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I thank Therese Anders, Jake Anderson, Boaz Atzili, Micol Bez, David Brenner, Daniel Byman, Elvia Pena Cruz, Paula Ganga, Desha Girod, Mark Hines, Stathis Kalyvas, Karin Kitchens, Haillie Lee, Alexandra Ma, Soumyajit Mazumder, Eric Mosinger, Daniel Nexon, Dave Ohls, Stella Peisch, Prakhar Sharma, Reno Varghese, Laila Wahedi, Joseph Young, and seminar participants at Yale University, Georgetown University, American University.
Why do some rebel groups provide services inclusively, even to unlikely supporters, while most other insurgencies either restrict their service provision to core allies, or offer nothing? The Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) began its campaign for Eritrean independence from Ethiopia in the early 1970s, and until it achieved final victory in 1993, the EPLF provided inclusive goods, offering education and healthcare to almost all people in the areas it controlled. By 1978, the EPLF's medical services provided care to almost 1.6 million Eritreans,1and in 1982 alone, nearly 10,000 Eritreans enrolled in the EPLF's literacy courses.2Even people who would likely never support the insurgency benefited from the EPLF's social service provision: by 1990, tens of thousands of Ethiopian prisoners of war were given "medical treatment, food, shelter and basic education" despite the fact that they were "a strain on Eritrean resources."3
By contrast, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) viciously tore through Sierra Leone for nearly a decade, leaving a trail of destruction and mass violence. They even engaged in cannibalism.4Despite this violence, and much like the EPLF, the RUF also provided some welfare services. The rebel group offered free medical care to its fighters5and provided free education and medical services in "safe areas,"6or territories where support for the RUF was "sufficiently stable and firmly controlled."7Yet unlike the EPLF, the RUF did not provide services inclusively. Instead, it restricted access to these goods to a small and inconsistent slice of the population, and even then, the implementation of the group's welfare apparatus resonated "of patrimonial principles."8
These cases illustrate the diversity in the exclusivity of rebel services. This variation in access to goods presents a striking empirical puzzle: most rebel groups (about 70 percent of groups with territorial control) offer no services or limit their service provision to active or likely...