authority through the implementation of governance institutions which
demonstrate the group’s ability to hold individuals accountable for their behavior
and establish the rebel group’s capacity to identify and punish those individuals who
do not support the rebel cause. In this way, the rebel group intends to coerce
cooperation or at least minimize the support that civilians are willing to offer to the
government opposition through intimidation and fear. Given prior conditions of
weak civilian support, we would expect coercive judicial processes, such as trials,
to be more likely.

Hypothesis 2: Rebel groups are more likely to use coercive judicial processes
to solidify and maintain civilian support when they have initial low levels of
support from the civilian population.

Research Design
In order to test the argument for rebel use of judicial processes during armed conflict,
I rely on the DCJ data set (Loyle and Binningsbø 2018). The DCJ data set catalogs
justice processes across 204 internal armed conflicts in 108 countries between 1946
Loyle 119

and 2011, as appear in the Uppsala Conflict Data Program/Peace Research Institute
Oslo (UCDP/PRIO) Armed Conflict Dataset (ACD) version 4-2012 (Gleditsch et al.
2002; Themnér and Wallensteen 2012).
In this data collection effort, DCJ is defined as “a judicial or quasi-judicial
process initiated during an armed conflict that attempts to address wrongdoings that
have taken or are taking place as part of that conflict” (Loyle and Binningsbø 2018,
443). The six forms of DCJ in the data set represent the most dominant options for
governments and rebel groups seeking to address abuses (Elster 2004): trials, truth
commissions and commissions of inquiry, reparations, amnesties, purges, and
exiles.7 The DCJ data set codes processes that focus exclusively on crimes or wrong-
doings related to the events of a particular conflict.8 For example, a truth commis-
sion or commission of inquiry included in the data must relate specifically to events
that took place as part of the ongoing civil war. The data would not include trials of
nonconflict-related crimes, such as domestic abuse, or a commission of inquiry into
an apartment fire, unless that event was somehow directly related to the armed
conflict. In practice, this is less of a limiting criteria for rebel judicial processes that
are often created during armed conflicts and, as such, are likely related directly to
conflict events.9
The DCJ data include a total of 2,205 DCJ processes. While the data include
information on justice processes initiated by both government and rebel groups, for
this analysis, I look only at those processes initiated by a rebel group. In the data,
there are 222 processes adopted by rebels from sixty-seven different rebel groups
across fifty-seven conflicts. Of note, rebel judicial processes represent 10.3 percent
of the total DCJ behavior during armed conflicts, yet over 60 percent of conflicts in
the DCJ data set include at least one rebel-initiated justice process.
I selected the DCJ data set for two primary reasons. First, it is the only systematic
catalogue of rebel-initiated justice processes across all types of judicial and quasi-
judicial processes. While other efforts have been undertaken to catalog rebel courts,
for example, Huang (2016), this work has not included parallel institutions such as
truth commissions and amnesty programs which provide important tactical variation
in rebel judicial strategy. Second, the DCJ data set uses the UCDP/PRIO ACD
version 4-2012 (Gleditsch et al. 2002; Themnér and Wallensteen 2012) as its uni-
verse of conflict cases which allows me to rely on established conflict measures in
order to test my hypotheses.
The DCJ data include all DCJ activities related to internal conflicts as coded by
Gleditsch et al. (2002) and use a process conflict-year format. Based on the ACD
(Gleditsch et al. 2002; Themnér and Wallensteen 2012), the start date for each
conflict episode is the first year when twenty-five battle deaths occurred between
combatants with a stated incompatibility. The end date is when an active conflict
year is followed by a year that had fewer than twenty-five battle-related deaths
(Kreutz 2010). A new conflict episode is created when the conflict restarts between
the same combatants, even if it is many years later. While the DCJ data set is in a
process conflict-year format, in order to conduct this analysis, I converted the DCJ
120 Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(1)

data to a conflict-dyad year format, in which ACD conflicts are split into yearly
dyads by government and rebel group. This format allows me to test the judicial
behavior of rebel groups across conflict and allows me to account for conflicts
with more than one rebel group. Furthermore, the format allows me to use
annual group-level data on rebel groups to test my hypotheses. The reformatted
data include 206 conflict episodes, across 108 countries, producing 2,495 con-
flict years.

Rebel Use of Judicial Processes

The first response variable in this analysis is a binary variable for rebel use of a
judicial process. The variable is coded as 0 if no rebel-initiated judicial process
took place in a given conflict year and 1 if a judicial process was used. Rebel
judicial processes were adopted in 132 conflict years. Two additional variables
were coded for conciliatory and coercive judicial processes. These variables are
also binary and coded as 0 if no rebel-initiated conciliatory/coercive judicial
process took place in a given conflict year and 1 if that type of process was
used.
Conciliatory judicial processes. The conciliatory judicial process variable accounts for
whether or not a rebel-initiated truth commission, reparations offer, or amnesty
process was put in place in a given conflict year. There are a total of forty-six
conflict years that include one or more conciliatory measures.
“Truth commissions” in the DCJ data set are defined as officially sanctioned,
temporary investigative bodies that focus on a pattern of abuse over a particular
period of time (Hayner 2011, 14). This includes truth commissions as well as formal
investigations and commissions of inquiry. There are six rebel-initiated truth com-
missions included in the DCJ data set. “Reparations” are defined as compensation
given by the rebel group to an individual or group who was harmed in some way
during the conflict (Loyle and Binningsbø 2018, 447). The DCJ data set includes
only material compensation, either in the form of money, property, skills training,
and education or compensation to war-affected communities as a whole. There are
nine rebel-initiated reparation processes in the DCJ data set. “Amnesty processes”
are defined as a promise on the part of the governing party (rebel group) to not
prosecute or punish violators (Loyle and Binningsbø 2018, 448). The DCJ data
include thirty-eight rebel-initiated amnesty processes.
Coercive judicial processes. The coercive judicial process variable records whether a
rebel-initiated trial was put in place in a given conflict year. There are ninety-nine
conflict years that include one or more trials. A “trial” is defined by the DCJ data set
as the formal examination of alleged wrongdoing through judicial proceedings
within a legal structure (Loyle and Binningsbø 2018, 448). The DCJ data include
136 rebel-initiated trials.
Loyle 121

Rebel Group Mobilization

The central independent variable of this analysis is the initial level of support that the
rebel group has within the population. While civilian support is a notoriously diffi-
cult concept to capture (and can be conceptualized in a variety of ways), I proxy
civilian support with a measure of the rebel group’s mobilization capacity from the
Non-State Actor (NSA) data set (Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan 2013). In
joining up to fight and/or offering logistical support to the rebel group, an individual
potentially incurs an extremely high level of costs. The ability for a rebel group to
mobilize is, therefore, an important indicator of its overall level of civilian support.
Group mobilization capacity in the NSA data is a variable which records “the ability
of the rebel group to mobilize personnel, rated relative to the government” (Cun-
ningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan 2012). It is a four-category variable ranging from
very weak to very strong levels of mobilization capacity. There are very few obser-
vations on the high end of the capacity variable due to the commonly asymmetric
nature of rebel challenges to the state. Following Wood (2013, 469), I collapse the
data to a two-category variable because the variable significantly skews toward
lower levels of mobilization. The two-category variable is coded as 0 for those
group with a low mobilization capacity and 1 for groups with at least a moderate
level of mobilizing ability. In 48 percent of conflict years in the data, rebel groups
are coded as having a moderate level of mobilization capacity.

Additional Determinants of Rebel Governance

Findings from the rebel governance literature suggest that there are a variety of
group level and societal factors which may lead rebel groups to choose to adopt
governance institutions more generally. This work speaks broadly to the rebel
group’s decision to expend resources on activities beyond the battlefield, answering
the question of why would rebels create and sustain governments during civil war
(Kasfir 2015, 21). Incorporating insights from this work, I include variables in the
model which offer alternative explanations for rebel use of judicial processes during
conflict. In particular, I include measures for a rebel group’s ideology, its conflict
demands, the military capacity of the group, whether or not it has control of territory,
and the regime type of the challenger government.
Revolutionary theory would suggest that those rebel groups professing leftist or
Marxist aims would be more likely to adopt governing institutions. During the
Chinese Revolution, Zedong (1961) stressed the importance of institutions of gov-
ernment for demonstrating the strength and capacity of a rebel group. Judicial
processes would therefore be one institutional mechanism, among many, through
which the rebel group could demonstrate its ability to rule. We would therefore
expect judicial processes to be more common among leftist groups. Leftist ideology
is coded using Wood and Thomas (2017). Wood and Thomas (2017) define Leftist
rebels as “ . . . typically draw[ing] on Marxist philosophies of class struggle and
122 Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(1)

promot[ing] revolution as a strategy through which to liberate peasants, workers, and

other oppressed class groups.” They continue, “ . . . rebellions adopting these ideol-
ogies typically propose a fundamental reshaping of existing social hierarchies in
order to ‘liberate’ the population” (p. 34). Leftist ideology is coded as a binary
variable where those groups that profess a leftist ideology are coded as 1 and those
that do not are coded as 0. Examples of Leftist groups in the data include the Shining
Path in Peru and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. There are thirty-six
Leftist groups included in the analysis.
Groups determined to one day rule their own sovereign territory may be more
likely to adopt judicial institutions in order to demonstrate to the population and the
challenger government that the group has the capability to govern. Here, we would
expect those groups professing secessionist aims to be more likely to adopt all forms
of governing institutions including judicial processes. Secessionist demand is coded
as a binary variable for whether or not the conflict was being fought for these goals.
The variable is coded as 1 if the rebel group professes secessionist demands and 0
otherwise and relies on the conflict incompatibility variable in the UCDP/PRIO
ACD (Gleditsch et al. 2002). There are 179 secession-seeking groups in the data
including the LTTE in Sri Lanka and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey.
Furthermore, the ability to adopt a particular governance strategy is likely linked
to the overall organizational capacity of the group itself. Kasfir (2015) makes the
point that rebel groups are almost always at a comparative disadvantage to their
adversary, the government, in terms of fighting capacity. We would therefor expect
that only rebel groups with a comparatively high fighting capacity, vis-à-vis the
government, would have the resources and ability to adopt a judicial process during
conflict. In addition to overall fighting capacity, territorial control is another means
through which to access a rebel group’s ability to adopt a justice process. Fighting
capacity and territorial control are coded from the NSA data set (Cunningham,
Gleditsch, and Salehyan 2013). The fighting capacity variable records “the rebel
group’s fighting capacity, rated relative to the government” (Cunningham, Gle-
ditsch, and Salehyan 2012). It is a four-category variable ranging from very weak
to very strong.10 Territorial control is a binary variable that accounts for whether or
not the rebel group controls territory.
Finally, Huang’s (2016) findings suggest that we should expect rebel groups
fighting against an established democracy to be more likely to adopt institutions
that most closely approximate those institutions available from the challenger gov-
ernment. The existing government structure creates “expectations of governance”
for the rebel group which are not always distinct from those demands on the state
(Förster 2015, 204). In this case, we would expect judicial processes to be more
common when rebel groups are fighting against a democracy and then when they are
fighting against an anocracy or autocratic regime. The democratic regime variable is
coded from the Polity measure (Marshal, Gurr, and Jaggers 2017). The variable is
coded as a dichotomous variable measuring 1 if the challenger government scores a
6 or higher on the Polity2 scale and 0 if the government scores below 6.11
Loyle 123

Table 1. Logistic Regression of Rebel Use of Judicial Processes during Conflict.

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3

Judicial Conciliatory Coercive

Process Use Process Use Process Use

Mobilization capacity 0.300 (0.364) 1.63*** (0.569) 0.028 (0.385)

Secessionist incompatibility 0.084 (0.391) 0.141 (0.338) .169 (0.469)
Military capacity 0.593** (0.257) 0.908**** (0.328) 0.509* (0.297)
Territorial control 0.233 (0.369) 0.145 (0.481) 0.412 (0.412)
Democratic regime 0.875*** (0.283) 0.768*** (0.334) 0.874*** (.330)
Cold War conflict 0.883*** (0.243) 1.263*** (0.447) 0.617*** (0.285)
Conflict intensity 0.852*** (0.286) 0.646** (0.332) .849*** (.357)
Constant 5.475*** (1.126) 9.397*** (1.146) 4.89*** (1.28)
Observations 2,379 2,379 2,379
Pseudo R2 .065 .124 .049
Log-likelihood 439.111 177.892 364.026
w2 .000 .000 .000
Note: Standard errors are given in parentheses.
*p < .1.
**p < .05.
***p < .01.

In addition, the analysis accounts for temporal variation, conflict duration, and
conflict intensity. It may be the case that following the end of the Cold War, there
have been normative changes in the expectation and use of certain judicial strategies.
Sikkink (2011) suggests that there has been an accountability or justice cascade in
the post-1989 period. While these changes are generally proscribed to governments,
I include a control variable for those conflict years occurring before 1989. Conflict
duration and intensity may also have an impact on a rebel group’s ability or decision
to adopt judicial processes. It may simply be that longer conflicts give rebels more
opportunity to adopt different governance processes, while more intense conflicts
present a need for rebel groups to address violations and grievances. I therefore
include a measure for conflict duration which is a count of all the years a conflict has
been ongoing up to and including a given conflict year and a measure for conflict
intensity which is a two-category variable measuring minor conflicts and wars with
minor conflicts measured as those conflicts with below 1,000 battle deaths in a given
year and wars measured as those conflict with 1,000 battle deaths or more in a given
year. These variables are included from UCDP/PRIO ACD (Gleditsch et al. 2002).

Empirical Results
The results of this analysis are presented in Table 1. I include three models: a logit
model that examines the conditions under which rebel groups employ a judicial
124 Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(1)

process during conflict (model 1) and logit models that examine the conditions under
which conciliatory (model 2) and coercive (model 3) judicial processes are more
likely to be used.12
While many of the standard explanations of rebel governance hold for rebel use
of judicial processes, there is important variation when accounting for the differ-
ences between the use of conciliatory and coercive judicial strategies as examined in
models 2 and 3. These analyses demonstrate support for the hypothesis (Hypothesis
1) that rebel groups are more likely to use conciliatory justice processes when they
have established high levels of support from the civilian population (model 2). The
average marginal effect of a rebel group changing from low to high capacity for
civilian mobilization increases the likelihood of adopting a conciliatory justice
process by 2 percent in a given conflict year (p < .05), where the baseline probability
for their use in a given conflict is 1 percent. The use of any rebel judicial process in a
given conflict year is a relatively rare event, so mobilization capacity is a notable
substantive indicator for this type of behavior.
This impact is not present when examining the use of coercive processes (model
3). While Hypothesis 2 expects that rebel groups are more likely to use coercive
judicial processes when they have initial low levels of support from the civilian
population, based on model 3 I find a negative but not significant impact of rebel
mobilization capacity on the likelihood of adopting coercive judicial processes.
Together, these findings suggest that in selecting judicial processes, rebel groups
are concerned with the existing level of civilian support and vary their governance
strategies accordingly.
Model 1 includes a binary measure for rebel judicial process use to examine the
conditions under which a rebel group chooses to employ any form of judicial
process. In model 1, I find that a number of the orthodox explanations for rebel
governance behavior also have an impact on rebel use of judicial processes. Of note,
the military capacity of the rebel group is related to the use of judicial processes
during conflict. Higher-capacity rebel groups are more likely to adopt judicial pro-
cesses. Specifically, the average marginal effect of a one-category increase on the
capacity variable increases the likelihood of a rebel group adopting a judicial process
by 4 percent (p < .05). Fighting within the political context of a democratic regime
also makes the use of judicial processes by rebel groups more likely. There is an
average marginal effect of 4 percent (p < .05) for democracies over nondemocracies.
This suggests that rebel groups look to the institutional context of the states in which
they are fighting when making decision about governance, particularly judicial
strategy. Included in Online Appendix Table A2, the level of rule of law in the
warring country is also related to the rebel use of judicial processes. Furthermore,
high-intensity conflicts make the use of judicial processes to address conflict-related
wrongdoings more likely. There is an average marginal effect of 5 percent (p < .05)
for high-intensity versus low-intensity conflicts. Finally, conflicts which took place
during the Cold War are less likely to include rebel judicial processes. Conflicts that
took place during the Cold War are 4 percent (p < .05) less likely to include a rebel
Loyle 125

judicial processes then post–Cold War conflicts. This adds some additional validity
to the “justice cascade” argument that suggests that a global norm of accountability
is on the rise (Sikkink 2011). Predicted probabilities for these variables are included
in Figure 5.
Of note, territorial control has a negative, though not significant, impact on the
use of rebel judicial processes that is a counterintuitive finding given the emphasis
put on territorial control in some of the prevailing rebel governance literature (Kasfir
2015). This suggests that the capacity of a rebel group may be more important for
understanding the use of rebel governance than the ability, or desire, of a group to
hold territory. This explanation is further supported by the fact that secessionist
goals are also not found to have a significant effect on a rebel group’s use of judicial
processes.

Rebel Judicial Processes in Nepal

The CPN-Maoists’ use of trials during the civil war in Nepal provides a case through
which to further investigate these findings. The civil war in Nepal began in February
1996 after a series of elections and collapsed parliaments in the country’s failed
attempt to move toward a more open democracy (Hutt 2004). Calling for a secular
free state which would end certain forms of discrimination and oppression within
Nepali society, the CPN-M or Maoists began an armed insurgency, a “People’s
War,” which lasted for ten years.13
The war began slowly at first with the Maoists in confrontation with the state
police force. As presented in the introduction, the civil war was notable, in part, for
the initial lack of support from the general population for the Maoist cause and the
lack of military capacity within the group. It wasn’t until the Maoists gained sig-
nificant strength and territory toward the latter half of the conflict that the civil war
began to be taken more seriously by the government and the army was called in to
assist. Fighting continued until 2006 when the major political parties in cooperation
with the CPN-M organized massive demonstrations that ultimately lead King Gya-
nendra to relinquish power and to a restoration of parliamentary democracy. These
shifts in power culminated in a new government and the signing of a comprehensive
peace agreement ending the conflict.
To increase its popular support during the conflict, the CPN-M embarked on a
series of information campaigns using grassroots Maoist techniques of popular
education and indoctrination. One of the core tools used by the Maoists to secure
popular support was the creation of a parallel judicial system to the state courts,
known as “the People’s Courts.” The People’s Courts resolved legal disputes rang-
ing in levels of criminality and included the prosecution of Maoist soldiers and
supporters tried for crimes of war or government collaboration.14 The courts were
officially created under the eighteenth point of the Minimum Policy and Programme
of the Revolutionary People’s Council and implemented by the local “People’s
Governments.” These courts were mandated to dispense justice to the people. To
126
Figure 5. Predicted probabilities of rebel group use of judicial processes.
Loyle 127

do this, lawyers and judges were elected by the people’s representative council and
ruled not by a book but by “social realities” (Gellner and Hacchethu 2008). The
People’s Courts became an admired and often feared form of justice in the rural
villages of Nepal (Sivakumaran 2009).
The official Nepali judicial system had typically been viewed as an instrument of
the ruling class, ineffective in the rural areas.15 At the onset of the civil war, 90
percent of legal cases were settled locally due to the geographical constraints on
where physical court buildings were located. Furthermore, corruption in the form of
bribes by those in higher economic and caste ranks fostered a sense of inherent bias
and mistrust by those in lower castes (Gellner and Hachhethu 2008). These problems
of access to justice and rule of law were exacerbated by the conflict.16
The People’s Courts were an intentional and effective way for the Maoists to
demonstrate strength and exercise control over an initially skeptical population. The
CPN-Maoists were aware of the limits on their mobilization capacity and sought
strategies to overcome this deficiency. As Khim Lal Devkota, one of the authors of
the Maoist legal code and constitution stated, “in a Communist society, you do not
need any law, constitution, prison, police, and army. But [at that time, we were] not
in a communist society . . . [When society] is divided you have to handle the peo-
ple.”17 On the ground, the People’s Courts fulfilled their function as a tool of control.
Lecomte-Tilouine (2013) documents the large-scale use of force to make people
attend village government meetings and court proceedings (p. 232). She argues that
the public presence at these meetings was one way in which the party demonstrated
its power to the civilian population (Lecomte-Tilouine 2013, 232).
Mirroring complaints about the national judiciary, the distribution of justice
within the People’s Courts was itself often arbitrary and designed to strengthen
Maoist control. Sushil Pyakurel, former Commissioner of the National Human
Rights Commission of Nepal, explains “if you look at this within the frame of rule
of law, due process, it was not that; it was very arbitrary. If you are for [the Maoists],
okay, you will get justice within an hour.”18 The People’s Courts expanded to cover
“crimes” across all areas of Nepali life and enforced labor punishments for even low-
level offenders.19 The People’s Courts became a visible reminder of the Maoists’
growing strength and reach across the country as well as a punishment to those who
did not support their goals. While the initial mobilization capacity of the Maoists
was weak, a coercive judicial strategy ultimately served to strengthen civilian sup-
port for the group through a strategy of intimidation and punishment.

Conclusion
Governance institutions are an important tool in advancing a rebel group’s aim of
cultivating and consolidating civilian support. In this article, I explore patterns in the
rebel use of judicial processes and demonstrate that some of the key determinants of
rebel behavior identified in the rebel governance literature, such as secessionist aims
and territorial control, do not explain the use of rebel judicial and quasi-judicial
128 Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(1)

institutions. Furthermore, differences across types of judicial processes and the

information that they convey to the civilian population impact rebel strategy. In
other words, the motivation, and likely the outcomes, for the use of rebel institutions
varies across institutional form. Specifically, I find that preexisting levels of civilian
support for a rebel group is a predictor of the strategies rebel groups will use to
maintain or increase that support and subsequently of rebel governance behavior.
Groups that are able to successfully mobilize support for their organization select
different institutions of governance than those rebel groups who are not as successful
at this task.
Furthermore, it is worth reflecting on the important differences between govern-
ment and rebel judicial processes. Many of the examples of rebel judicial processes
suggest that they are a far cry from institutions functioning according to the rule of
law or internationally recognized standards of best practice. As in the case of the
commission of inquiry established by UNITA in Angola, there is evidence that the
commission was created, in part, to delegitimize a UNITA general who was posing a
political threat to General Savimbi. We should therefore be cautious about linking
this institutional behavior too closely to other commission of inquiry and truth
commissions which profess to more clearly provide impartial and “just” verdicts.
That being said, much of the recent work on the use of transitional justice has called
into question the impartial and apolitical nature of these processes even when
implemented by governments (Loken, Lake, and Cronin-Furman 2018; Loyle
2018; Loyle and Davenport 2016) particularly those justice processes employed
while conflict is ongoing (Loyle and Binningsbø 2018). It may be that government
and rebel justice during conflict can best be understood as two sides of the same
coin.
While I have conceived of different types of judicial processes functioning as
either conciliatory or coercive mechanisms, there are important characteristics of
each type of judicial process which could complicate this relationship. For example,
trials that prosecute rebel violators of human rights may effectively address grie-
vances within the civilian population. Amnesty processes that are used to compel
information on informant behavior may serve a largely coercive function. Future
research should focus on further disaggregating the motivations within individual,
case-specific judicial processes as has been the trend in the transitional justice
literature (e.g., Nichols 2019).
Understanding the rebel use of judicial processes has important implications for
policy work within the field of rebel diplomacy. In particular, judicial strategy by
rebel groups could be a strong predictor of the intentions of that group and its
relationship to the civilian population, foreshadowing outcomes related to the
potential for future peace and/or democratization. Learning more about how rebels
govern may be a robust indicator of their preferences and goals, teaching us lessons
about how to best interact with these groups and their civilian support base in the
future.
Loyle 129

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Samuel Bestvater for research assistance with this project as well as
participants at The Organization of Rebellion: Understanding Rebel Group Governance and
Legitimacy Workshop at the University of Maryland, including Jessica Maves Brathwaite,
Jori Breslawksi, Bridget Coggins, Kathleen Cunningham, Amelia Hoover Green, Reyko
Huang, Danielle Jung, Zachariah Mampilly, Caitlin McCulloch, Peggy McWeeney, Belgin
San Akca, Katherine Sawyer, Lee Seymour, Megan Stewart, Mara Revkin and the reviewers
for their attentive feedback. Earlier versions of this work were presented at the University of
Kentucky’s Peace Studies Workshop and at Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop Collo-
quium Series. I acknowledge support for this project from the National Science Foundation.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: Funding for this research was provided, in part, by the
National Science Foundation.

ORCID iD
Cyanne E. Loyle https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4871-7433

Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes
1. Personal interview, Khim Lal Devkota, chief legal advisor for Communist Party of
Nepal-Maoists, author of Maoist Constitution and Legal Code, May 8, 2014.
2. Despite the proliferation of recent work on rebel governance, little work has directly
engaged with the question of the rebel use of judicial processes. Huang’s (2016) work on
rebel governance accounts for the use of courts by rebel groups. She finds that 28 percent
of rebel groups in her sample employed some form of court structure. Others have
developed important case insight into the use of rebel judicial processes, such as Siva-
kumaran’s (2009) work on rebel courts and Ledwidge’s (2017) work on rebel law.
3. The focus of this study is on judicial processes that specifically address conflict-related
crimes. While similar arguments can be made about the use of judicial processes to
account for other types of violations, that is outside the scope of the current inquiry.
4. It is also likely, as has been theorized elsewhere (Jo 2015), that rebel judicial behavior can
be a strong signal to the international community.
5. Of note, the classification of truth commissions, reparations, and amnesty offers as con-
ciliatory mechanisms does not preclude the ability of these processes to be coercive. As
130 Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(1)

discussed in greater detail in the concluding discussion, characteristics of individual

judicial processes can influence their co-opting or coercive capacities.
6. Just as conciliatory processes can have coercive elements, trials can also have concilia-
tory components. For example, it is possible for rebels to try members of their own cadre
for human rights abuses, thus addressing grievances within the civilian population.
7. Exiles and purges are not included in the following analysis of rebel use of judicial processes.
Exiles are the least common rebel judicial process, and there is definitional uncertainty
regarding whether or not a rebel group is able to credibly exile an individual from a territory
without having sovereign control of the state itself. Purges are often solely instances of rebel
leadership restructuring and do not adhere to the same level of institutionalization as gov-
ernment purges. As such, I do not consider rebel purges to be a rebel judicial process.
8. While much of the existing work on rebel government puts scope conditions on the
possibility of rebel institutions, such as the need for territorial control (Kasfir 2015), I
treat these conditions as areas of inquiry questioning whether or not they are a necessary
condition for the use of judicial processes, as such these scope conditions are not included
in my operational definition of rebel judicial processes.
9. The focus on conflict-related judicial processes limits the scope of the analysis. It is
possible that rebel groups adopt judicial strategies that are independent of the conflict
itself, for example, Islamist groups who adopt Sharia Law in territories under their
control. However, the civilian support argument assumes the presence of an ongoing
armed conflict and requires the use of judicial processes as information in that conflict.
Future research could advance these findings by investigating patterns of adoption for
nonconflict-related judicial processes.
10. An alternative measure for fighting capacity would be the overall rebel strength measure
in the Non-State Actor data. However, this variable is a composite measure which
includes components of capacity such as mobilization. The more precise measure of
fighting capacity is therefore included in this analysis.
11. To further account for the context in which rebel judicial institutions are implemented, I
include the Varieties of Democracy rule-of-law measure in an analysis in the Online
Appendix Table A2.
12. All three models account for standard errors clustered by conflict. Additional specifica-
tions of the model, including individual logit models for each judicial process category,
are included in the Online Appendix. Given the high amount of missing data on the leftist
and conflict duration variables, the models presented do not include these measures. A
full model is presented in Online Appendix Table A1.
13. Fieldwork in Nepal was conducted in May–June 2014. Additional information on this
research can be found in Online Appendix B.
14. Personal interview, Khim Lal Devkota, chief legal advisor for Maoists, author of Maoist
Constitution and Legal Code, May 8, 2014.
15. Personal interview, Padma Ratna Tuladhar, human rights activist, facilitator of the Nepal
peace process, May 5, 2014.
16. Personal interview, Dr. K. B. Rokaya, member of the Nepal Human Rights Commission
and member of the Ceasefire Code of Conduct Monitoring Team, May 8, 2014.
Loyle 131

17. Personal interview, Khim Lal Devkota, chief legal advisor for Maoists, author of Maoist
Constitution and Legal Code, May 8, 2014.
18. Personal interview, Sushil Pyakurel, former commissioner, National Human Rights Com-
mission of Nepal, May 26, 2014.
19. Personal interview, Khim Lal Devkota, chief legal advisor for Maoists, author of Maoist
Constitution and Legal Code, May 8, 2014.

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